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Os Pecados de Philip Fleming
Neste livro, Irving Wallace aborda alguns aspectos da intimidade de um intelectual americano, o escritor Philip Fleming, através da narrativa de uma semana da sua vida particularmente recheada de acontecimentos afectivamente significativos. Os "pecados" de Philip Fleming, veremos pela leitura do romance, se pecados são, são-no apenas em aparência. Irving Wallace pretende demonstrar como só o conhecimento íntimo e pormenorizado dos problemas postos permite, de facto, um julgamento imparcial.
Presa de súbita paixão, correspondida, tão violenta quanto a relação com Helen, sua mulher, se havia tornado desinteressante, Philip Fleming vai encontrar-se perante certo malogro de carácter fisiopsicológico nas suas novas relações com Peggy, que o leva à beira da obsessão.Incapaz, no seu desvario, de descortinar com clareza o caminho que solucione as questões em que se enredou, perde a autoconfiança, o que se reflecte em instabilidade emocional e em perda de capacidades como artista criador. Perturbado, verifica que no seu próprio filho, Danny, se manifestam sintomas de insegurança psíquica, como se a criança fosse um termómetro dos equilíbrios ou desequilíbrios das relações familiares. Deste modo, cada passo falhado se multiplica por outros, falhados também, aumentando a desordem interior, até chegar a uma situação de verdadeira crise. Sacudido desde as profundidades do ser, vê-se finalmente impelido para diante do sim ou não, decisivos.
Presa de súbita paixão, correspondida, tão violenta quanto a relação com Helen, sua mulher, se havia tornado desinteressante, Philip Fleming vai encontrar-se perante certo malogro de carácter fisiopsicológico nas suas novas relações com Peggy, que o leva à beira da obsessão.Incapaz, no seu desvario, de descortinar com clareza o caminho que solucione as questões em que se enredou, perde a autoconfiança, o que se reflecte em instabilidade emocional e em perda de capacidades como artista criador. Perturbado, verifica que no seu próprio filho, Danny, se manifestam sintomas de insegurança psíquica, como se a criança fosse um termómetro dos equilíbrios ou desequilíbrios das relações familiares. Deste modo, cada passo falhado se multiplica por outros, falhados também, aumentando a desordem interior, até chegar a uma situação de verdadeira crise. Sacudido desde as profundidades do ser, vê-se finalmente impelido para diante do sim ou não, decisivos.
292 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
6 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
About the author
Irving Wallace
178 books285 followersIrving Wallace was an American bestselling author and screenwriter. His extensively researched books included such page-turners as The Chapman Report (1960), about human sexuality; The Prize (1962), a fictional behind-the-scenes account of the Nobel Prizes; The Man, about a black man becoming president of the U.S. in the 1960s; and The Word (1972), about the discovery of a new gospel.
Wallace was born in Chicago, Illinois. Wallace grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was the father of Olympic historian David Wallechinsky and author Amy Wallace.
Wallace began selling stories to magazines when he was a teenager. In World War II Wallace served in the Frank Capra unit in Fort Fox along with Theodor Seuss Geisel - more popularly known as Dr Seuss - and continued to write for magazines. He also served in the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Force. In the years immediately following World war II Wallace became a Hollywood screenwriter. He collaborated on such films as The West Point Story (1950), Split Second (1953),and Meet Me at the Fair (1953).
After several years in Hollywood, he devoted himself full-time to writing books. Wallace published 33 books during his lifetime.
Wallace was born in Chicago, Illinois. Wallace grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was the father of Olympic historian David Wallechinsky and author Amy Wallace.
Wallace began selling stories to magazines when he was a teenager. In World War II Wallace served in the Frank Capra unit in Fort Fox along with Theodor Seuss Geisel - more popularly known as Dr Seuss - and continued to write for magazines. He also served in the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Force. In the years immediately following World war II Wallace became a Hollywood screenwriter. He collaborated on such films as The West Point Story (1950), Split Second (1953),and Meet Me at the Fair (1953).
