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All Men Are Liars [Paperback]

Alberto Manguel
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Book Description

June 5, 2012

In this gorgeously imagined novel, a journalist interviews those who knew—or thought they knew—Alejandro Bevilacqua, a brilliant, infuriatingly elusive South American writer and author of the masterpiece, In Praise of Lying. But the accounts of those in his circle of friends, lovers, and enemies become increasingly contradictory, murky, and suspect. Is everyone lying, or just telling their own subjective version of the truth? As the literary investigation unfolds and a chorus of Bevilacqua’s peers piece together the fractured reality of his life, thirty years after his death, only the reader holds the power of final judgment.

In All Men Are Liars, Alberto Manguel pays homage to literature’s inventions and explores whether we can ever truly know someone, and the question of how, by whom, and for what, we ourselves will be remembered.


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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[All Men Are Liars is a] beguiling exercise in metafiction, one that tells an engrossing story from various perspectives while undermining the possibility of truth in storytelling… This novel succeeds both as a story and an illumination of storytelling.” – Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW

“[A] richly hued, melancholy and funny puzzle of a novel…” — The Guardian (UK)

“A remarkable novel richly textured, ingeniously constructed and deeply unsettling” —The Spectator (UK)

“Clever, witty and entertaining.” —The Times (UK)
 

About the Author

Born in Buenos Aires, Alberto Manguel is the prize-winning author of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi), A History of Reading, The Library at Night, and News From a Foreign Country Came and the translator and editor of many other works. He lives in the south of France.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Riverhead Trade; Reprint edition (June 5, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 9781594488351
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594488351
  • ASIN: 1594488355
  • Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #796,430 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor, Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, moved to Canada in 1982 and now lives in France, where he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre français des Arts et des Lettres.

Customer Reviews

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars One person, many impressions June 5, 2012
Format:Paperback
Dark and complex, like a piece of fine chocolate, All Men Are Liars is a book to be savored and revisited.
Think about your friends, coworkers, or those with whom you've shared of yourself for a time, and in a specific role. How would any of them describe you? Would any two of them draw the same picture of you or have the same opinion of you? Alberto Manguel uses the voices of several people to describe Alejandro Bevilaqua after his death. As an interesting twist, one of those voices is that of Manguel himself. Each person's viewpoint is colored by their emotional ties to the deceased, and each adds a dimension to a man who the reader never hears from directly. The upshot is a questionable portrait of the subject, Bevilaqua, but a truer idea of those who describe him.
In a circular puzzle, Manguel starts the narration himself, speaking to the chronicler of Bevilaqua's life, Jean-Luc Terradillos. Initially, when I assumed that the story would traverse a lineal course, I was reading it as I would a novel that would involve escalation, climax, and denouement. However, when successive narrators were introduced, I found myself going back to the beginning to look at overlaps, exaggerations, and omissions in how each of these people wanted to remember Bevilaqua. It is these discrepancies in the biography that give weight to the title, because the stories do not mesh to create a seamless portrait. Having the various contributors to the story each set apart in their own chapter made the book more of a collection of stories, tied with a common thread.
Another way to look at it is that each chapter really is a chapter of Bevilaqua's life, and each story proves that he was many things to many people. I could see my own life being compartmentalized this way, being written as chapters in a book, by people who know me from specific encounters with them.
The author weaves historic and geographic settings throughout the different narrations to provide a rich background. The reader will get a good sense of Buenos Aires and Madrid from the period, with all the textural elements of life in those locales.
This book was originally published in Spanish, and I would have to credit the translator, Miranda France, with making the English text read quite smoothly. I appreciate a translation such as this that has little stiffness.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Really a pretty good mystery May 13, 2013
By JAK
Format:Paperback
You've been told that patience is a virtue and with this novel it is.The premise is that a journalist is looking into the life and death of a mysterious Argentine novelist who seems to have committed suicide after the publication of his one novel.Four narrators recount what they know of the late Alejandro Bevilaqua and of course what you hear is somewhat contradictory.It is rather Rashomon like.You will want to refer back to earlier sections of the book because if you don't ,unless you have a fantastic memory , you won't be able to figure whats going on.I wound up quite enjoying that and saying, oh so that's what happened !This is a complex , tricky novel and it winds up being fun.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant! March 9, 2013
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
One of my favorite writers! It's a kind of a Rashomon-type novel, and is compelling and engaging. I've read everything (I think) he's written.
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