Customer Reviews

Stardust: A Novel

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It's 1945, the war is over, but Ben Collier is still in the Army. He's been charged with making a documentary about the concentration camps, because people should see it, they should know, they should remember. However, he has to find a studio to make it. As fate would have it he meets Sol Lasner, head of Continental Studios on the train going west. Lasner has a heart attack, Ben saves his life and earns his undying gratitude, because he helped Lasner keep his heart problem a secret.

Lasner agrees to make the documentary and installs Ben in an office on the studio lot. But Ben has more on his plate than just making a documentary for the Army, no matter how important. His brother Danny took a swan dive off the balcony of the Cherokee Arms and is in a coma. Ben visits, Danny comes to, says, "Don't leave me," but Ben does for a second and when he comes back, Danny is dead.

Ben refuses to believe his brother committed suicide. The studio hushes it up, makes everybody believe it was an accident, but Ben believes it's murder. Of course Ben is right. Ben has an affair with his brother's wife, meets a girl who survived the camps, learns more about his brother than he wanted to know and he gets a killer on his trail. Add to this a publicity seeking congressman who could easily be Joe McCarthy in disguise, with a movie industry in his sights and maybe Ben too and you have quite a story.

Joseph Kanon Won me over with Los Alamos, kept me in his camp with The Prodigal Spy & Alibi, after this I am a devoted fan (well I guess I really already was). I just wish he would write faster. Though he played around with history, made a hero where none existed, he also made a book that will take you back to a time when Hollywood was young, a time when things were better, or were they? And he made a book that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page.

I have little to say about this book, pro or con. Many Amazon reviewers found it exciting and powerful. For me, it was flat and lethargic. The story is convoluted, unnecessarily so, and takes too long to unfold and gather momentum. It's very heavy on dialog, which usually adds pace and immediacy but here lacks any vibrancy and variety. I had to push myself to stay with the plot and felt that the dialog and limited sense of characterization distanced me from it; it was labored and demanded labor from me to keep my attention focused.
It's well done but without any fizz. I can see that it will appeal to readers who enjoy getting into the flow of a story and are interested in its background themes of post-World War II Hollywood and the film making community. The red-baiting, union busting of the time that created the McCarthy period is well presented and at times evocative. It's definitely not a thriller or mystery story within the genre conception of the form. The solving of the murder of the hero's brother that is assumed to be suicide is not in and of itself central to the plot. It is not a Who dunnit? story so much as a Why dunnit?
The book has its virtues and is certainly well-crafted. My comments here are just a personal reaction that despite these merits, it is dull. I can see why some reviews compare it with Le Carre, but while the tone and leisuredly unfolding are comparable, the writing lacks the little extra something that gives Le Carre's work so much texture and moral complexity. This is more a complicated than a complex novel. I enjoyed Kanon's earlier work - The Good German and Los Alamos in particular, so if you too liked them, then Stardust is probably worth buying. I would expect a number of readers coming newly to his work would be disappointed or apathetic about it.

When Daniel Kohler is fatally injured in a fall in 1945, his brother Ben is just arriving in Hollywood to make a film for the Army documenting the death camps. This is a subject close to home as Ben served in Europe at the close of the war. As he investigates the circumstances surrounding Daniel's death and works on his movie, the two are related in ways he never imagined. Mr. Kanon deftly weaves a number of stories into the whole--a small group of ex-pat intellectuals under FBI scrutiny, a camp survivor transplanted to the home of a film mogul, the subterfuge required for alternative lifestyles, tabloid journalism, being Jewish in post WWII America and the studio star system.

This beautifully written book is sprinkled with real and fictional characters based on real ones and this world is skillfully evoked. As Ben navigates the maze of clues leading to the truth about his brother, his path is made murkier by complex relationships, loyalties and lies. Stardust is a literary thriller of the highest quality. Thought provoking and entertaining at the same time, it's a brilliant commentary on illusion and truth and what patriotism means.

This was the first novel of Joseph Kanon that I have had the opportunity to read. I've heard great praise for his previous works, especially The Good German. So when I had the chance to read his latest novel, Stardust" I grabbed it. To be up front, I came away with mixed feelings. On one hand I found the characters well developed and interesting. On the other hand, this might possibly be the slowest, most dragged out development of a plot I've read since James Clavell's Noble House. The first half of the book is very slow and snail-like in its progression. There were times I had a hard time just staying interested.

The story takes place in Hollywood right after the end of World War II. Ben Collier has found out his brother Danny has been gravely injured in what was presumed to be a suicide attempt. Just as Ben arrives at the bedside Danny wakes briefly from his coma, utters "Don't leave me" and then dies. Ben doesn't believe his brother tried to kill himself and is determined to uncover the truth. What follows is a mystery interwoven around all the political intrigue of the film industry in the 1940's, with both the communist witch hunt and labor union strife as main issues.

