Customer Reviews

Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy

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Many readers will no doubt be familiar with the Count Almasy as portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Anthony Mingella's brilliant film "The English Patient" based on Michael Ondaajte's book of the same name. In both the film and book, Count Almasy shares a doomed passionate romance with Katherine Clifton, who dies in the desert. The Count is horrifically burnt in an aircrash attempting to retrieve the body of his lover, and later succumbs to his wounds, and his grief for Katherine, but not before recounting his tale to a caring nurse. What many people may not know, is that Count Almasy was in fact a real life figure (in fact, by name, the only true life figure in the whole film/book - all the other characters were ficticious, although a few were very loosely based on real characters with name changes), who did indeed partake in a number of desert explorations in the pre-war Libyan desert.

John Bierman (Author of "Alamein: War without hate", "Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion" among others) has written a very engaging biography of "Count" Laszlo Almasy, peeling back the myth of Almasy, and revealing the real "Count". For a start, it seems the "Count" was not in fact a real Count - although aristocratic, his family did not possess any titles. And another thing - it seems the Count may have been a homosexual, and may have at one time had a lover in the German army.

At times, because documentary evidence concerning the Count is scarce, the content is just supposition, guesswork, and speculation. As a result, this isn't a true in-depth biography due to the lack of material, which is frustrating although no fault of the author. The book itself isn't particularly weighty, and would be completed with a few solid evenings of reading.

Bierman does quite clearly state when he is dealing with known hard facts. Much of the desert exploration that was conducted by Almasy and others in the "Zerzura Club" is documented. What is also documented reasonably well is Almasy's war efforts in support of Rommel's Army in Africa, although at times, some of it is patchy. At other times, particularly when written/oral evidence cannot be substaniated, Bierman also quite clearly indicates this. An example is the account related by Bierman, based on written journals by a British adventurer and sometime spy, of a pursuit of Almasy by Communist agents through the streets of Rome, in which the British agent helped Almasy evade capture as a way of thanking the Hungarian for his activities as a British agent during the war. So it would seem Almasy was playing both sides of the fence - although as Bierman stresses, this is merely speculation. I did find that Almasy's activities post WWII was relatively light, although at one stage he was tried as a war criminal. It transpires that Almasy, although fighting on the side of the Nazis, was no Nazi (unlike his brother) and in fact saved jews from the authorities in the dying days of the war.

Nonetheless, Bierman was written a very interesting account (as far as it is known) of one of the more mysterious and enigmatic characters of wartime. Illustrated with a couple of maps, and two inserts of black and white photography, this book would be an ideal companion to Saul Kelly's somewhat dry (no pun intended) "The Lost Oasis", which gives a broader overview of the activities of some of the notable Libyan desert explorers both during the war, and prior to it.