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JOURNEY OF A MAN by Thomas Wiseman

JOURNEY OF A MAN

By

Pub Date: Sept. 29th, 1967
Publisher: Doubleday

Uneasy travels between hedonism and retrospection as the Stellmans, a not-so-young but handsome couple, return to their native Vienna and Rome. He is the Survivor, an Austrian Jew who came through the Hitler era, the fight for Israeli independence, and McCarthyite purges of the film industry. His wife is the Taker, with a childlike conviction that she deserves a sweet and easy life because of her sufferings in wartime Italy. They run into the Leaver, a detached, lusty and suicidal British girl. . . and an old friend, the Maker, successful as film director and orgiast. Talky novel plus minimal gift for dialogue adds up to disappointment. And the characters (like those in Czar, 1966) tend to lack substance. Still, the other ingredients--Nazi flashbacks, Felliniesque gatherings, epigrams about life and love, elaborate carnality--suggest a wide potential appeal.