After several years in Hollywood, he devoted himself full-time to writing books. Wallace published 33 books during his lifetime.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 13, 2022
Wanted to take a break from the serious reading I've been doing and read a popular novel. Picked this one up. It is Irving Wallace's first novel. Used to read a lot of Irving Wallace when I was a student. At that time, I felt that his books were well researched and so I learnt a lot from them, and they also had a good plot written in simple journalistic prose. Must have gone through atleast half of his backlist. At some point I stopped reading his books and never went back. I think his two best books were 'The Man' and 'The Prize'. 'The Man' is about how a black man accidentally becomes the American President and how his party tries to impeach him. It was a book ahead of its time and would make a great TV miniseries even today. It was made into a TV series / movie during its time, with James Earl Jones playing the role of the African-American President, but I don't think that series is available anywhere now. 'The Prize' is about how the Nobel Prize is given and the controversies involved. Wallace spins that off into a Cold War era mystery. Wallace also wrote a lot of nonfiction and I feel that his nonfiction has aged well. I've read just one of them – 'The Sunday Gentleman'. It is a collection of biographical essays about interesting people. I learnt about P. T. Barnum and Van Meegeren and the Everleigh Sisters through that book. Wallace later expanded that essay on Barnum into a whole book called 'The Fabulous Showman'. I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the sources used for the 2017 movie, 'The Greatest Showman'.
This book, 'The Sins of Fleming', is about a scriptwriter in Hollywood, who meets an attractive woman and attempts to have an affair during the course of a week. There was nothing much in the story. Just lots of descriptions of women from the perspective of the male gaze, and lots of gratuitous sex for which Wallace was famous for. Things that we'll treat with contempt these days, and haul the author over the coals for. I didn't like the main character – I don't know what he was trying. The women characters were well drawn – they were complex and fascinating and likeable.
The literary references in the story were interesting – Stendhal, Byron, Caroline Lamb, Henrik Ibsen, Proust, Tolstoy, Dickens. Now I want to read more on Lady Caroline Lamb – she looks like a fascinating person. There is also a reference to Croesus, about whom I am reading right now in Herodotus' 'The Histories'. There is also a reference to Andorra, one of my favourite countries, which I enjoyed reading about. There was a mention of a French perfume called Arpege. I wanted to find out whether it was real or imaginary and if it was real, whether it was still available. So went to Amazon and checked. Was very surprised that it is still around, in beautiful bottles. Who knew! It was expensive – not rich-people-expensive, but middle-class-expensive. For a moment, I was tempted to buy and try. Unfortunately, I'm not a perfume person.
So, the story was mostly unimpressive, and hasn't aged well. But the nonfiction parts of the book were interesting, if one decided to pursue them more and jump into the rabbit hole. I don't know whether my favourite Irving Wallace books have aged well. Need to read 'The Man' and 'The Prize' again sometime, and see how they are.
Irving Wallace had an interesting background. He was Jewish. But he knew that in the America of his time, if people knew that he was Jewish, he wouldn't get anywhere. There was a quota for Jewish students in American universities at that time, not a minimum quota but a maximum quota. That is, a university won't admit more than a particular number of Jewish students in a year. Some universities didn't entertain Jewish applicants. All this during the time when Einstein was living in America and was celebrated there. So, if one was Jewish at that time, one couldn't get anywhere. Like if one was Black, or Native American, or Asian, or Middle Eastern, or a woman. So Wallace changed his Jewish second name to the more acceptable WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) name, Wallace. And he became a successful novelist, and at one point, he was probably the highest paid novelist in the world. His son David, discovered years later, that they were Jewish, they had East European roots, and their second name was Wallechinksky. So after he went through an identity crisis, David changed back his second name to Wallechinksky. I discovered all this through Anne Fadiman's memoir about her father, 'The Wine Lover's Daughter'. This is the kind of interesting stuff we learn from books.
For a book, where the plot wasn't great, it had some nice passages. Just proves that we can find beauty anywhere, if we decide to look closely. Here are some of my favourites.
"How falsely portrayed, in most novels and plays, and in almost all movies, were troubled marriages. In fiction, usually, a single reason was given for a marriage that did not work. As a writer he understood the necessity of this simplification. A single reason for discord could be dramatized better than many and could be better understood by audiences of varied sensitivity and comprehension. Yet, how untrue these pictures of the marital state. His own marriage worked, but not well. It had good days, lovely, wondrous days, and shattering black days. But when it was bad, it was bad not for a single reason but for a dozen reasons. They were so many, and often so indirectly related to immediate discord, that he often had difficulty in associating them with any quarrel."
