Description
Book SynopsisOne of the most sensational incidents in the history of France, the Dreyfus Affair was a landmark federal case involving treason and antisemitism. A controversial documentary about the trial by pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès caused riots when it was shown in 1899, and was banned from any screening in France for the next three quarters of a century.
Who engineered Dreyfus''s conviction? Was the man who played him in the film actually murdered by a mob of enraged moviegoers? And why is Jack Kews, a shadowy 20th-century Zola in New York City, so determined to find out?
A web of intrigue, menace and betrayal reaches through space and time, as the search for keys to a historic trap hones in on a cache of zealously guarded forgeries and tins of crumbling film stock.
This erudite page-turner takes us from late 19th-century France to the film studios of the great Georges Méliès to the tribulations of a film restorer who finds herself caught
Trade Review
"In 1993, Susan Daitch was showcased in the Review of Contemporary Fiction alongside David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann. Her first novel, L.C., is an unheralded masterpiece, but due to its politics (and the gendered world of literary criticism) it never achieved the critical or commercial success of her peers Wallace and Vollmann. Nonetheless, for many readers the arrival of a new book from Daitch is the most exciting literary event of the year. In Paper Conspiracies, Daitch approaches the Dreyfus Affair, the defining incident of modern anti-semitism before the Shoah, by focusing on the fringes of the case, particularly the film-maker Georges Melies, who made a silent film about Dreyfus. Fin de siecle France is drawn into the present by a film restorer trying to save the Melies movie. As expected, Daitch's prose is intelligent and beautiful."--Hey Small Press "Like Herzog's study of Viennese literature, Susan Daitch's third novel, Paper Conspiracies (City Lights, August), shuttles from the fin de siecle to the present, only in France. Daitch takes her impetus from the silent movie about Alfred Dreyfus made by the cinematic pioneer Georges Melies, best known for his fanciful A Trip to the Moon (1902). A film in which one of the first masters of special effects took on a sensational political event makes good sense as a jumping-off point for Daitch's formally experimental, intertextual fiction. She's the sort of writer who favors footnotes and who imagines how the Yiddish-speaker who busted Lenny Bruce felt; David Foster Wallace once called her 'one of the most intelligent and attentive writers at work in the U.S. today.'"--Tablet Magazine
