Search results for ""Author Nicholas Mosley""

Through a dialogue between two lovers, a young physicist in England and an anthropologist in Germany, Nicholas Mosely retells the history of Europe of the twenties and thirties. The destructive power and attraction of fascism and communism is unveiled and set against the changing relationship between man and science in the time of atomic power. Their story weaves together disparate strands of landscape to take the reader on a journey through Spain, London, Soviet Russia, North Africa and middle Europe. Simultaneously taking us through a new intellectual landscape from the new scenes of physics, biology, anthropology and psychology. 'A novel of enormous ambition, a book that takes on just about every social movement, every significant political event of our time - a virtual intellectual anthology of the 20th century, in fictional form' - Daniel Stern, "New York Times" Book Review.

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"Natalie Natalia"?is Nicholas Mosley's brilliant examination of political life. It revolves around Anthony Greville, a conservative Member of Parliament who is tormented by his ambivalence toward his career, by his religious doubts, and by his adulterous affair with Natalia Jones, the enigmatic wife of a colleague.The course of their affair dramatizes love in its most creative and perilously destructive aspects, the two facets symbolized in the two names he has for his lover: "I sometimes called Natalia Natalie instead of Natalia," Greville says, "when she was the ravenous rather than the angelic angel... What Natalie said was often a code for what Natalia was meaning." Ranging in setting from England to Central Africa, the novel is a remarkable investigation of ethics, with fiction itself as an ethical activity.

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Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada--the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class--his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.

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As one of the characters in Assassins says, "Tolstoy was right, you can't beat the Gods. It's the small things - the warp and woof - that make up the pattern. And how much influence do we have over the small? Now that's a theme for a modern writer." And Nicholas Mosley is this writer. Part political thriller and part love story, Assassins explores the "small things" that give shape and meaning to the "big events."

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In his final novel, Rainbow People, Nicholas Mosley offers us the distinctly twenty-firstcentury story of a holy family. A man, a woman, and a child walk together along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near the border between Greece and Macedonia. They watch as a film is made about the refugee crisis on the beach. While the mother and father, joined by the filmmaker, contemplate the meaning of the crisis, the limited powers of art, the greater powers of fear and faith, the child explores, plays, and constantly transforms before their eyes. Months later, the family travels from their home in England to Calais, France, where an enormous refugee camp called “the Jungle” has sprung up. Here, in this unlikely place, the child shows the adults a graceful way to face the future. Mosley’s Rainbow People is a masterful, powerful book about borders, politics, and hope.

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Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an effort to improve his family image. But the war left Mosley a radically changed man: he had gone in out of personal convenience, and left with a sense of greater purpose. Saved from death by one of his men, holed up in barns and trenches and tents, and marching across Europe, Mosley found in war a certainty that eluded him in peacetime. "War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly," he writes. "This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do." In an interview conducted between 1977 and 1978, Nicholas Mosley said, "When I was young William Faulkner was my great love, not just because of the density of style, but because he seemed to be dealing with the question not of what will happen next but what is happening now. The first Faulkner novel I read was The Sound and the Fury, which I got hold of when we liberated a POW camp in Italy in 1944 and I liberated the Red Cross Library. I was about twenty.... What in god's name, after all, was I doing aged twenty in Italy in a war?"

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"Religion," this book begins, "is a mistrusted word now," and Nicholas Mosley, in this engaging meditation, seeks to repair that trust. Rather than trying to convince or compel the reader to accept his beliefs, he describes how religion functions in the modern world. Elsewhere, Mosley has written, "There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." In this book, he describes religion as the source of that meaning. Despair is the fashionable attitude, but it is one Mosley, here and in his many novels, rejects in favor of a cautious optimism. He writes not to persuade, but to explain a worldview that is refreshing for the hope and intelligence it contains.

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This vivid and strikingly witty novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, eighteen-year-old Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colorful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young Trotskyites, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and interior reality, while Mosley himself questions art's ability to convey these different realities. Both Bert and Mosley triumph over these challenges by the end of this engaging and innovative novel.

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Nicholas Mosley's Whitbread Award-winning novel Hopeful Monsters dealt with the suggestion that if human nature could not be improved by scientific manipulation, perhaps a suitable environment or soil might nonetheless be prepared into which an appropriate seed for change might fall, and not be smothered by weeds. In Metamorphosis, a humanitarian worker and a journalist in a vast refugee camp in East Africa come across a newborn child who for some inexplicable reason gives them the impression that it might be just such a seed. But why? And what to do about it?

