A lengthy epistolary novel set within a frame tale. Ralph Trilipush is an Oxford-educated
Egyptologist from Harvard who has convinced the wealthy father of his fiancée,
and some of his somewhat shady friends, to finance an exploration to find the
tomb of the perhaps mythical King Atum-hadu.
His belief in the actual existence of this king is based on a few
fragments of papyrus discovered while he was stationed in Egypt during the
First World War. Reaching from Australia
in the late 1800s, to Egypt during and after the war, and into 1954, the main action takes
place in the last months of 1922, when Howard Carter was on the verge of the
discovery of King Tut’s tomb in the same area Trilipush where hopes to find his
king. The plot is too intricate and complex
to even attempt to summarize, and half the fun of this book is figuring out who
is actually who and what has actually happened.
The other half is the witty writing.
As Trilipush meets with disaster after disaster in his quest, he spirals
into a kind of madness. Fame, fortune,
and academia are all skewered. With the
St. Louis Art Museum hosting an exhibit of recent archeological finds from
Egypt, it was particularly fortuitous to have this 2004 novel recommended to
me. Confusing at first, but rewarding
as one proceeds. 383 pp.
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