Michael Mewshaw - Böcker

“One of the Year’s Best,” Times Literary SupplementWhen a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he’s famous for.While living in southern France in 1972, Michael Mewshaw engineered a meeting with Graham Greene. Mewshaw was an ambitious young journalist and novelist, Greene was an internationally revered elder statesman of letters. The pair became fast friends and corresponded for the next twenty years. My Man in Antibes is an intimate portrait of what it was like to eat, drink, and gossip with one of the most revered—and complicated—authors of the twentieth century. Growing up Catholic with literary aspirations, Mewshaw believed Greene was the author to emulate. Not only did Greene demonstrate how religious belief and church dogma could be subjects for fiction, he also wrote murder mysteries and political thrillers where his characters’ inner conflicts played out dramatically in exotic settings. Under Greene’s sway, Mewshaw traveled through Mexico like the whiskey priest in Greene’s The Power and the Glory and honeymooned at the Hotel Oloffson in Haiti, the setting of The Comedians.When Mewshaw tracked down Greene in Antibes, he found the author was far from a reclusive, close-mouthed figure: Greene garrulously recounted tales about the many women in his life—and husbands of those women—as well as his extraordinary interviews with political figures such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Over the next two decades, Mewshaw and Greene ate meals together, discussed their travels, and talked about writers they knew in common, such as Anthony Burgess, Shirley Hazzard, and Gore Vidal.While young Mewshaw looked up to the world-weary Greene, their relationship was never simply that of mentor and mentee. My Man in Antibes bristles with misunderstandings, arguments, and one young writer’s desire to get to know a legendary older writer who, in many ways, actively sought to remain unknowable.

When Michael Mewshaw receives a call from a stranger who says she has reason to believe he is her biological father, Mewshaw realizes he has been half dreading, half hoping for this to happen for over 30 years. Just like the young woman who wants to find the last piece to the puzzle of her life, he hopes to answer questions that have plagued him for decades. But first he has to make sure that she is who she claims to be. In this fascinating memoir, Mewhsaw confronts his own past, the chaos of his family, and complicated memories of the woman he once loved. His unusual role in the baby's birth, her adoption, and, now, her search for her biological parents sets the stage for a revealing personal odyssey that offers a quest for identity and a journey of discovery, an obsession with recapturing the past and righting old wrongs, the constant potential for disappointment balanced against the possibility of redemption. As he finds his old flame and her old lover, rediscovering who he was and who he has become, he finds his life enriched in the process.

"Mewshaw's sentences sing. His ability to evoke a setting that many will find exotic rivals Graham Greene's, as does the depth of his characterization and his ability to make the reader keep wondering what in the world might happen next. The narrative keeps delivering surprises all the way to the final line. I love this novel.” — Steve Yarbrough, author Stay Gone DaysThe son of a Spanish mother and an American father who claimed to have worked for the CIA, Paul Stewart lives in his family home, a carmen in the Albaicín district of Granada. The house, which surrounds a lush courtyard, has foundations that date from Spain’s Islamic era and has been in the family for generations.Struggling to make ends meet, Paul has turned the carmen into an artist’s residency that caters primarily to American artists. The only current guests are Simone, a celebrity painter with a sexualized reputation, and an asylum-seeking Algerian professor who is the subject of a fatwa. Paul has been forced to take him in. An African refugee named Blessed, who’s been displaced by the arrival of the professor, suffers a crisis of both body and faith as a result.The relationship between Simone and Paul begins to complicate matters, and suspicions about everybody abound. Murky pasts and private agendas collide with avowed intentions—including those of the U.S. government—as events gather momentum toward an explosive, revelatory finish. In the hands of Michael Mewshaw, a master storyteller, this story fairly shines in our fraught age of political secrets and international terrorism.