Word: sabatini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...never did a lick of work - summers at European spas - impossible to go anywhere without a chaperone. A dreamy child, she wrote her first novel at eight, and all through her teens scribbled madly romantic epics in imitation of her favorite writers: Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini...
Whatever his inspiration, Sabatini wrote his masterpiece (and bestselling title) in 1920. Everything came together in Scaramouche; the strongest moments in his other novels barely equal the weakest scenes in this book. The hero is a witty young lawyer whose best friend is skewered by an aristocratic swordsman on the eve of the French Revolution. The hero vows to hound the aristo to destruction-only to find the absolute powers of the monarchy arrayed against...
Dance on the Abyss. As revolution is fomented, Sabatini tracks his hero through dazzling careers of evasion and revenge. To elude the police and pursue his enemy, he becomes in succession a republican agitator, a celebrated actor and a political assassin. The final confrontation of hero and villain produces a wild surprise ending...
...Scaramouche, the author's usual demand for personal justice is transmuted into a passion for social justice, and this merging of private and public feeling lends the novel a universality Sabatini nowhere else achieved. In the Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr, he has made one of the subtlest villains in romantic literature, a good man perverted by a bad idea (aristocratic privilege excuses any crime) into a perfectly sincere monster. In Scaramouche, the hero, he has created his Hamlet...
...born with the gift of laughter," Sabatini announces in the novel's opening sentence, "and a sense that the world was mad." Scaramouche, in fact, is the type of the homme engagé, the modern intellectual activist. All his acts are the free acts of a man who dances his existence upon the abyss of nothingness. Today the notion that only the crazy are sane in a world gone mad would hardly rattle an espresso cup. It was not so in Sabatini's time. By a singular stroke of intuition, he created an existentialist hero almost a decade...