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Reminiscent in theme and style to his Whitbread Award-winning?"Hopeful Monsters," Nicholas Mosley's?"The Hesperides Tree"?tells of a young man frustrated by the inability of his two chosen courses of study--biology and literature--to adequately define the world. Baffled by several life-shaping coincidences that seem to be part of life itself, he embarks on a physical and intellectual journey in search of a girl he fell in love with years earlier. This journey leads him to a deserted island off the coast of Ireland and, perhaps, to the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, home of the Tree of Life.

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Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. We learn of her involvement with drugs and increasing self-delusion. After a crack-up, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an eccentric and possibly mad guru. But what is at the back of appearances; how calculated is the self-destructiveness from which a new order might emerge?

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A retired academic and writer is becoming a media celebrity of sorts, appearing on various talk shows to voice his controversial views on human nature and war. While in New York to make such an appearance, he becomes the victim of a hit-and-run--set up by the CIA? the FBI? terrorists?--and ends up confined to a hospital bed. This forced inactivity allows him to reflect on his life--the work he has done, the women he has known--as various people from his life gather around him, including both his first and second wives. Reminiscing about his past while dealing with his present, the man begins to see his provocative ideas about fidelity, sin, and grace play themselves out in a virtuosic way that could only be conceived by Nicholas Mosley.

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In Children of Darkness and Light, Mosley takes on what for most novelists has been the most challenging of subjects: a novel directly concerned with religious belief. A middle-aged, burnt-out journalist is sent to the north of England to do a story about the possible appearance of the Blessed Virgin to a group of children, though this may be a rumor initiated by the government to cover up a nuclear disaster. Or both. Out of such conflicting possibilities, Mosley invents a sinister world where nothing is what it seems to be. And as Mosley's narrator moves through the possibilities of half-truths, lies, conspiracies, and betrayals, he himself creates a parallel crisis in his personal life wherein he and his wife are trying to destroy their marriage or save it, or - as we come to expect in Mosley novels - do both at once. And behind all this is the possibility that the narrator - half philosopher and half would-be saint - is little more than a middle-aged man trying to justify his irresponsibility and infidelity behind a shield of wit and irony.

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"When you have put your trust in shadows there is nothing that is real. Have you found this?" Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius's ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends' joie de vivre. In this, his second novel--written in the '50s and never before published--Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.

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Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

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Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

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Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley's politics, religion and stammering, this diverse collection gathers essays written by Nicholas Mosley over the past forty years. Resembling the behaviour of slime mould - a strange organism made up of separate amoebae that temporarily form a single pillar which then bursts in order to scatter its seeds across the forest floor - the ideas found in these essays converge and disperse, crossing over into other disciplines, and creating a unique way of looking at the world, one echoed in Mosley's fictional writings.

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-- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which shape the twentieth century, taking them from Cambridge and Berlin to the Spanish Civil War, Russia, the Sahara, and finally to Los Alamos to witness the first nuclear test. -- Hopeful Monsters received Britain's prestigious Whitbread Award in 1990. -- Praising Mosley's ability to distill complex modes of thought, the New York Times called Hopeful Monsters a virtual encyclopedia of twentieth century thought, in fictional form. -- First U.S. edition by Dalkey Archive ('90), most recent paperback by Vintage ('93).

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Dedicated to the discussion and celebration of innovative fiction, the Review of Contemporary Fiction has featured the most influential authors of the twentieth century for over twenty years.This summer, with the issue on New Japanese Fiction, RCF will return to featuring interesting new fiction from around the world. This issue builds on a tradition in place since the origin of RCF, and has included publication of issues devoted to: New Italian Fiction (156478-121-6), New Danish Fiction (1-56478-127-5), New Finnish Fiction (1-56478-098-8) and New Latvian Fiction (1-56478-178-X).The fall issue highlights the new format for RCF, featuring long essays on two to four authors that provide both an introduction to their fiction and interpretative strategies for reading their work. For a complete list of recent issues.In addition, each issue features an extensive book review section, focused on contemporary fiction that is generally not reviewed by the mainstream media.

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In his recent novels--including his award-winning Hopeful Monsters--Nicholas Mosley has investigated the patterns that govern our mental and emotional lives and the possibilities that we have for change, and nowhere has he explored such themes with greater concentration than in Catastrophe Practice. A unique book whose characters and concerns are the basis for the other four novels of the Catastrophe Practice Series - Hopeful Monsters, Imago Bird, Judith, and Serpent-- Catastrophe Practice is remarkable both in its form (three plays with prefaces and a novella) and in its ability to convey the complexities of thought. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters of Catastrophe Practice struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters (and the author) feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive--conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations--and try to find a way to realize genuine experience.

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