Sanctuary V

by Budd Schulberg

Where a liberal politician on the run seeks refuge from the revolutionary leader he both loves and hates, worships and fears.
Where vengeful reactionaries, disillusioned idealists, poets, prostitutes, homosexuals, the cream of the crop and the scum of society all come together.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a screenwriter, novelist, and journalist who is best remembered for the classic novels What Makes Sammy Run?, The Harder They Fall, and the story On the Waterfront, which he adapted as a novel, play, and an Academy Award–winning film script. Born in New York City, Schulberg grew up in Hollywood, where his father, B. P. Schulberg, was head of production at Paramount, among other studios. Throughout his career, Schulberg worked as a journalist and essayist, often writing about boxing, a lifelong passion. Many of his writings on the sport are collected in Sparring with Hemingway (1995). Other highlights from Schulberg’s nonfiction career include Moving Pictures (1981), an account of his upbringing in Hollywood, and Writers in America (1973), a glimpse of some of the famous novelists he met early in his career. He died in 2009.

Reviews

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although Schulberg is one of my favourite authors and I've read all of his other fiction, I decided to abandon this after around 70 pages. Set in an unnamed post-revolution Latin American country, it's written in the first person from the point of view of the puppet president, who was on the side of the revolution's leader but falls out with him.

I think the problem with the book is that, while the author's previous novels were set in worlds he knew intimately, in this case he is an outsider attempting to write like an insider and he doesn't quite pull it off. Although he clearly did a lot of research and even met Castro on one occasion, the world he describes here did not ring true for me, and I thought that Angel (the leader of the revolution) in particular was more like a cartoon character than a believable human being.