2.5
I Was Jack Mortimer
ByPublisher Description
"One doesn't step into anyone's life, not even a dead man's, without having to live it to the end."
A man climbs into Ferdinand Sponer's cab, gives the name of a hotel, and before he reaches it has been murdered: shot through the throat. And though Sponer has so far committed no crime, he is drawn into the late Jack Mortimer's life, and might not be able to escape its tangles and intrigues before it is too late...
Twice filmed, I Was Jack Mortimer is a tale of misappropriated identity as darkly captivating and twisting as the books of Patricia Highsmith.
A man climbs into Ferdinand Sponer's cab, gives the name of a hotel, and before he reaches it has been murdered: shot through the throat. And though Sponer has so far committed no crime, he is drawn into the late Jack Mortimer's life, and might not be able to escape its tangles and intrigues before it is too late...
Twice filmed, I Was Jack Mortimer is a tale of misappropriated identity as darkly captivating and twisting as the books of Patricia Highsmith.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesI Was Jack Mortimer Reviews
2.5
Alison FJ
Created 6 months agoShare
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“This is a light, breezy, easy-to-read little book that I finished on a long plane trip. It was very suitable to that purpose. I had never read anything by Alexander Lernet-Holenia, who was born in 1897 and lived the last decades of his life inside the nationalized formerly-Habsburg Hofburg palace in Vienna. This story follows a taxi driver who has a girlfriend he neglects, falls in love with a young aristocratic woman based on her looks, picks up a fare at a train station who is mysteriously murdered -- without the driver noticing -- in his cab before they arrive at their destination (a hotel in the city center), makes a serious of increasingly silly decisions about how to respond to that horrific situation, and somehow ends the whole affair having learned one thing: There are "women one shouldn't see again" and there are others that "wanted to sacrifice themselves for you" and he hadn't done a very good job of deciding which type to prioritize.
I've read a lot of Austrian literature from this period and none of it is rousingly feminist, but the ridiculous and borderline misogynist depictions of women in this novel were so outrageously sexist that I couldn't stand to give it the 3 stars it might have deserved, despite its outrageous denouement, artificial dialogue, and a series of really horrible female characters who seem to fall into and out of love merely out of spite.”
Simone Vitale
Created over 2 years agoShare
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BrenW13
Created over 2 years agoShare
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Dr. Somnath Das
Created almost 4 years agoShare
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Lisa Coyne
Created about 4 years agoShare
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About Alexander Lernet-Holenia
Alexander Lernet-Holenia was born in Vienna in 1897. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and became a protégé of Rainer Maria Rilke. During his life he wrote poetry, novels, plays and was a successful screenwriter. His uneasy relationship with the National Socialist Party resulted in his removal from prominence in 1944, but after the end of the Second World War, he again became a vital figure in Austrian cultural life. He died in 1976.
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