Word: waltari
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ADVENTURER (377 pp.) - Mika Waltari-Putnam...
...standard formula for making a historical novel sell merrily nowadays is: violence plus sex equals success. Finnish Novelist Mika Waltari has his own way of handling the formula: double the quantities, double the result. Last year, U.S. readers got their first taste of the treatment in The Egyptian, a story of how a local fellah made good with the ladies in the 14th Century B.C. It sold more than 500,000 copies, held first place on bestseller lists for over three months, and still ranks in the top dozen...
...latest Waltari should make the cash registers clang just as loudly as The Egyptian did. His publisher confidently predicts for The Adventurer a sale of "six figures in six weeks...
...Waltari's adventurer, Michael Bast, the bastard of a Finnish strumpet, has been brought up by a middle-aged witch who lies in bed at night and sighs with desire for the local hangman. In this school of adversity Michael learns little of life, grows up to be a sort of cross between Candide and Lanny Budd. He is the kind of young man who gets seduced time & again without quite realizing what is going on, who gives his money to rascals for safekeeping, who signs a paper which helps to prove his wife a witch because a nice...
...Waltari lets his fool rush into every crime a man can commit, and into many of the major scenes of the 16th Century -Michael is present at the Stockholm Massacre of 1520 and the sack of Rome by the troops of Emperor Charles V. He talks with Luther and Erasmus, studies with Paracelsus. In this way, the reader gets alternate doses of high and low life that may be intended, like the hot & cold treatments of a Finnish steam bath, to make him tingle all over. In Waltari overdoses, the treatment brings on numbness...