What made this a hard book to enjoy initially was the much dragged out first half. To say the author takes his time to develop the plot would be an understatement. Each scene, each conversation, each introduction of a new character is stretched out over many pages. One example is Ben's first meeting with ex-FBI Agent Riordan. The conversation was no less than 10 pages long, most of which was Ben making smart-aleck and sarcastic comments every time Riordan answered one of his questions. That's another issue I had with the book. In the first half of the story our hero for the most part is just not a likable character. He's at times whiny, then sarcastic and offensive. There were times I wished someone would just smack him upside the head (which of course actually happens in the second half).

As we get into the second half things begin to heat up. As Ben begins to determine the truth of what happened to his brother and why, he starts to morph into a more sympathetic character. Starting with an attempt on Ben's life the action begins to heat up as he must walk a narrow line between the political power of Senator's Minot's anti-communist committee and the loyalty he has for Sol Lasner, the head of Continental Studios. Somewhere mixed up in all of this is a murderer and Ben has vowed to find out who it is, even at the cost of his own life. As we move closer to the end of the book it truly becomes a page turner. Where the first half was hard to keep reading, the second half more than made up for it by being impossible to put down.

Overall, I would have to say I ended up enjoying the book. It was a hard story to plod through at first but finally the pace picked up enough to keep my interest long enough to get to the good stuff. I would recommend this to most mystery fans. A good story with many surprises!

Nobody wants to see war films after the war. Ben Collier, son of Otto Kohler, is in the Signal Corps. and has films of the camps. His father made films in Germany. Sol Lasner, Hollywood mogul, had known the father. In the early postwar period people traveled by train, Hollywood included. Lasner, meeting Ben on the train, wants to keep his heart condition a secret and solicits Ben's help.

Movies moved to California for the sun. Everything was shot outdoors. Arriving at his destination, Ben learns that his brother has jumped out of a window and is in a coma. The novel has real people in it-- Alma Mahler, Salka Viertal, the Warners, Paulette Goddard, Ann Sheridan, Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann, Greer Garson.

Ben's brother's action is a mystery. The films of Otto Kohler are in a collection at his brother Danny's place. Danny dies following a brief period of consciousness. Daniel had taken people over the Pyrenees to escape Hitler. The funeral is attended mostly by Germans. In Hollywood there are union issues.

Ben comes to believe that the death is a homicide. It is discovered that Ben's father used Danny to guide his fellow party members to freedom. Someone who has survived the camps tells Ben his father was killed as a Communist, not as a Jew. Ben's source says it was she who fingered his father.

So, this book is nearly genre fiction, and very good at that. It is just after the war and Hollywood is filled with displaced Europeans. The Holocaust has taken place and the division of Germany is to follow soon. Hollywood itself is to be subject to investigation by congressional committees. In a highly competitive environment, politics is to intrude.

Fortunately, for the sake of the story, exiles display fast hospitality. Too, Hollywood is an interesting place about which to read. Ben (Reuben) Collier (Kohler) functions as both an everyman and as an investigator into the past, Ben having been separated from both his father and brother through marital discord in the family.

This is something like a LeCarre product, except that it is historical fiction. The writing is very sharp, competent. The story is exciting, well-executed. In some respects Joseph Kannon resembles Dashiell Hammett in knowing that corruption, untangled, falls back on itself.

Ben Collier, born Reuben Kohler, a German-American Jew raised in the film industry by his famous director father, leaves Germany in the days immediately following the end of the Second World War in Europe to visit his brother Danny, who lies in a coma in a Hollywood hospital. There, he finds himself embroiled in complex ways with Danny's widow, Liesl, and the star-studded German emigre community in Southern California; with Danny's seemingly impenetrable past; with Sol Lasner, head of one of the early Hollywood studios, and Lasner's right-hand man, "Bunny" Jenkins, a former child star in England; and with a Right-Wing Congressman who stands in for Richard Nixon -- not to mention assorted Communists, fellow-travelers, and the FBI in the era of J. Edgar Hoover. As the plot unfolds in all its complexity, the euphoria of victory in Europe and (later) in the Pacific gives way to the hysteria of the Red Scare, the Hollywood Blacklist, and the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee.

This brilliant novel, structurally a murder mystery, is better viewed as a compelling portrait of Hollywood in the days preceding the Blacklist. Kanon skillfully paints a canvas peopled by both real and imagined icons of the times, including movie stars such as Paulette Goddard in the foreground and Greer Garson, Cary Grant, and Marlene Dietrich in the background; the writer Ben Hecht; German emigres such as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Lion Feuchtwanger; and a smattering of well-known studio heads and politicians. Even FDR gets into the act late in the game, however indirectly.

In the hands of a hack writer, this story could well have become unreadable. But Kanon infuses the tale with suspense that grows slowly and then at an accelerating rate as his self-doubting hero, Ben Collier, becomes enmeshed in the mystery. Kanon's nuanced portraits of his characters bring them to life and make them difficult to ignore or forget: the talented and promising Jewish actress forced to the sidelines by the Red Scare; the aging, once-powerful studio head who is losing control of the company he founded; the closeted gay film executive caring for his gravely wounded lover; the brilliant German actress groomed for stardom on the fast track; the death camp survivor with eyes that never come to life. Every one of these and many other credible characters emerges from the pages of Stardust as multidimensional and profoundly human.

