4.5 - at least.In Arthur Phillip’s brilliant and entertaining The Egyptologist, not one but two unreliable narrators weave epistolary narratives about related events in the 1920s. In these accounts, facts, suppositions, and obsessions, events and identities sift and shift like sands in the desert under a gentle but steady wind. This is at its heart a story about the desire for immortality, whether it’s through the building of a king’s monument, the writing of stories, or a millionaire’s propagation of his name through heirs and legacies. It’s also about the act of story-telling itself and a story’s relationship to the “truth.” And lest that sound dull and analytical, it is also a really fun story about archaeologist/explorers, a private eye, a flirty flapper, speakeasys, gangsters and the drama of Howard Carter opening up King Tut’s tomb to world acclaim. But the Egyptologist in question is not the famous Howard Carter, but one Ralph Trilibush who has had a life-long fascination with the XIII Dynasty king Atum-hadu (translation: “Atum-Is-Aroused”). Atum-hadu’s very existence has always been a matter of speculation, but if he did live (in this fiction), he was a ruler, a warrior and, in his spare time, a pornographer/poet. Trilibush mounts an expedition in 1922 to find Atum-hadu’s tomb with the financial backing of his father-in-law to-be and some business partners who turn out to be less than reputable. Trilibush’s tale is told in the form of journal entries, letters to his fiancée Margaret, and occasional cables. The other, concurrent story is told after the fact as remembrances in letters from a retired private investigator, Henry Ferrell, to Margaret’s nephew after her death 30 years later. Ferrell relates his own story about setting out after Trilibush as part of an investigation into other matters and what ensued, according to his not- always- objective viewpoint. Ferrell’s quest had taken him to Boston where he spent some time at the home of Trilibush’s prospective father-in-law and where he fell in love with Margaret, before he also travelled to Egypt. The two stories each contribute information, but through the disparate lenses of Trilibush and Ferrell, neither of whom may be reporting accurately, and neither of whom may perceive accurately, for different reasons, the events unfolding around them or even those they cause directly. In fact, we know almost immediately that Ferrell embellishes, as he freely admits it, and then we see him do it as he takes all kinds of license with the story he is trying to tell. Margaret, the pretty, spoiled daughter of a department store owner, plays both ends against the middle while constantly trying to outsmart the nurse assigned to care for and control her during a particular “illness,” the nature of which becomes clear only later.Ferrell speculates about holes in Trilibush’s history as told to his fiancée even as Trilibush tries to piece together evidence of Atum-hadu’s history. Trilibush becomes aware of Ferrell’s investigation and each impugns the other’s knowledge and veracity, making it ever more difficult to discern whose story is true or more true. The multiple viewpoints and the device of letters delayed by weeks, as would have occurred in 1922, makes communications and therefore knowledge harder to sort out. Trilibush explains to Margaret in a letterFerrell had become confused, you see, Margaret, by three documents: two missing and one incomplete. This often happens with people new to interpreting texts. They take any one document much too seriously, when of course nothing can be understood from a single document. When it comes to incomplete history, one needs to encircle the truth, not bound at it like an amorous kangaroo. But for men like Ferrell, if the first thing they happen to read says x, they believe x forever, and if a second document should say the opposite, they grow confused and begin shouting, “Conspiracy!” When they cannot find something, they assume it is because it never existed. Trilibush later illustrates how one set of facts can be explained by a dozen speculative stories that can plausibly but falsely tie them together. Thus, he is well aware that one’s immortality is subject to the corrosive influences of ineptitude or misinterpretation, or both. And yet, we come to have more and more reason, as the story unfolds, to doubt Trilibush’s version of things too. The question of whether Atun-hadu was real or a fiction like King Arthur runs throughout and, if he did exist, how much of his history was self-created. Theories about the act of creation figure prominently in the book as well. Metafictional themes abound. Trilibush, as an Egyptologist, has sympathy with the ancient kings’ philosophy that their histories and names must be preserved and recorded for them to continue to exist beyond their own years, to be immortal. But there is a paradox: the necessity for a recorded history that will preserve “reality” versus the dangers of interpretation through the biographer’s / story-teller’s bungling or stamping of his own identity on the story, therefore influencing perceptions of the enduring “reality” to prosperity. This book was so much fun on so many levels: stories about ancient Egypt and modern discoveries, the structure and themes of creation, identity and interpretation, and to what extent stories create “reality,” plus the mystery of trying to piece together what was “really” going on. All histories, and stories, are interpretations, after all. There were a couple of “OMG” moments I won’t soon forget. While this was very different from Phillips The Song Is You, both books were intriguing in the way they make us question the narrators’ perceptions and how that affects the unfolding of the story. Highly recommended.
