Customer Reviews

Pandaemonium: A Novel

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The idea of Peter Lorre as narrator of this book promises to be a funny one. But I think those of a certain age, who have the hysterical voice of Rocky Rococo indelibly ringing in our ears, will be disappointed. I was. The author doesn't really capture that Peter Lorre. His coyness about his drug abuse and sexual hi-jinks lacked an expected leering quality. His cringings were ordinary rather than epic. I won't say the portrayal is a failure as he has a certain presence. But for someone so colorful in our memory he is rather flat on the page. Most of the alleged humor in the book is similarly drab.

This is a pretty good book nonetheless. The events leading to those set in the dessert provide many a memorable occasion for compulsive reading. The intricate episode when, as he is being interrogated by Goebbels the imperious Von Beckmann, flashes back to his travels into the Jewish villages of Europe revealing his true origins to us, is masterfully done.

But the culmination of the book, the grim antics on location in Death Valley are outlandish and unbelievable. The cult atmosphere as described is jarringly anachronistic; more reminiscent of Charlie Manson than Hitler. Yet we are explicitly directed by the author to take these as analogous to the Nazi madness of the era.

I wrote this to try and understand what to make of this book. My expectations for it were disappointed at every turn. Yet it held my interest right up to the final chapters. But these desert episodes seem totally misguided; And worse, predictable. Yet I admired much of the writing. I guess those who read of my still unresolved dilemma regarding this book may take it as a warning.

Putting the stain of shame on his forbears (Julius & Phil Epstein, authors of such classic screenplays as Casablanca, The Male Animal, Arsenic & Old Lace, etc.), Leslie Epstein's Pandaemonium purports to be the story of the disaster-filled movie of that name, which in turn is actually Sophocles' Antigone done as a Western!, in the desert town of the same name, "as told by" (sometimes) one Lazlo Lowenstein, better known to most of us as Peter Lorre. This allows Epstein to continue perpetrating the lie of Lorre's alleged cocaine addiction, with Lorre always reaching into his pockets for his "magic dust". However, Stephen Youngkin's biography of Lorre, The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre, exhaustively researched for over 25 years, proves such claims are lies - Lorre was actually addicted to morphine & Youngkin's book has the proof as provided from FOI docs involving Harry J. Anslinger & the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (precursor to today's DEA). But there are many more inaccuracies in this book than space to mention them all. The plot: Film pioneer gone mad wants to make a film in the middle of the desert, and the cast and crew seem to go crazy from the heat and thirst & there seems to be a murder or two but the film gets made, after a fashion. Hitler-era Germany & Austria figure in the book and the decimation of Jews during the 1930's and 1940's is offensively symbolized within the movie in the form of cowboys (Nazis) versus Injuns (Jews). On board a plane flying out to the desert location a Japanese coroner from L A tells Lorre of the plot to bomb Pearl Harbor, claiming a Mr Moto movie has inspired Emperor Hirohito! Then some other stuff happens. Can the reader care about it? No. The End. Celia Lovsky, Lorre's wife at the time, is missing here so that faux-Lorre can get boringly fondled by Rochelle Hudson. Plenty of other real-life film stars of the era are maligned as characters besides Lorre. The 1934 film Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch is supposedly going into production in 1942 in this book. And so on. If you're going to involve historical events and people who actually walked the earth not too long ago, Mr. Epstein, do a little research! But alas, the writing is the main problem here. Epstein is so pedestrian, uninteresting, dull, plodding, filled with page after page of excessive descriptions that make Dostoyevsky seem like an author of blank verse. Nearly 400 pages of stultifying snooze-fuel. Less than one star.

Epstein, the son and nephew of the screenwriting Epstein brothers who were responsible for "Casablanca," among many other films, has used his family lore to construct a crazed, and compulsively readable tale set in the milieu of pre-WWII Hollywood. His narrator, Peter Lorre, is sick of playing Mr. Moto, and longs for the onset of war with Japan so that he might be freed from the shackles of his contract with the studio.

The novel opens with Lorre accompanying a troupe of actors arriving in Salzburg, Austria, just prior to the Anschluss. They are to perform Antigone, but the German annexation endangers the Jews in the cast (Lorre included). The play's director, an extremely charismatic, one might say mesmerizing man named Rudolf Von Beckmann, carries on with the production, but is eventually forced to flee.

Subsequently, Von Beckmann takes over the direction of a western already in production, and transforms it into a piece of reality-based film-making, in which he exerts his powers over the entire cast and crew, in an eerie parallel to events in Europe. All the while, Hollywood and the United States dither about, unable or unwilling to believe the reports that are being brought back, of the mass removal of Jews from the cities.

This is a fine work of art, and one with plenty to deliver in the way of moral authority. Besides which, it's a good read!

A really human portrait of mixing the personal and the political in the name of artistic endeavors, I found this book to be a wonderful read about Hollywood in its heyday. In the same way the author was unafraid to take on the Holocaust and protray it in the language of human survival for King of the Jews, Epstein is also unafraid to be both funny and frightening in this novel.