The definitive novel of Hollywood in its most glamorous era, "Pandaemonium" is an epic that examines the roots of film and its relation to the dark forces of the imagination. Narrated by the ever-wise Peter Lorre, the book assembles a huge cast of Hollywood types who converge on Pandaemonium, a Nevada ghost town, at the onset of World War II.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Pandaemonium was John Milton's invention, the capital of Hell where one of literature's great antiheroes, Satan, ruled his mob of fallen angels. Pandaemonium is Leslie Epstein's invention, a fevered mix of highbrow literary references wrapped in lowbrow comedy, a place where Hollywood directors mingle with German dictators, resulting in--well, you know. The novel's narrators are pulled straight from Hollywood history; the first, actor Peter Lorre, relates the events surrounding a performance of Antigone scheduled to be staged in Salzburg shortly before the Anschluss. Lorre, cast as Antigone's groom opposite the alluring Magda Mezaray, hopes this performance will release him from the string of B movies in which he starred as Japanese detective Mr. Moto. His hopes are dashed when the play is interrupted by an assassination attempt on one of the spectators, Adolph Hitler himself. The play's director, Rudolph Von Beckmann, is held responsible and taken to Vienna to explain things to Joseph Goebbels.
Pandaemonium then returns to Hollywood where, upon his return from an internment camp in Europe, Von Beckmann's plans to make a great Western become inextricably tangled with labyrinthine studio politics and Lorre's attempts to shed his association with Mr. Moto. The second narrator, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, takes up the tale, chronicling Lorre and Von Beckmann's return to Europe in search of Magda. By the time Epstein reaches the filming of Von Beckmann's Western, his fictional landscape resembles Milton's Hell very closely indeed. Pandaemonium is funny, ambitious, and makes for wickedly good reading. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Epstein (King of the Jews, Norton, 1993), sets this historical/allegorical novel during the early days of World War II. The narrator is the anguished actor Peter Lorre, who is desperate to escape his studio contract, which requires him to play Mr. Moto ad nauseam. At the heart of the novel is Rudolph Von Beckmann, a director and actor with mesmerizing powers who, at the outset, is staging Antigone in Salzburg at the time of the Austrian Anschluss. The production goes forward after the Nazi takeover, and Von Beckmann and his troupe of actors, some of whom (including narrator Lorre) are Jewish, are subject to unanticipated difficulties. While the plot twists and turns and races through ever-stranger episodes, what emerges from this remarkable novel is a grand vision of the intertwining of culture and politics. With an insider's view of Hollywood (Epstein's father and uncle were screenwriters for many films, including Casablanca) the author draws us into the strange world of gossip, politics, and careerism while keeping us aware of the greater world of global conflict and holocaust. A tour de force; for all libraries.?David Dodd, Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
It could have been SO MUCH BETTER,
By Lee E. "idlefingers" (Arkansas) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pandaemonium: A Novel (Paperback)
Casting Peter Lorre as the cynical voice of Hollywood was a brilliant stroke in Epstein's part. Unfortunately, the execution fails, as his depiction of Lorre, and for that matter ALL THE CHARACTERS, leave much to be desired. I agree with a few reviews already written about this book: Epstein tries WAY TO HARD to get his message across, and in the process falls flat. For me this book was heavy and dull, up until they get to the cult-like town of Pandaemonium, where it does pick up the pace and becomes quite the page turner. And I did feel much sympathy for poor Peter Lorre, when he turns from being a Japanesse sleuth to a Cassandra, preaching of destructions to come. The POV switch was as much an annoyance as (I'm sorry to say this) the Epstein twins. And the "it smells like almonds" jokes were not funny to begin with. The fact that this joke pops up quite frequently throughout the whole book is enough to make you cringe. One last rant: every single character in this book is selfish and despicable. I hated each and every one of them. Now there's nothing wrong with hating characters. The Maltese Falcon is a prime example of characters you LOVE to hate. But no, these characters you just simply hate. Epstein did good when he penned King of the Jews. What happened here is a mystery.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ambitious, but perhaps too much so?,
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This review is from: Pandaemonium (Hardcover)
Like his earlier "King of the Jews," this novel also takes on the Holocaust--but this time (with a couple of briefly portrayed exceptions) it's at a distance. The narrative voice of Peter Lorre as a modern-day Cassandra works interestingly in the early parts of the novel, but by the time the ghost town emerges halfway through the book, Epstein seems to have become uncertain whether or not to stay with Lorre's p-o-v or roam about more loosely. This distancing from Lorre weakens the latter part of the novel, and it's hard to care for the characters' fates thereafter. Too many players strut about, enter and leave without making enough of an impression in a novel which reaches for a grand statement about Hollywood, the Jewish role, and the Nazi terror. Epstein's best at brilliant vignettes: a Yiddish version of the Dreyfus trial via stock footage shown on a shetl bedsheet and then resurrected by none other than Goebbels; the opening airplane-in-distress scene introducing the dramatis personae; a satirical graveside panorama of Hollywood's Jews and Gentiles alike; the imaginative staging of "Antigone" after the Nazi occupation of Salzburg; and the splendidly conveyed and visually captivating opening sequence of the grand movie which von Beckmann begins to film in the Nevada wastes. But Epstein's work is stronger in these smaller parts than as its meandering whole, from which at least a third of the book could have been cut and the rest more tightly controlled by its talented but overreaching author. Still, I'm using it for a "Jews and Hollywood" book circle at, fittingly, the Hollywood-Los Feliz Jewish Community Center, and I hope others in our group will record their own opinions about one of the few novels to capture verbally some of film's magical power.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Aptly titled -- chaos, indeed,
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This review is from: Pandaemonium: A Novel (Paperback)
Boy, I really wanted to like it much more than I did. Novels about Hollywood which feature actual personalities are rarely successful, no matter how much insider knowledge is involved. I found that I couldn't finish it, even though I had less than 50 pages left to go. Life is too short.
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