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Faking it or the Wrong Hungarian
Book by Green, Gerald
Paperback
Published January 1, 1972
7 people want to read
About the author
Gerald Green
86 books15 followersGreen attended Columbia College, where he edited the Jester, starred in several Varsity Shows, and was a member of the Philolexian Society. He graduated from the college in 1942 and, after serving in the US Army in Europe during the Second World War, where he was also the editor of the army's Stars and Stripes newspaper, he returned to New York to attend the Columbia Journalism School.
Green wrote many novels, the best known being The Last Angry Man, published in 1956. It was adapted into a movie by the same name which was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Paul Muni) and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White. His other novels include His Majesty O'Keefe (co-authored with Lawrence Klingman), adapted into a 1954 film, North West, Portofino PTA, To Brooklyn With Love, My Son the Jock, The Lotus Eaters and East and West. His 1962 novel Portofino P.T.A. was adapted into a musical, Something More!, by composer Sammy Fain and lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman.
He wrote the teleplay for Holocaust, a critically acclaimed 1978 TV miniseries that won eight Emmy Awards, including one for "Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series," and was credited with persuading the West German government to repeal the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. He later adapted the script into a novel of the same title. In recognition for this effort, Green was awarded the Dag Hammarskjöld International Peace Prize for literature, 1979. Green won another Emmy nomination for his 1985 TV script for Wallenberg: A Hero's Story. Green was also a writer, producer, and director for NBC News. In 1952, he co-created (with Dave Garroway) NBC's The Today Show.
Green lived in Stamford, Connecticut for twenty years and moved to New Canaan, Connecticut. His first wife, Marie, died of cancer. They had three children: Nancy, Ted and David. He married Marlene Eagle in 1979, becoming stepfather to Dr Janie Worth (Née Eagle), Julie Cardo (Née Eagle) and David Eagle. Green died of pneumonia in Norwalk, Connecticut on August 29, 2006.
Green wrote many novels, the best known being The Last Angry Man, published in 1956. It was adapted into a movie by the same name which was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Paul Muni) and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White. His other novels include His Majesty O'Keefe (co-authored with Lawrence Klingman), adapted into a 1954 film, North West, Portofino PTA, To Brooklyn With Love, My Son the Jock, The Lotus Eaters and East and West. His 1962 novel Portofino P.T.A. was adapted into a musical, Something More!, by composer Sammy Fain and lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman.
He wrote the teleplay for Holocaust, a critically acclaimed 1978 TV miniseries that won eight Emmy Awards, including one for "Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series," and was credited with persuading the West German government to repeal the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. He later adapted the script into a novel of the same title. In recognition for this effort, Green was awarded the Dag Hammarskjöld International Peace Prize for literature, 1979. Green won another Emmy nomination for his 1985 TV script for Wallenberg: A Hero's Story. Green was also a writer, producer, and director for NBC News. In 1952, he co-created (with Dave Garroway) NBC's The Today Show.
Green lived in Stamford, Connecticut for twenty years and moved to New Canaan, Connecticut. His first wife, Marie, died of cancer. They had three children: Nancy, Ted and David. He married Marlene Eagle in 1979, becoming stepfather to Dr Janie Worth (Née Eagle), Julie Cardo (Née Eagle) and David Eagle. Green died of pneumonia in Norwalk, Connecticut on August 29, 2006.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 28, 2020
The title of the book is not simply, as Goodreads has it, Faking It; it is FAKING IT or The Wrong Hungarian. In the early 1970s, when this book first appeared, it would have been topical as well as frequently amusing. Much of the subject matter is about spies from many lands crossing paths in Paris, most of them there ostensibly to attend the first World Conference on the Arts and Sciences.
The narrator, Benjamin Bloodworth, husband and father from Long Island, is a Jewish novelist, largely regarded as undistinguished. He wants to become celebrated, and feels that this conference will be his chance. He can not make himself suddenly into a great and famous author, so he becomes a gadfly, loudly criticizing those who are already famous. When his antics are proving unsuccessful, he drops hints that he is really at the conference not as an author but as a spy. He has inadvertently been involved in espionage already; on the day that he arrived in Paris, he ran into one of his literary heroes, an aging leftwing author, who has trusted Bloodworth to deliver a letter and a white rat to a Hungarian scientist.
There are some scientists of various kinds at the conference, but the people running it seem to all be in the arts, and almost all of these are authors. They are, the first page of the 1972 Pocket Books edition says, based on "certain freaks and freeloaders of the literary establishment. (If their identities are thinly disguised, that's because the author didn't try very hard!)." Some fifty years later, I can guess on whom some of them are based, but I do not recognize most of the people being satirized.
Bloodworth is not an engaging narrator to me. He chooses to try to look important by diminishing those who are more highly regarded. Thousands of miles away from his family, he makes determined efforts to seduce women; in an episode that is extraordinarily distasteful, he even attempts a rape. I suspect that all of this is intended to be humorous, but I do not find it so.
I have to mention the very poor, unattributed cover. It is nice, though, to see again the once-familiar Pocket Books symbol, Gertrude the kangaroo.
I read this because of my warm memories of two other books by Gerald Green, both of which I read in my adolescence, The Last Angry Man and The Heartless Light. It is hard to believe that FAKING IT or The Wrong Hungarian is by the same author.
The narrator, Benjamin Bloodworth, husband and father from Long Island, is a Jewish novelist, largely regarded as undistinguished. He wants to become celebrated, and feels that this conference will be his chance. He can not make himself suddenly into a great and famous author, so he becomes a gadfly, loudly criticizing those who are already famous. When his antics are proving unsuccessful, he drops hints that he is really at the conference not as an author but as a spy. He has inadvertently been involved in espionage already; on the day that he arrived in Paris, he ran into one of his literary heroes, an aging leftwing author, who has trusted Bloodworth to deliver a letter and a white rat to a Hungarian scientist.
There are some scientists of various kinds at the conference, but the people running it seem to all be in the arts, and almost all of these are authors. They are, the first page of the 1972 Pocket Books edition says, based on "certain freaks and freeloaders of the literary establishment. (If their identities are thinly disguised, that's because the author didn't try very hard!)." Some fifty years later, I can guess on whom some of them are based, but I do not recognize most of the people being satirized.
Bloodworth is not an engaging narrator to me. He chooses to try to look important by diminishing those who are more highly regarded. Thousands of miles away from his family, he makes determined efforts to seduce women; in an episode that is extraordinarily distasteful, he even attempts a rape. I suspect that all of this is intended to be humorous, but I do not find it so.
I have to mention the very poor, unattributed cover. It is nice, though, to see again the once-familiar Pocket Books symbol, Gertrude the kangaroo.
I read this because of my warm memories of two other books by Gerald Green, both of which I read in my adolescence, The Last Angry Man and The Heartless Light. It is hard to believe that FAKING IT or The Wrong Hungarian is by the same author.
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