All the Iron in the Eiffel Tower - by Michele Mari (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Mari's surreal presentation of 1930s Europe is a riotous, carnivalesque twist on historical fiction: a gothic labyrinth where writers collide with their own phantoms!

Paris, 1936. A chess game is all that keeps Walter Benjamin's prized literary archive from falling into the maniacal hands of Erich Auerbach. Marc Bloch believes that a recent epidemic of suicides, which has felled countless artists and intellectuals, is in fact the work of uncanny conspirators. Driven to investigate, Bloch and Benjamin delve into the arcades of an otherworldly Paris. What emerges is a carnivalesque pageant of 1930s Europe, of modernism as it teeters into fascism, and of the manifold demons that still haunt the history of literature.

Review Quotes

"All the Iron in the Eiffel Tower has long been one of Mari's most beloved books at home, winning multiple prizes including Italy's most historic literary award, the Bagutta Prize. With translations in several European languages making it one of Mari's most internationally read novels, the lack of an English translation is particularly conspicuous, especially when the book has even been deemed "Mari's strongest fictional performance.'" --Adam Mars-Jones, Times Literary Supplement

"Grimly beautiful and dazzling in its pyrotechnic fantasy."--Simone Bachechi, Lucia Libri

About the Author

Michele Mari is one of Italy's most renowned novelists, poets, and translators. A former professor of Italian literature at the University of Milan, he has translated classic novels by Herman Melville, George Orwell, John Steinbeck and H. G. Wells.

Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator whose published and forthcoming translations from the Italian include A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, and Michele Mari's You, Bleeding Childhood, which was the first book by Mari to be published in English.