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Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel von…
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Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel (2022. Auflage)

von Anthony Marra (Autor)

MitgliederRezensionenBeliebtheitDurchschnittliche BewertungDiskussionen
4492955,234 (3.88)41
Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ? The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini??s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles??a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
??A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that??s a true joy to read.???Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
??A gorgeous book . . . sublime.???The New York Times (Editors?? Choice)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR
Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father??s arrest.
Fifteen years later, on the eve of America??s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won??t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can??t escape the studio??s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria??s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.
Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father??s past threatens Maria??s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father??s fate??and her own.
Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life??s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls ??a
… (mehr)
Mitglied:lisapeet
Titel:Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel
Autoren:Anthony Marra (Autor)
Info:Hogarth (2022), 432 pages
Sammlungen:Read, eGalley
Bewertung:****
Tags:fiction, World War II, Italy, Hollywood, Day of Dialog

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Mercury Pictures Presents von Anthony Marra

Kürzlich hinzugefügt vonJoeB1934, JFBCore, PaulieMelbs, sunshine91, Jammy24, JFB87, private Bibliothek, sddoglover1010, Artur-Bobinski
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For the first hundred pages or so the tone was putting me off of it; Marra was clearly trying hard to amuse the great novel reading public with jokes and ironic humor and I was not feeling it.
She enjoyed wine spritzers, Virginia Woolf, probing the depths of his bellybutton, having affairs with men half her age, and buying overpriced paintings of people with their eyes and ears all mixed up.


Even worse was what he put into his characters’ mouths: “Still, I must admit, I like Jesus’s politics. Feeding the hungry, blessing the meek, wearing a robe to work.” Badda-bing! Eh.

But gradually the sweeping epic aspect and the rich characterization won me over. Kinda hard not to fall somewhat under the spell of a well written sweeping epic with rich characterization, I find. It reminded me of Jennifer Egan’s [b:Manhattan Beach|34467031|Manhattan Beach|Jennifer Egan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524162798l/34467031._SY75_.jpg|55587075], I suppose because of the World War II setting and popular appeal, which is a bit shallow really but Marra does namecheck Manhattan Beach in the acknowledgements as a book that kept him company as he wrote this. Perhaps it makes sense to think that those who like the one will probably like the other. ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
Thoroughly enjoyed this book by a wonderful author. ( )
  Suem330 | Feb 3, 2024 |
Loved A constellation of vital phenomena. Couldn't make it through this one. I just didn't care about the people or the places. ( )
  77nanci | Nov 11, 2023 |
Despite my fascination with cinema, the book rambles with too many side stories that detract from main focus. ( )
  GordonPrescottWiener | Aug 24, 2023 |
This is the most satisfying thing I’ve read in a long time. It’s simultaneously funny and heartbreaking, authentic and quixotic, intelligent, absorbing, and masterfully written.

Ostensibly the story is about Maria, a plucky Italian emigree who, as WW2 erupts across Europe, flees Fascist Italy and a haunting, horrible mistake to make a new life in America as the assistant to the head of Mercury Studios, a struggling Hollywood filmmaking company. In truth, however, this book is no more about Maria than it is about the constellation of splendidly realized “bit players” who orbit her: eccentric movie studio bosses and washed up actors, wisecracking emigrees and meddling Italian relatives, beleaguered bureaucrats and ambitious blond secretaries, sentimental prostitutes, mourning mothers, doomed idealists, and racketeers with hearts of gold - characters whose stories, in Marra’s deft hands, are fully as complex and riveting and emotional as the central narrative that binds them together.

If you’re looking for something that will keep your book club talking late into the night, this novel provides plentiful fodder for discussion: the ways in which both Hollywood and the novel’s large cast of emigrees reinvent reality from discarded scraps of the past; the Faustian bargains that so many characters are forced to make in order to protect themselves, their values, or the people they love; the abundant ironies and idiocies of war; the difficulties of making peace with injustice and fate and our own mistakes. Marra’s writing may be empathetic, but it’s also penetrating and perspicuous.

If you’re fascinated by authentic historical detail about Hollywood in its infancy, if you enjoy your heartbreak with a side of incisive humor, if you admire characters who endure hardship with resiliency, grace, and decency, then you're in for a treat. My only regret is that I’ll now have to wait a while before being able to justify re-reading this; but at least that gives me time to explore some of Marra’s other novels in the meantime. ( )
  Dorritt | Aug 21, 2023 |
The line between art and agitprop can be narrow, and rarely more so than in Hollywood, where people sometimes struggle to know (or care) what art is to begin with. This notion hovers behind Anthony Marra’s elegant new novel, “Mercury Pictures Presents,” in which Artie Feldman, the improbably endearing vulgarian who runs the book’s titular studio — the sort of B-movie factory that flourished in the slipstream of Hollywood’s majors during the Golden Age 1930s and ’40s — keeps his toupee collection displayed in his office and has never met a bad idea he didn’t love....It is impossible to do justice to Marra’s smooth, sweeping style in bits — viewed in isolation, such descriptions could easily seem overwrought and clumsy — but knit together, these pieces have striking command and authority. This is a gorgeous book, but its gorgeousness, too, might be merely a false front for what’s really on its mind.... The success of “Mercury Pictures Presents,” both the novel and the Hollywood entity it depicts, is evanescent and ambiguous, enduring and clear all at once. Whether Artie, the showman, and Maria, the book’s historical anchor and ethical conscience, will survive is one question, but the ideas posed by Marra’s novel assuredly do, and they resonate all the more strongly through our own contemporary, distressingly fascist-adjacent, moment.
hinzugefügt von Lemeritus | bearbeitenNew York Times, Matthew Specktor (bezahlte Seite) (Jul 26, 2022)
 
