Hulme's Investigations into the Bogart Script (Paperback or Softback)

Ghose, Zulfikar

ISBN 10: 178036315X / ISBN 13: 9781780363158

Published by Peach Publishing 5/12/2017, 2017

About this Item

Hulme's Investigations into the Bogart Script.

Seller Inventory # BBS-9781780363158

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hulme's Investigations into the Bogart Script (Paperback or Softback)
• Publisher: Peach Publishing 5/12/2017
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178036315X
• ISBN 13: 9781780363158
• Binding: Paperback or Softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 0.5 pounds
• Book Type: Book

About this title

Synopsis

At one level, this is an absorbing mystery which keeps the reader wanting to know where the next twist in the narrative will lead: who is Hulme, what exactly is he investigating, and what has Bogart got to do with it all? At another level, this is a very funny novel in which a parade of characters who could be movie or crime fiction stereotypes, men and women familiar to the popular imagination, keeps the reader absorbed with their wildly unpredictable actions. There are Walt and Rosemary on some kind of odyssey across the United States, sometimes in a jumbo jet and sometimes in a wagon train, for this novel moves across time and space without respecting linear progress. Behind all the fast-moving action, there are the mysterious communications between Walt and Hulme, expressed sometimes as high wit and sometimes as apparent nonsense but in a language that, while it immediately amuses the reader, springs the surprise of a philosophical insight into reality. Several Hollywood scripts are rehearsed as though the investigation was into the mystery of the human condition, the search of the soul for paradise. In the end, Walt and Rosemary are led, as though by fate, to a cottage high up in the Rockies from where they are granted a vision of America as if they beheld the world in its original purity. This is a novel unlike any other. The clue to its design can perhaps be glimpsed in the Author’s Note, which hints at the idea of a narrative driven by the aesthetic impulse generated by a philosophical conception of the nature of language. It is a work of high literary art, which will engage the interest of the most demanding reader, and yet it can be read at the simplest level of a story that entertains the reader to the end.

About the Author

Zulfikar Ghose is internationally known as a critic, poet and novelist. His books include Jets from Orange, Figures of Enchantment and a trilogy, The Incredible Brazilian. His work has received praise from T. S. Eliot, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles and Michael Moorcock, amongst others. Born in 1935 in Sialkot, Pakistan, Ghose emigrated to England in 1952. After graduating from Keele University with a BA in English and Philosophy, he lived in London where he was a cricket correspondent for The Observer and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and the Western Daily Press. In 1960, he met the novelist and poet B. S. Johnson, with whom he became close friends, and in the same year he joined The Group – a collection of poets who met at Edward Lucie-Smith’s house in Chelsea to discuss their work. These meetings were attended by, amongst others, George MacBeth and Philip Hobsbaum, and occasionally by Ted Hughes. In 1963, Zulfikar Ghose was put forward for the E. C. Gregory Award by the judges T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Henry Moore and Howard Sergeant; but when Eliot fell ill, his place on the committee was taken by a solicitor who raised an objection concerning Ghose’s nationality. The committee decided to overcome the legal hurdle by giving him a “Special Award”. His works comprise books and poems published on both sides of the Atlantic and where his rich prose has been described as “remarkable, imagistic, witty and original” and all his writing “sheer literary pleasure, exciting, effective, evocative and the beauty of great art”. In 1969, Ghose emigrated to the U.S.A after an invitation to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. He had tea with Patricia Nixon at the White House who presented him with a copy of The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. He became a US citizen in 2004 and went on to hold the distinguished position of Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor in Creative Writing. Ghose, now retired from full-time teaching, is the Professor Emeritus, University Texas at Austin. He lives with his wife Helena de la Fontaine, an artist from Brazil, whom he married in London in 1964.