Mistler's Exit [Paperback]

Louis BEGLEY (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; ARC edition (1998)
• ASIN: B000UZJVAU
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Begley Does it Again!, November 7, 1998

By 

Mary Moss ([e-mail]) (San Francisco, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mistler's Exit (Hardcover)

Once again Louis Begley has written a beautiful, elegant and spare novel that has not one extraneous or superfluous word in it. Though a slim volume, it is dense with stunning sentences, and themes. They are like jewels, to be read and savored over and over again as were each of his previous books. I love this guy!

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Life after the "final verdict", June 2, 2000

By 

C. A. Spencer (New Zealand) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mistler's Exit (Hardcover)

After reading "All about Schmidt" I was attracted to read another book by Louis Begley. This has to be a recommendation of the author. He must be doing something right to qualify for more hours of my discretionary time. Perhaps I was attracted by his grammatical English, which is sadly becoming rarer with an almost universal expectation of little more than bare communication on the lowest level. His legal background is evident in a few periodic sentences of tedious length. There are few and they give way to a simple and wonderfully direct prose for human reaction and emotion. If you were given a finite life expectancy, how would you react? This is the stuff of TV human interest programs. What does our legally trained author offer beyond the banal? Firstly, this is a truly positive book. Nothing morbid here. It is a litany of human passion, self-indulgence and self-gratification. And why not, if you have only a few months to live. The message is Horace's old maxim "carpe diem." Live life. Don't wait. Our hero, Thomas Mistler, in fact had to wait till he had a terminal report from his doctor. But his unexpected reaction is one of freedom from what had restricted his inner-most emotions before knowing that life was not to continue in its bourgeois continuum apparently foreever. So the reader is part of his late emotional and sexual emancipation. He enjoys what many secretly dream of without the burden of middle class values and narrow religious scruple.

Don't read this if you are concerned with the thoughts of an older man who is still sexually alive and well. Don't read it if you are bound by the rules of middle class restrictions of the "apropriate," whatever that may be.

This should be compulsory reading for those with a serious, or life-threatening condition. Forget the gloom. Just for once, let your real feelings come to the fore.

Not to forget Louis Begley's wonderfully succinct and irnonic style, let me assure you that this is a book for those who appreciate irony and grit. Older readers might even find it educational!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Contemplating A Death in Venice., September 8, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Mistler's Exit (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

Thomas Mistler, the founder and CEO of a world-renowned, New York advertising agency, is not a very likable person. A self-indulgent WASP who enjoys the high life, he is accustomed to getting his own way both in business and in his personal life. Married to an "appropriate," pedigreed wife, with whom he has an appropropriate, conventional home life, he also pursues other women attracted to his "glitz." Suddenly, Mistler discovers that he has liver cancer, too far advanced to make treatment a viable option without interfering with the quality of his remaining days.

With remarkable sang-froid, Mistler decides not to tell his family, feigning a business trip to Europe so that he can have a week by himself in Venice to prepare for the inevitable. To his surprise, he discovers a young woman in his hotel room, a photographer he has just met at a dinner party who is attracted to him but also wants to work for his agency. With Lena he revisits many of his favorite places, and indulges in sensual pleasures, fine wines, and foods before his insensitivity drives her away.

Alone, Mistler explores his past and contemplates his relationships with his father, his father's mistress (Tante Elizabeth, whom he adores), his wife and son (who has escaped to the West Coast to become a writer), friends from school, and ultimately, "the girl who got away," a Radcliffe classmate when he was at Harvard, who is now living in Venice. Unsentimental, Mistler makes no excuses for what he gradually begins to see as his faults. While he knows he will not change, at this point, he also knows, as an advertising man, that he has the power to affect how he himself may be viewed in the future if he acts appropriately now.

The Venice setting is perfect for this book about a man contemplating death. The canals are polluted and devoid of life, and the city itself survives only through an enormous effort to hold back the sea. Resembling Hades and its series of rivers, Venice also features gondoliers in black boats who resemble Charon, the old man who ferries the dead across the River Styx to Hades, and when Mistler buys a black wherry from a boatman, all the imagery comes together. Though the main character may not be someone with whom the reader will identify, his behavior and actions are consistent with his personality. Author Begley conveys Mistler's formality and his inner feelings in elegant language, completely appropriate for Mistler, and his insights into life's big questions are thoughtful. Mary Whipple