The Eighth Wonder of the World Hardcover - 2006

Media reviews

The Boston Phoenix

Dana Kletter
Epstein repeatedly summons a cinematic vision to produce the brand of spectacle that Fascism inspired. The result is a sweeping, operatic work, its many narratives linked by Hollywood-scale production numbers choreographed by his verbal pyrotechnics....Like Prince’s cantilevered buildings, which Max so admires, Epstein’s narrative seems poised to tip at any moment. His balancing act both exhilarates and unnerves.


Publishers Weekly

Artful writing sustains a novel as ambitious as the Babel-like tower it describes.


Library Journal

Molly Abramowitz
powerful...Highly recommended.


Kirkus Reviews
STARRED REVIEW


Epstein’s best book since his 1979 triumph King of the Jews—a synthesis of history and imaginative daring, akin to Catch-22 and the encyclopedic historical fiction of Thomas Pynchon and William T. Vollmann


Booklist

Traveling back and forth in time between the present day and World War II-era Italy, the narrative mixes real historical figures such as Benito Mussolini with fictional and larger-than-life figures that could only come from a wild imagination....A patient reader will enjoy the broad scope of this ambitious work [and] signature...high-energy style.


Boston Magazine

Courtney Cox
The Brookline author's 10th book tells the story of a famed American architect and his young Jewish protege, commissioned by Benito Mussolini to build an incredible, mile-high tower. Both characters struggle to balance their commitment to art, patriotism, and religious beliefs during the height of Italy's Fascist regime.

A daunting read at nearly 500 pages, the novel is nonetheless sure to be Epstein's most important.


O Magazine

Vince Passaro
Leslie Epstein’s large, swirling, magical-realist novel of Italy in the war years, captures this era beautifully...The writing is assured, evocative, and witty; the theme is 20th-century delusion, which, Epstein allows us to see, might well be matched by the newer delusions of our own time.

Epstein reports that various actual historical incidents percolated in his mind for 40 years before he took up this story, and you can feel the perfectly balanced weight of those years of consideration.

His fantastical tale echoes the mythologizing power he portrays and leads us to suspend disbelief in as mysterious a way... It is an extraordinary artistic achievement.


Historical Novels Review

Claire Morris
Think Umberto Eco and Louis de Bernieres for the tone, tongue-in-cheek use of language, and somewhat fantastical plotting that makes up The Eighth Wonder of the World.

With its political statement, innovative story, and quirky characters, this is not an effortless read. There were times when I could only manage a handful of pages before needing to take a break. But the novel grew on me, perhaps because it is so intricately plotted. Its tragedy creeps up on you because of its light-hearted veneer. Savouring Epstein’s descriptions, I could imagine Rome in the Mussolini era, and the liberal sprinkling of Italian throughout the dialogue, along with extreme versions of Italians speaking English and Americans speaking English, succeeded in helping to set the stage.

Definitely an original.


Hollywood Reporter

Another character you'll love to hate is Amos Prince, the truculent American architect whose crimes and misdemeanors in Mussolini's Italy are exhaustively delineated in Leslie Epstein's ebullient historical novel The Eighth Wonder of the World....

The novel abounds with dramatic scenes, but its triumph is Amos: visionary genius, con man extraordinaire and deranged anti-Semite whose fury is captured in hilariously brutal intentional malapropisms....

He's a great, horrific character, and one shudders with pleasure envisioning him enacted by a cackling, silver-haired Robert De Niro or Anthony Hopkins. Talk about a wonder of the world...

The Washington Post

Mussolini's vanity, buffoonery and general incompetence take starring roles in Leslie Epstein's new novel, The Eighth Wonder of the World, a story of Italian fascism and bombastic architectural ambition. The mix is tailor-made for Epstein's talents. Over the course of nine previous books, he has fixed his trenchant gaze on such dark passages of 20th-century history as the Holocaust (his classic King of the Jews) and the House Un-American Activities Committee (his most recent outing, San Remo Drive). Here, as in the earlier novels, the tragic and the inane are slyly spliced together, with inflated delusions punctured by sharp barbs of satire.

Epstein exploits a rich vein of absurdity running through the tragedies of history. We are treated to scenes of Nazi dignitaries dancing and bed-hopping on the Hindenburg, and the novel gives a rollicking send-up of Mussolini's button-popping machismo and overblown oratory. As in several of Epstein's previous novels, real-life figures are memorably evoked. Besides Mussolini, there are cameos for Pope Pius XII (whom Epstein shows watching the roundup of the Jews from a Vatican window) and, as the novel moves into the present tense, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. If these characters are portrayed with scant mercy, then Epstein is equally harsh on his own creations. None of his characters evokes our sympathy. Even Maximilian cruelly neglects his feisty wife and becomes a comically lecherous old man.

For all the comedy and farce, Epstein has, as always, a serious purpose. Delving into the myths that nurtured Mussolini's brand of fascism, he offers a view of history as a great wheel, "endlessly repeating itself, even as it pulverizes those caught beneath it." Thus the fate of the Jews conquered by the Emperor Titus and marched through the streets of Rome is suffered by the Ethiopians captured by Mussolini in 1936 and then by the Italian Jews forced onto trains for Germany in 1943. James Joyce wrote that history is a nightmare from which we struggle to awake. For Epstein, that nightmare is a recurring one. The only consolation is that, as the grisly account of Mussolini's death illustrates, tyrants too get crushed by the wheel. And then they become the butt of our jokes.

The Jewish Week

Diane Cole
Historical fiction can be stuffy, but not when Leslie Epstein is the author. In his latest novel, The Eighth Wonder of the World, Epstein applies his irreverent, tragic-comic-absurdist sensibility to the fate of the Jews in Fascist Italy.

Epstein’s provocative mix of fact and melodrama careens between the antic and the operatic to keep the reader off-balance until the end. You gasp in horror, even as you laugh. In Eighth Wonder of the World, Epstein has composed a post-modern take on fiction as well as the Holocaust, a dark joke that would be funny if history hadn’t proven even darker.


Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Robert David Jaffee
Epstein has created another splendid comic villain in Amos Prince, an anti-Semitic architect, based on Ezra Pound, whose penchant for malapropisms and bad puns leads him to refer to Mussolini as "Douche," "Dolce," and "Mauso-lini," to give a few examples.

But Prince can turn off his antic disposition when he seeks the commission to build a mile-high monument, the titular eighth wonder of the world, to commemorate Italy's victory over Ethiopia: "Our monument is literally just such a clock, a gigantic sundial, with the tower as the gnomon and all of Rome as the face."


San Diego Union-Tribune

Paul Freidinger
Epstein is ambitious, cinematic in his approach, and the story brims with operatic emotion....the book is often quite funny and swings on a pendulum between tragedy and farce.

Readers should not be intimidated by The Eighth Wonder of the World. The novel is mesmerizing; it's a thriller, an addictive tale of love, loss and blind commitment to bad ideas.


Preservation Magazine

Epstein uses broad strokes of comic pastiche to emphasize the absurd grandiosity of characters whose exercises in narcissism play out against the grim crescendo of World War II and the Holocaust. The impact is at first disorienting: rather than villains, historical characters like Speer and Mussolini come across as operatic oafs. By novel's end, though, the circuslike entourage over which the dictatorial Prince presides more closely resembles an inferno.

Epstein vividly captures the spectacle of Fascist Italy, describing grand parades choreographed like a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza.