A psychological thriller featuring Javier Falcon, the complex detective from "The Blind Man of Seville".

The Silent and the Damned

Winner of the prestigious Gold Dagger Award in the U.K. for the best mystery of 1999, this complex literary thriller may be one of the most satisfying suspense novels to come along in some time. Robert Wilson has written several political thrillers, most of which are set in West Africa, but they are, alas, largely unavailable in the U.S.In A Small Death in Lisbon, the narrative switches back and forth between 1941 and 1999, and Wilson's wide knowledge of history and keen sense of place make the eras equally vibrant. In 1941 Germany, Klaus Felsen, an industrialist, is approached by the SS high command in a none-too-friendly manner and is "persuaded" to go to Lisbon and oversee the sale--or smuggling--of wolfram (also known as tungsten, used in the manufacture of tanks and airplanes). World War II Portugal is neutral where business is concerned, and too much of the precious metal is being sold to Britain when Germany needs it to insure that Hitler's blitzkrieg is successful.Cut to 1999 Lisbon, where the daughter of a prominent lawyer has been found dead on a beach. Ze Coelho, a liberal police inspector who is a widower with a daughter of his own, must sift through the life of Catarina Oliveira and discover why she was so brutally murdered. Her father is enigmatic, her mother suicidal; her friends were rock musicians and drug addicts.The reader is treated to a wonderful portrait of Lisbon in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution that ousted Salazar from power, and the scars from that conflict are still close to the surface for the citizens of Lisbon, including Coehlo and his colleagues. We also see World War II in a slightly different manner from that to which we are accustomed--through the eyes of the Germans and the Portuguese. The pace of the book is leisurely but compelling as the events of 1941 and those in 1999 merge in an extraordinary climax

Une mort à Lisbonne

After trying his hand at spy fiction in The Company of Strangers, Robert Wilson returns to his detective-thriller roots with The Blind Man of Seville, a grimly bewitching and character-driven yarn about people confronting their most hidden horrors. "It was only right that there should be at least one murder in Holy Week," muses Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón as he's called out during Spain's Semana Santa festivities to probe the death of a prosperous Seville restaurateur, Raúl Jiménez. The deceased was found strapped to a chair with his eyelids removed, facing a television on which had been showing a video of him entertaining prostitutes. Jiménez's heart had failed as he struggled to escape. This murder is "more extraordinary than any I have seen in my career," Falcón tells the businessman's widow, as he embarks on an investigation that will lead to the slayings of a hooker and an art dealer, and force the homicide cop into a game of wits against a killer obsessed with the contradictions between illusion and reality. Meanwhile, Falcón is himself obsessed with the long-secreted journals kept by his late father, a famous painter, whose brutal acts during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent hedonism in North Africa shaped Javier's life... and will make him the killer's next target. Wilson's plot turns rather creakily on the coincidence of Falcón discovering a photograph of his father among Jiménez's things. And lengthy excerpts from the elder Falcón's diaries, while they reveal links between the book's secondary players, and are interesting for their portrayal of wartime Europe and postwar Tangier, nonetheless hobble this story's pace and distract from the modern crimes at its center. Still, there's a poetic edge to this author's prose that makes even his most gruesome or tragic scenes worthy of rereading, and in Javier Falcón--a lonely outsider who shadows his ex-wife and has a perplexing aversion to milk--he creates a police protagonist as satisfyingly and humanly flawed as any since Zé Coelho, from Wilson's outstanding A Small Death in Lisbon. --J. Kingston Pierce

Meurtres à Séville (Javier Falcon, #1)

This unprecedented angle on the oeuvre of Robert Wilson reveals the importance of chair design for his cross-medium art.

For American experimental theater stage director and playwright Robert Wilson (born 1941), theater is a totality of visual, textual and performative mediums. Wilson has incorporated furniture designs into his scenography since his earliest productions in the 1960s. "In almost all of my plays, there is a chair specially designed," he said. "Often, the chairs are much like an actor." Wilson's chairs, with their frequently referential names (the Kafka Chair, Queen Victoria Chairs, the Mondrian Chair), assume expanded significance as the surviving artifacts of each performance.
The works in this publication range from 1969 to 2011, from the stainless steel mesh Parzival Sofa (1987) to the painted wood Clementine Hunter Rocker (2011). Wilson's practice as a designer is illuminated by his practice as a collector, with pieces in materials ranging from wood, bronze and steel to taxidermied legs, tempered glass and neon. This publication includes several works never previously exhibited.

Robert wilson : chairs

Lisbonne, 1944. Les nazis seraient sur le point de fabriquer la bombe atomique. Les Alliés mobilisent tous leurs moyens pour les en empêcher : Andrea, dix-neuf ans, anglaise, est plongée dans la bataille. Mais lorsqu'elle tombe amoureuse de Karl Voss, attaché à la légation allemande, leur liaison déstabilise l'équilibre précaire du petit monde des espions et précipite les drames. Vingt-cinq ans plus tard, en pleine guerre froide, Andrea piste à Berlin le Léopard des neiges, agent secret convoité à la fois par les Russes et les Britanniques. Menteuse, tricheuse, manipulatrice, Andrea n'a été fidèle qu'à une seule vérité : son amour pour Karl. Dans ce climat hostile, elle va le retrouver. Mais pas du même côté de la barrière...

La danse des espions - Occasion

Stunning European-based thriller from an acclaimed young British author: 'A class act' - Sunday Times; 'First in a field of one' - Literary Review

 Lisbon 1944. In the torrid summer heat, as the streets of the capital seethe with spies and informers, the endgame of the Intelligence war is being silently fought.

 Andrea Aspinall, mathematician and spy, enters this sophisticated world through a wealthy household in Estoril. Karl Voss, military attaché to the German Legation, has arrived embittered by his implication in the murder of a Reichsminister and traumatized by Stalingrad, on a mission to rescue Germany from annihilation. In the lethal tranquility of this corrupted paradise they meet and attempt to find love in a world where no-one can be believed.

 After a night of extreme violence, Andrea is left with a lifelong addiction to the clandestine world that leads her from the brutal Portuguese fascist régime to the paranoia of Cold War Germany, where she is forced to make the final and the hardest choice.

The Company of Strangers

En 1941, dans une Europe en guerre, Klaus Felsen, industriel allemand, est envoyé au Portugal pour le compte des SS. Tout-puissant en ce pays, il ne recule devant rien pour assurer les intérêts des Allemands aussi bien que les siens : il triche, trahit et viole... Des années plus tard, à Lisbonne, le cadavre de Catarina Oliveira est retrouvé sur une plage. Jolie adolescente aux yeux bleus, fille unique d'un couple de grands bourgeois à la réputation irréprochable, Catarina collectionnait les amants et flambait son existence comme si elle fuyait devant quelque chose d'insupportable. Mais quoi? L'enquête est confiée à l'inspecteur Ze Coelho, flic anticonformiste, qui s'obstine dans sa quête de la vérité. Plongeant dans un univers d'une perversité inouïe, il déterre les secrets de famille et le lien existant entre Catarina et le SS. Un lien effacé par le temps, ignoré de tous, sauf de ceux qui ont minutieusement programmé la suppression de la jeune fille.

The Silent and the Damned

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