Should you find yourself entombed in ancient Egypt, hope that your minions included a copy of Arthur Phillips's new novel among the gilded tools and ebony furniture. It'll make the time fly, and it's practically bright enough to read by its own light. "Yes, Ra, that Underworld sounds great, but I really want to get back to my book.""The Egyptologist" is nothing like Phillips's bestselling debut, "Prague" (2002), and yet it's full of all the dazzling talent he showed there. Presented as a collection of letters, telegrams, journals, drawings, scholarly analysis, and ancient (ribald) poems, the book opens like some long-sealed chamber of mysteries. But beware: Trust no one who's read this novel, particularly reviewers, whose damp breath and careless touch could easily disintegrate its wonders before you can enjoy them....Chief among the voices that Phillips choreographs so brilliantly is that of Ralph Trilipush, a young professor of Egyptology at Harvard University. He's the "dashing and mildly notorious translator" of King Atum-hadu's naughty and (possibly apocryphal) verse and a man of hysterical overconfidence. With the tenuous financial backing of a department store baron in Boston, Ralph travels to Egypt in 1922 to find King Atum's tomb, a simple matter, he claims, of following clues he stumbled upon while serving in the British Army during World War I.We read letters to and from Ralph's fiancée (his "eternal Queen whose beauty astonishes the sun") and the running narrative of what will be his "indisputable masterwork," a comically vain piece of scholarship and personal reflection designed to immortalize his brilliance and shame his skeptics.This two-month expedition is a scathingly funny example of counting your mummies before they're unwrapped. Ralph spends much of his manuscript describing discoveries that he will (surely) make the next day and glories that will (inevitably) follow when he returns home. This tendency of overanticipation requires constantly reminding his (future) editor to update the text when it's published by Harvard. No, make that Yale. "I could hear the pantheon welcoming me into its ranks," he says in a typical moment of reverie.He works without a license with a small, threatening group of natives, just a few miles from where Howard Carter is pursuing what Ralph assures us is a "pointless quest," the final resting place of some drab little ruler (King Tut).Ralph's idol, on the other hand, is the final ruler of the Middle Kingdom (c. 1650 BC). When enemies were crushing in on Egypt from all sides, King Atum-hadu dared to create himself in his own image of glory, a strikingly apt role model for Ralph.Meanwhile, woven into Ralph's letters and scholarship is another series of letters written 30 years later by Harold Ferrell, a private detective, holed up against his will in an Australian nursing home. In the early 1920s, he had been hired by a British law firm involved in a complex paternity case. His sleuthing eventually ballooned into a double (triple?) murder investigation that involved none other than Ralph Trilipush.For decades, he's been convinced that "these dynamite tales" could be profitably published, and now - ca-ching! - the nephew of Ralph's fiancée has written to him for information about his late aunt. "You want clear recollections?" Ferrell writes back. "Well, I'm historical truth on two legs."Quoting from newspaper clippings and his carefully preserved notes, Ferrell seems to offer a much needed voice of veracity against Ralph's narrative of denial and pretense. But it's quickly apparent that he's just another self-reflective surface in this hall of mirrors. It turns out, he didn't keep notes during the most crucial part of the investigation, and the people he interviewed - from a communist librarian to a circus performer - provide testimonies that don't fit together at all.What's more, academic records prove more fragile than ancient papyrus, and Ralph may be a more eternal queen than his fiancée.For pages and pages, we're left digging for some Rosetta Stone to make sense of all these competing claims. Yes, denial is not just a river in Egypt. But confusion is half the fun here, whether we're swinging from the roaring Twenties, marching through sand-swept dunes, or serving in the libidinous court of King Atum-hadu.Slippery truths fall out of these outrageous stories like asps from overhanging branches. Beneath all his comic ventriloquism and ribald parody of academia, Phillips is reaching for something more profound: the sad ways people represent and misrepresent themselves, shifting awkwardly from confidence to self-delusion."We are all Egyptian still," Ralph notes in a rare moment of wisdom.As the ancient kings knew, it's always a matter of creating an image grand enough to sustain oneself but hidden enough to repel detractors. With his feverish plans, Ralph is first ridiculous, then just like that insufferable bore we once knew, and finally - gasp - a little too close to home.http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0907/p1...
