Word: waltari
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...DARK ANGEL (374 pp.)-Mika Waltari-Putnam...
...Mika Waltari, one of the most successful of practicing historical novelists (The Egyptian, The Wanderer), has taken this most crucial of all sieges as the subject of hs new book. It is both a lush and a tricky subject, combining the excitement of a historic military occasion with the far-reaching complications of the death of a great Christian state. It is a tribute to Waltari that he succeeds not only in blending the glamour and the disaster of the event but also works in the sort of love story on which, as every historical novelist knows, the fate both...
...Most of Waltari's characters are drawn straight from the history books. Those who are not are made to look as if they were by the simple device of being made relatives of the authentic ones. Gorgeous Heroine Anna Notaras, who is a sort of Greek Joan of Arc with painted toenails, is the dubbed-in daughter of history's Grand Duke Lukas Notaras. Her would-be lover, John Angelos, another Waltari creation, is depicted as the rightful heir to the Byzantine throne...
...wheels-within-wheels complications of war, love and treachery would have stalled a clumsy novelist. But Novelist Waltari is anything but clumsy. Dramatically and lavishly, he paints in the spectacular background-the campfires of the approaching Turks lining the night horizon, the arrival of their army ("a huge, living carpet seemed to cover the earth"), the roar and hiss of the foundries relentlessly churning out the Sultan's culverins and giant bombards. At first, the massive walls of Constantinople seem little affected; then telltale lines begin to streak down the masonry, widening into fundamental fractures and splits. In these...
...Wanderer, by Mika Waltari, may be a bit of a disappointment to the author's fans. Its story moves intelligibly from episode to episode, and its characters are sufficiently self-consistent so that it is possible to tell them apart. But the old Waltari charm is not there. The hero is a Finnish boy named Michael who sails aboard a pilgrim ship for Palestine, only to be lugged off to the African slave markets by Moslem pirates. Thenceforward, he ricochets about the Ottoman Empire-from the fall of Algiers to the siege of Vienna to the campaigns in Persia...