Last Call

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Mulisch has hit full stride as a writer with this latest novel set in contemporary Amsterdam. As in the critically praised The Assault , he is fascinated by the relationship between light and dark, reality and illusion. Uli Bouwmeester, an aging variety artiste, is asked by the director of a playwrights' collective to star in a new play. Hurricane combines a modern drama about the final performance of Pierre de Vries, a famous turn-of-the-century actor, with scenes from The Tempest in which de Vries played Prospero. Uli, in the meantime, is coming to life. To a washed-up actor, a former Nazi collaborator who lives with his elderly sister, the opportunity seems like redemption. As rehearsals progress, Uli becomes so absorbed in his role that the line between theatrical illusion and reality is breached. In one eerie sequence, he literally descends into the bowels of the earth and finds himself in the arms of a transvestite. Mulisch has created a richly textured work, a vivid portrait of modern-day Amsterdam. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Eighty-year-old Uli is acting the part of his life in the Authors' Theater production of Hurricane . Although his career had ended when it was discovered that he had performed for occupation troops and later in Germany, now he has been resurrected to play an aged actor, perhaps himself, and Prospero, the Tempest's sorcerer and star of the play within the play. Even his sister Bert, with whom he lives, gets caught up in the excitement. Thus, two stages of reality are already in place as this imaginative novel opens, but then in come three gambling hoodlums, a love-starved transsexual nurse, and a narrator who comments on everything. While the opening is tedious, once Last Call gets its many realities established, readers are treated to a virtuoso performance. This novel clearly earns Mulisch and Dutch fiction a wider audience. Paul E. Hutchison, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park