"In the studios there was a cliché, as phony as the producers who persistently repeated it, that if you could not tell the story you wanted to tell in one sentence, it was not worth making as a movie. “Give it to me in one sentence, kid,” they would say. “If you can’t, you haven’t got it yet.” This was the rankest nonsense. He liked to picture Charles Dickens sitting in a producer’s office trying to compress his latest novel into one sterile, meaningless, pretentious sentence. Yet, the cliché was appealing because it was challenging."
"Surely somewhere, foreign ministers had conversed in stilted, guarded words of destruction or survival; surely somewhere, men had died by violence and lived by heroism; surely somewhere, floods had raged, and lovers scandalized, and sums of gold had been gained and lost—but to all of this, Philip had been blind and deaf. For a week, he had lived on a planet inhabited by two, and on this planet no other life existed. It was less strange than amazing, he decided, that this most momentous week in his memory would play no part in his public history. To him, the week had been the summary of his being, it had been everything, yet to others it would have no actuality. No one on all the earth knew or would know of the crucial days except he and Peggy—and not even she knew or understood its significance to him. He would grow into the years ahead, have more anniversaries, children, friends, acquaintances; he would become famous or respected or frustrated; he would add achievement to achievement and failure to failure, and earn money and spend it, and become grandparent and sage or old fool; he would love, and he would disappear, and no one would know of this one crucial week in his story. Was it possible that this happened to other men, too? If so, history was a fraud, and those who were diggers into the past were indulging in the idiot’s play of simpletons. Was it possible that the most decisive days in the lives of Jesus, Mohammed, Socrates, Kant, Darwin, Napoleon, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Tolstoy were not to be found in their writings or writings about them? Was it possible that even those whose lives had been so thoroughly illuminated by themselves and others—Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Lincoln, Lord Byron—had carried their most vital secrets to their graves?"
Have you read Irving Wallace's novels? Do you like them or hate them? Which one is your favourite?
This book, 'The Sins of Fleming', is about a scriptwriter in Hollywood, who meets an attractive woman and attempts to have an affair during the course of a week. There was nothing much in the story. Just lots of descriptions of women from the perspective of the male gaze, and lots of gratuitous sex for which Wallace was famous for. Things that we'll treat with contempt these days, and haul the author over the coals for. I didn't like the main character – I don't know what he was trying. The women characters were well drawn – they were complex and fascinating and likeable.
The literary references in the story were interesting – Stendhal, Byron, Caroline Lamb, Henrik Ibsen, Proust, Tolstoy, Dickens. Now I want to read more on Lady Caroline Lamb – she looks like a fascinating person. There is also a reference to Croesus, about whom I am reading right now in Herodotus' 'The Histories'. There is also a reference to Andorra, one of my favourite countries, which I enjoyed reading about. There was a mention of a French perfume called Arpege. I wanted to find out whether it was real or imaginary and if it was real, whether it was still available. So went to Amazon and checked. Was very surprised that it is still around, in beautiful bottles. Who knew! It was expensive – not rich-people-expensive, but middle-class-expensive. For a moment, I was tempted to buy and try. Unfortunately, I'm not a perfume person.
So, the story was mostly unimpressive, and hasn't aged well. But the nonfiction parts of the book were interesting, if one decided to pursue them more and jump into the rabbit hole. I don't know whether my favourite Irving Wallace books have aged well. Need to read 'The Man' and 'The Prize' again sometime, and see how they are.
Irving Wallace had an interesting background. He was Jewish. But he knew that in the America of his time, if people knew that he was Jewish, he wouldn't get anywhere. There was a quota for Jewish students in American universities at that time, not a minimum quota but a maximum quota. That is, a university won't admit more than a particular number of Jewish students in a year. Some universities didn't entertain Jewish applicants. All this during the time when Einstein was living in America and was celebrated there. So, if one was Jewish at that time, one couldn't get anywhere. Like if one was Black, or Native American, or Asian, or Middle Eastern, or a woman. So Wallace changed his Jewish second name to the more acceptable WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) name, Wallace. And he became a successful novelist, and at one point, he was probably the highest paid novelist in the world. His son David, discovered years later, that they were Jewish, they had East European roots, and their second name was Wallechinksky. So after he went through an identity crisis, David changed back his second name to Wallechinksky. I discovered all this through Anne Fadiman's memoir about her father, 'The Wine Lover's Daughter'. This is the kind of interesting stuff we learn from books.