Marra has published his second novel, a story set before and during World War II called “Mercury Pictures Presents.” The author’s fans, who include former president Barack Obama, will recognize his elegant resolution of tangled disasters, his heartbreaking poignancy, his eye for historical curiosities that exceed the parameters of fiction. But the emotional range here is narrower, the record of human cruelty more subtle. And if “Mercury Pictures Presents” doesn’t generate the impact of “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” well, that’s an impossibly high standard.... Marra demonstrates his remarkable ability to capture the intricate cruelties of political and social collapse. Borrowing the tropes of spy thrillers and police procedurals, he transcribes a web of chaos and kindness that carries a few lucky souls through the fires of Italy’s collapse. Along the way, he sets down the lines of future coincidences so outlandish that only history could validate them.... The novel’s most fascinating move is the way it teases out the complications of realism — particularly in the service of propaganda. Marra describes studio filmmakers struggling to shoot footage of actual battle scenes that looks convincing. Despite their best efforts, the technological limits of the cameras make the documentary reels appear tiny and confusing. The only solution, ultimately, is to fake the carnage with reenactments. “Everywhere,” Marra deadpans, “there was a pent-up hunger for what resembled reality.” ...What’s real is rendered fake; what’s fake is passed off as real. Who can maintain a sense of moral clarity in such a national house of mirrors? ...you can trust that the novel will eventually resolve into focus with a moment of radical compassion that emits no more noise than a sigh.
hinzugefügt von Lemeritus | bearbeitenWashington Post, Ron Charles (bezahlte Seite) (Jul 26, 2022)
 
Marra’s prose is fluid and sprightly; each sentence is imbued with wit and heart and dances to its own internal rhythm. The dialogue is crisp and filled with ripostes and underline-worthy bon mots. The characters are simultaneously larger than life and all too human, utterly memorable. The historically iconic settings are brought sensuously to life by Marra’s cinematic eye. Marra has ascended to the top of the literary ranks.
hinzugefügt von Lemeritus | bearbeitenBooklist, Bill Kelly (May 15, 2022)
 
Like the author’s earlier novels, the award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013) and The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015), this one builds a discrete world and shows how its denizens are shaped—often warped—by circumstance. But the Hollywood setting feels overfamiliar and the characters curiously uninvolving. While the prose frequently sings, there are also ripely overwritten passages: At a party, the “thunking heels of lindy-hopping couples dimpled the boozy air”; fireworks are described as a “molten asterisk in the heavens to which the body on the ground is a footnote.”
The World War II Hollywood setting is colorful, but it’s just a B picture.
hinzugefügt von Lemeritus | bearbeitenKirkus Reviews (Mar 29, 2022)
 
Marra’s meticulously crafted latest (after the collection The Tsar of Love and Techno) follows a host of outsiders as they try to make it through pre-WWII Italy and wartime Los Angeles with some of their morals intact.... While Marra’s pleasure in the details and argot of the past occasionally feels like overkill, this tough-minded, funny outing exemplifies what Maria calls the democratic promise of “the miniaturist’s gaze,” in which “all were worthy.” Thanks to Marra, the pleasure is contagious.
hinzugefügt von Lemeritus | bearbeitenPublisher's Weekly (Mar 25, 2022)
 
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Was this artificial "return" mere playacting? I cannot believe it. -Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, written in Los Angeles, 1943-1947
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When you entered the executive offices of Mercury Pictures International, you would first see a scale model of the studio itself. Artie Feldman, co-founder and head of production, installed it in the lobby to distract skittish investors from second thoughts. Complete with back lot, sound stages, and facilities buildings, the miniature was a faithful replica of the ten-acre studio in which it sat. Maria Legana, as rendered by the miniaturist, was a tiny, featureless figure looking out Artie's office window. And this was where the real Maria stood late one morning in 1941, hands holstered on her hips, watching a pigeon autography the windshield of her boss's new convertible. She'd like to buy that bird a drink.
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Youth, like any natural abundance, is appreciated only after it is misused and squandered.
Like most California Republicans, his politics were prejudices in search of policies.
Perhaps racism demonstrates its tenacity by making hypocrites of even its victims.
She was tired of pretending she wasn't falling apart.
Awful, wasn't it. That feeling of falling behind? Of missing your moment.
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Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ? The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini??s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles??a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
??A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that??s a true joy to read.???Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
??A gorgeous book . . . sublime.???The New York Times (Editors?? Choice)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR
Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father??s arrest.
Fifteen years later, on the eve of America??s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won??t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can??t escape the studio??s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria??s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.
Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father??s past threatens Maria??s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father??s fate??and her own.
Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life??s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls ??a

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