What do You think about The Egyptologist (2005)?
At the heart of the academic satire, regardless of the particulars of the specific branch or discipline being satirized, lies the human propensity toward self-delusion, especially in regards to what is possible to know. Phillips nails this in his novel about an Egyptologist searching to prove the existence of Atum-hadu, a possibly fictitious Egyptian king. Told through multiple perspectives, all of whom are clueless but absolutely sure of their world-view, this novel demonstrates how easy it is to trick one's self into believing one "knows" something. These assumptions beget sureties, which turn into dangerous and damaging obsessions. Set mainly against the backdrop of Egypt, London and Boston in the 1920s and 1930s, Phillips' novel is witty, comic and acerbic. Most of all, however, it shows that the deranged narrators of the novel, while distanced from us by time and space, are not really so different from us. (On a side note, you can see in this novel, the seeds of Phillips' latest work, The Tragedy of Arthur.)
—John Pappas
Yesterday on the plane back home to North Carolina I finished Arthur Phillips’ second novel, The Egyptologist. The book had been recommended to me by one of my mother’s friends, and reading the praise on the back and inside covers, nearly all of which mentioned Nabokov, I decided that it would be worth my time. Wrong. I am left wondering if any of those critics has actually read Vladimir Vladimirovich’s work. Phillips is very obviously, even painfully so, trying to be Nabokovian: unreliable narrators, focus on the creation of art, anagrams and other various mix-ups—but he misses the mark completely. His attempts at wit are, more often than not, failures. His unreliable narrators are so obvious that it would take an utter fool to not understand fully the entire plot and premises after only one hundred of its far too many pages.The novel drags on and on, and the ending, which I had seen praised as shocking, hilarious, unprecedented, turned out to be even less than Eliot’s whimper. It’s not that Phillips is a bad writer, in fact, he does show skill; but, he needs to lay off the Nabokov-nabbing and try something a bit more original.This novel is a great example of the reason why I don’t do creative writing. People are always asking if I want to be a writer, and their next question is always, “Why not?” How could I ever begin to write something comparable to my heroes, to Woolf, Waugh, Proust, Nabokov? It simply isn’t possible, and the task is too daunting for me to ever hope to take on. So I suppose I will just keep criticizing those who are brave (and foolish) enough to try!
—Christine
This is my second time reading this book and I think it's brilliant. I admit to being predisposed to it. I've read Howard Carter's three-volume work describing his discovery of the tomb of boy-pharaoh Tutankhamen twice too, never wanting that to end either. Here, Phillips gets it all right. What a perfect ear he has for the language, style, and cadences of that era. He captures it all, then turns it on its ear. The book is alternately witty, wise, darkly comic, achingly beautiful, wildly funny, deeply tragic. On the simplest level it is a take on the detective story, with a hard-boiled private investigator named Harold Ferrel pursuing the rather shadowy figure of Ralph M. Trilipush (the Egyptologist referred to in the title) across several continents. Along the way it becomes a kind of epic that charts an interior landscape of longing, love, hope, desire, deceit, self-delusion, self-determination. Ultimately it is a story about identity and imagination, and about creation - the act of willful self-creation - and by extension, I would say, about art.
—Nancy
