Book description
Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and
betrayal, Seven Lies tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young
man growing up in the former East Germany, whose yearnings for love,
glory and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to
America. The hopeless son of an ambitious mother and a kind but
unlucky diplomat, Stefan lurches between his budding, covert interests
- girls and Romantic poetry - to find himself embroiled in dissident
politics, which oddly seems to offer both. In time, by a series of
blackly comic and increasingly dangerous manoeuvres, he contrives to
make his fantasy come true, finding himself not only in the country of
his dreams, but also married to the woman he idolises. America seems
everything he expected, and meanwhile his secrets are safely locked
away behind the Berlin Wall. A new life of unbounded bliss seems to
have been granted to him. And then that life begins to fall apart...
Exquisitely written and brilliantly imagined, James Lasdun's second
novel is a terrifying plummet into anxiety, as complacency yields to
an edgy paranoia. Pitching the furtive, shabby world of Communist
Berlin against the glassy superficiality of contemporary New York,
Seven Lies is an examination of the architecture of deceit -
how deceit builds on itself until life is little more than an
accretion of falsehood; how hope turns to fear, and dreams to nightmares.
James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He
has published two collections of short stories, three books of poetry
and a novel,
The Horned Man
. His story 'The Siege' was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his film
Beseiged
. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film
Sunday
(based on another of his stories) which won Best Feature and Best
Screenplay awards at Sundance, 1997. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim
Fellowship in poetry, and currently teaches poetry and fiction workshops
at Princeton.
