Word: truths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...deception," Albert Fried has one of the characters in The Prescott Chronicles say. Fried would know. His own art represents an attempt to purvey a new kind of history in literary guise--to perpetrate another, more elaborate form of dissimulation which he paradoxically sees as an essay in truth-telling. This may not be the way the history books tell it, Fried suggests, but it's the way it must have been...
...course, the documents are fake, the inspired creations of Fried's imagination. But, as Fried (under the pseudonym Julian K. Prescott, the latest member of the line) argues in his preface, they tell the sort of truth most histories, based as they are on inadequate evidence, can never quite capture. Prescott (alias Fried), who has previously revealed a similar book on the Cold War, puts it this...
...private jokes at the expense of the ingenuous reader, the whole history of America being the province this time of my (or my master's) invention. Maybe so, but this, as I have been at some pains to show, is a pedestrian and unimaginative way of approaching the truth. A last word of reassurance then (if it is still needed): I exist! The Prescott family existed! These chronicles exist...
...that will do justice to both--is an ambitious one, perhaps overly so. In the end, his work is very hard to judge for jsut that reason. Only when he sticks to public figures and actual historical events is Fried assured of historical accuracy, his own philosophising about truth notwithstanding; but only by endowing those characters with distinctive motivations as mediated by the biases of fictional observers can he make history into drama. The combination of the verifiably historic with the personally idiosyncratic--when Fried achieves that synthesis--makes for pre-eminently satisfying reading. But whether that combination finally represents...
Sure, Desaulniers won in three sets, but he allowed 21 points when two would have been a lot. When you're one of the ten best squash players in the world--and that's the truth--and a good dresser as well--Dasaulniers wore green and red stripes on shirt, pants and socks--you can afford to take it easy. If only out of mercy...