For a book, where the plot wasn't great, it had some nice passages. Just proves that we can find beauty anywhere, if we decide to look closely. Here are some of my favourites.
"How falsely portrayed, in most novels and plays, and in almost all movies, were troubled marriages. In fiction, usually, a single reason was given for a marriage that did not work. As a writer he understood the necessity of this simplification. A single reason for discord could be dramatized better than many and could be better understood by audiences of varied sensitivity and comprehension. Yet, how untrue these pictures of the marital state. His own marriage worked, but not well. It had good days, lovely, wondrous days, and shattering black days. But when it was bad, it was bad not for a single reason but for a dozen reasons. They were so many, and often so indirectly related to immediate discord, that he often had difficulty in associating them with any quarrel."
"In the studios there was a cliché, as phony as the producers who persistently repeated it, that if you could not tell the story you wanted to tell in one sentence, it was not worth making as a movie. “Give it to me in one sentence, kid,” they would say. “If you can’t, you haven’t got it yet.” This was the rankest nonsense. He liked to picture Charles Dickens sitting in a producer’s office trying to compress his latest novel into one sterile, meaningless, pretentious sentence. Yet, the cliché was appealing because it was challenging."
"Surely somewhere, foreign ministers had conversed in stilted, guarded words of destruction or survival; surely somewhere, men had died by violence and lived by heroism; surely somewhere, floods had raged, and lovers scandalized, and sums of gold had been gained and lost—but to all of this, Philip had been blind and deaf. For a week, he had lived on a planet inhabited by two, and on this planet no other life existed. It was less strange than amazing, he decided, that this most momentous week in his memory would play no part in his public history. To him, the week had been the summary of his being, it had been everything, yet to others it would have no actuality. No one on all the earth knew or would know of the crucial days except he and Peggy—and not even she knew or understood its significance to him. He would grow into the years ahead, have more anniversaries, children, friends, acquaintances; he would become famous or respected or frustrated; he would add achievement to achievement and failure to failure, and earn money and spend it, and become grandparent and sage or old fool; he would love, and he would disappear, and no one would know of this one crucial week in his story. Was it possible that this happened to other men, too? If so, history was a fraud, and those who were diggers into the past were indulging in the idiot’s play of simpletons. Was it possible that the most decisive days in the lives of Jesus, Mohammed, Socrates, Kant, Darwin, Napoleon, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Tolstoy were not to be found in their writings or writings about them? Was it possible that even those whose lives had been so thoroughly illuminated by themselves and others—Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Lincoln, Lord Byron—had carried their most vital secrets to their graves?"
Have you read Irving Wallace's novels? Do you like them or hate them? Which one is your favourite?
September 5, 2017
E' stato scritto in contemporaneo a Revolutionary Road, 1959.
Ma che differenza di approccio, di stile, di profondità!
Qui, un maschio americano, sano e sessualmente attivo (la notazione è d'obbligo visto che il sesso è il chiodo fisso del protagonista, oltre a quelli che oggi paiono cliché dell'epoca, ma che all'epoca dovevano essere una novità, come l'analista, teorie freudiane, femmina castratrice e altro ancora), sposato più o meno felicemente, con figlioletto spaesato, scrittore-sceneggiatore di quasi successo, incontra una VeraFemmina e perde la testa.
Il titolo in italiano è fuorviante, in inglese è "I peccati di Philip Fleming": infatti, visto che quando arriva al dunque con la Tigre (dall'orrendo nome di Peggy, mattonella?), ahi ahi, una bella crisi di impotenza lo frega sul dunque.
Crisi che si ripropone ben 3 volte gettandolo nel panico totale.
Le prova tutte (tranne smettere di bere, quello che non si trangugia ad ogni pagina!), compreso zompare sulla propria moglie e sulla moglie di un amico (con risultati positivi) ma quando arriva al dunque con la Peggy, rien à faire! Finalmente le dice che divorzierà e la sposerà e, ovviamente essendo libero con la testa, riesce a farla sua in un amplesso che è una vera apoteosi della sublimazione maschio-femmina.
Ma lei decide di sposare un altro, e così lui ritorna in famiglia felice che la sua virilità sia stata confermata.