A former publishing executive, Kanon is the author of four previous novels. Among them are Los Alamos and The Good German, which later was adapted to film in a production starring George Clooney. Both books, like Stardust, are set in the years immediately following World War II and reflect Kanon's considerable historical knowledge of the era.

(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books)

It's post-World War II, and Ben Collier, on leave from the U.S. Army Signal Corp in Germany, has come to Los Angeles. His brother Danny, a director there, has fallen from a balcony and is now in a coma and near death. Danny dies soon after Ben's arrival, almost immediately after Danny awakens to beg Ben not to leave him.

Ben discovers that this was not an accident and not attempted suicide. Danny was somehow involved in the beginnings of the "witch hunt" for Communists in Hollywood, and someone wanted him dead. Now Ben tries to be Danny and hunt for Communists, hoping he will learn who murdered him .

At the same time, Ben is putting together a documentary. He wants the world to see what had been going on in the concentration camps during World War II. He has convinced an owner of one of the Hollywood movie studios to provide him with what the Army could not so he can produce this. Therefore, he is intimately involved with the goings on at the studio and with the people who worked with Danny there.

Joseph Kanon, who has written four previous novels of historical fiction (THE GOOD GERMAN, LOS ALAMOS, THE PRODIGAL SPY, and ALIBI), once again presents historical fiction as thriller/mystery. So this book is action packed and hard to put down while the reader learns about this historical period.

And once again I give Kanon's novel an A.

In his latest book, Stardust, Joe Kanon, the master of the historical thriller, adds a new chord to his work, transcending the genre and creating a compelling and exciting human drama. Stardust explores how people cope with love and loss; success and failure; the past and the future in the glamorous yet dangerous and morally ambiguous world of 1945 Hollywood. German emigres, movie stars, and studio heads are all implicated in a mysterious death that involves the world war just ended and the cold war just beginning; and, like the movies themselves, it's hard to know what's real and what isn't.

Joe Kanon's craftsmanship as a writer, his historical knowledge of this unique time and place, and his compassion for and understanding of good people caught in bad times, makes Stardust one of the best books of the year.

It's the 1940s and World War II has just ended. Young Ben Collier is on his way to Hollywood after visiting the German death camps to make a movie about the experience. Once he boards the train, he learns that his estranged brother Daniel, a Hollywood producer, has taken a fall and is not expected to live. On the train, Ben is immediately brushed with stardust, meeting his brother's associates. He makes a powerful ally when he assists an ailing studio head, and is immediately given red carpet treatment on his arrival in LA.

He goes immediately to Danny's bedside, where his brother unexpectedly awakens, before mysteriously dying a few minutes later when Ben is gone. The story of suicide doesn't fit with Ben's image of his brother, so he begins to investigate Danny's life. He finds himself drawn to his brother's wife, Liesl, and enjoys comfort in her arms before her ambitions put him aside. Ben finds a number of deep, dark secrets about his dead brother's life and, in getting closer to his killer, nearly finds himself meeting the same fate. The main backdrop to the story was the communist witch hunts that took place in Hollywood, creating an atmosphere of fear and unease among the glittering elite.

The story was carefully laid out and meticulously woven, and I know some readers relish such a style. While enjoying its bygone Hollywood atmosphere, I found the story somewhat slow-moving, and it had a large number of characters to keep track of, which was sometimes confusing. In all, though, it was a decent read that wove an intriguing mystery out of a dark era in Hollywood's history.

Ben Collier, a German Jew raised mostly in the US, returns from the battlefields of WWII Europe to make newsreels for the Army showcasing the liberation of the concentration camps. He discovers that his brother Daniel, a mid-level Hollywood director, has died in an "accident" widely believed to have been suicide. Through Daniel's wife, an expat German Jew herself, he is introduced to the community of German exiles in L.A., while his job exposes him to life at the studios. Ben is determined to discover why his brother died, even if it WAS suicide.

Through Ben's eyes, we see the hedonism, conspicuous spending, and self-absorption of Hollywood juxtaposed with the devastation and cruelty that lies over Europe, and the sense of unreality that arises from moving from one to the other. But the two are not completely separate, and Ben soon encounters law enforcement searching among the anti-Hitler Germans for the "commies" that will become the target of the Cold War witchhunt.

Most of the story unfolds through dialogue, rather than action. If you prefer the more breathless Ludlum-esque style of thriller, you probably will not enjoy Stardust. On the other hand, if you enjoy the measured revelation of pieces of a puzzle, you should enjoy Stardust. I did.

My one real quibble is with Ben falling into bed with his brother's widow. It is so predictable here that the story would have been fresher if he had NOT done so, or if a relationship started to develop slowly. As it was, I think the expected "two-stressed-out-people-fall-into-bed" detracted from the overall story.