2.5
All Men Are Liars
ByPublisher Description
In this gorgeously imagined novel, a journalist interviews those who knew—or thought they knew—Alejandro Bevilacqua, a brilliant, infuriatingly elusive South American writer and author of the masterpiece, In Praise of Lying. But the accounts of those in his circle of friends, lovers, and enemies become increasingly contradictory, murky, and suspect. Is everyone lying, or just telling their own subjective version of the truth? As the literary investigation unfolds and a chorus of Bevilacqua’s peers piece together the fractured reality of his life, thirty years after his death, only the reader holds the power of final judgment.
In All Men Are Liars, Alberto Manguel pays homage to literature’s inventions and explores whether we can ever truly know someone, and the question of how, by whom, and for what, we ourselves will be remembered.
In All Men Are Liars, Alberto Manguel pays homage to literature’s inventions and explores whether we can ever truly know someone, and the question of how, by whom, and for what, we ourselves will be remembered.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities4 Reviews
2.5
Alexandra
Created 3 months agoShare
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Gabby Issa
Created over 1 year agoShare
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“Mostly boring and overly complicated but the author did have some redeeming moments with his writing. 2.5”
Emma Ambrose
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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“All Men are Liars is a sly little book that elegantly pulls together the threads of a harrowing story to illuminate a dark historical corner. Manguel is a cunning writer with a skill for for piercing together messy narratives until they form a complete and ordered picture.
…
“Let's get technical. The needle on a lie detector traces onto sheets of rolling paper a zigzag line that seems never to commit itself either way: only in the moment of an absolute truth will the line become firmer, clearer. That unbroken, straight line is also the one made by an encephalogram when a patient dies. You have to keep an eye on both of them during an interrogation: they never both show the same
state. To get to the truth without ending the life is our aim-that was my job. My first encounters with him were all about following the line of the lie-detector needle; now I'm after the other kind, the straight line, the inevitable one.””
Amyk
Created over 12 years agoShare
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“Telling the story of a person’s life seems like a relatively easy feat—even if the person himself isn’t alive to help, such as the case in Alberto Manguel’s novel All Men are Liars. A journalist would just need to track down the people who knew the person best, interview them, and then write. Yet, as Manguel proves here, the reality of the situation is much more complicated than it would seem.
As Manguel’s novel opens, a journalist, Terradillos, is seeking out the life story of a man named Alejandro Bevilacqua who has recently died (or been killed, depending on whom you ask). Through the voices of four different characters who knew Bevilacqua, readers get a picture of the man—yet that picture is constantly shapeshifting. Just like the title of Manguel’s book (and supposedly Bevilacqua’s), all men—and women—in this story are subject to untruths, exaggerations, and hazy perceptions, which come together in a fascinating look at who this man really was.
In this book, Manguel takes readers through the Argentina and Spain of the early to mid 1900s, introducing us to a host of characters from every walk of life. The voices of the characters who tell their version of the events leading up to Bevilacqua’s death are all distinct from one another and full of local color.
I’ll admit that this book takes a bit of work to get into fully. I received it as a Goodreads ARC Giveaway, and I’m not sure that I would have completed it otherwise. That said, once I got into the book, I couldn’t put it down. I kept reading to try to unravel the mystery of the victim’s death and ultimately loved the unique look at the title concept of lying.”
About Alberto Manguel
Born in Buenos Aires, Alberto Manguel is the prize-winning author of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi), A History of Reading, The Library at Night, and News From a Foreign Country Came and the translator and editor of many other works. He lives in the south of France.