Sembra (e probabilmente lo è stato) uno di quei film americani anni '60 che oggi fanno sorridere, con i divanetti e i mobili-bar, i vestiti da cocktail, e gli uomini che iniziano a tentennare dal ruolo macho-man. Da un certo punto in poi è quasi illeggibile, ma non riesco mai a sottrarmi al fascino di questi libri, è come spiare dalla serratura una generazione che non ho neanche sfiorato, dove il tema ricorrente è la strenua ricerca, quasi infantile, delle possibilità di adulterio.
Ps: oltre a bere fuma con un turco, perfino al cinema!
Ma che differenza di approccio, di stile, di profondità!
Qui, un maschio americano, sano e sessualmente attivo (la notazione è d'obbligo visto che il sesso è il chiodo fisso del protagonista, oltre a quelli che oggi paiono cliché dell'epoca, ma che all'epoca dovevano essere una novità, come l'analista, teorie freudiane, femmina castratrice e altro ancora), sposato più o meno felicemente, con figlioletto spaesato, scrittore-sceneggiatore di quasi successo, incontra una VeraFemmina e perde la testa.
Il titolo in italiano è fuorviante, in inglese è "I peccati di Philip Fleming": infatti, visto che quando arriva al dunque con la Tigre (dall'orrendo nome di Peggy, mattonella?), ahi ahi, una bella crisi di impotenza lo frega sul dunque.
Crisi che si ripropone ben 3 volte gettandolo nel panico totale.
Le prova tutte (tranne smettere di bere, quello che non si trangugia ad ogni pagina!), compreso zompare sulla propria moglie e sulla moglie di un amico (con risultati positivi) ma quando arriva al dunque con la Peggy, rien à faire! Finalmente le dice che divorzierà e la sposerà e, ovviamente essendo libero con la testa, riesce a farla sua in un amplesso che è una vera apoteosi della sublimazione maschio-femmina.
Ma lei decide di sposare un altro, e così lui ritorna in famiglia felice che la sua virilità sia stata confermata.
Sembra (e probabilmente lo è stato) uno di quei film americani anni '60 che oggi fanno sorridere, con i divanetti e i mobili-bar, i vestiti da cocktail, e gli uomini che iniziano a tentennare dal ruolo macho-man. Da un certo punto in poi è quasi illeggibile, ma non riesco mai a sottrarmi al fascino di questi libri, è come spiare dalla serratura una generazione che non ho neanche sfiorato, dove il tema ricorrente è la strenua ricerca, quasi infantile, delle possibilità di adulterio.
Ps: oltre a bere fuma con un turco, perfino al cinema!
October 7, 2015
No es lo que leo regularmente, pero lo encontré en el librero de mi fallecido padre, es una primera edición,a lo mejor y hasta sea valioso. La historia te atrapa y tiene buen final.
March 11, 2022
Divertiu o suficiente, mas não conseguiu saltar para a fasquia do bom mesmo. Aceitável.
August 20, 2022
Libro molto importante per la mia adolescenza: fu proprio mia madre, a miei occhi sempre casta e pura, a suggerirmi la lettura. Narra le vicende (più o meno erotiche) di una donna appassionata, energica e determinata. L'esatto opposto dell'immagine che ho sempre avuto di mia madre.
Conseguentemente è "solo" per questo particolare personale che il libro mi ha lasciato una forte impressione, quasi fosse il manifesto di una donna vera celata dietro la maschera pirandelliana della madre.
Al di là di questo parere soggettivo: bello, intrigante e interessante.
Titolo originale: "The Sins of Philip Fleming"
Conseguentemente è "solo" per questo particolare personale che il libro mi ha lasciato una forte impressione, quasi fosse il manifesto di una donna vera celata dietro la maschera pirandelliana della madre.
Al di là di questo parere soggettivo: bello, intrigante e interessante.
Titolo originale: "The Sins of Philip Fleming"
June 30, 2012
Me atrapó desde la primera página y me gusta como el autor te lleva por todo el show/trauma/dilema de Philip, el final no me encantó y aunque nos enseña una gran lección me dejo con sabor a mi cita con el psicólogo ;)
June 23, 2023
I thoroughly enjoyed this literary piece and had the pleasure of working on it with Crossroads Press. A must read! Another addition is "The Nympho and other Maniacs".
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews