El Soñador

by Mark Upton, Lawrence Sanders

Eli Hebron era un destacado productor cinematográfico, soñador, artista y poeta. No había conseguido aún reponerse del suicidio de su mujer, una gran estrella, cuando todo se volvió en su contra. En el deslumbrante Hollywood de 1927, en los albores del cine sonoro, la estafa era una forma de negociar y el dólar la autoridad suprema. Los que soñaban a lo grande... sufrían grandes caídas. Sexo, fama, dinero, poder, pasiones. Un nuevo gran bestseller de Lawrence Sanders.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

243 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1978

Reviews

[Tabitha]

The entire time I was reading this I felt as though I was waiting for the story to start, like the entire book was filler. It was a chore for me to get through.

[Reuen]

Whoa!! how did you get here? anyway, SUBSCRIBE TO PEWDIEPIE!

[Miles Watson]

Like many of the reviewers here, I'm a big fan of Lawrence "Mr. Bestseller" Sanders and will generally grab anything he writes off a bookshelf without hesitation. As a pure prose-stylist he is one of the greatest novelists I've ever read, his passion for language, architecture, clothing, and let's face it, food, help make every page crackle, and when he hits on all cylinders, as he did for "The Sixth Commandment" and "The Third Deadly Sin" (just for example) he has profound things to say about the human condition. He's also one of the of the New York writers in the sense of bringing the city to life as almost nobody else can, or ever has. But...and let's face it...like most prolific authors he has his share of mediocre or even trashy entries, and others ("The Tangent Objective") for example which are spirited as hell but fall wide of whatever mark was intended. "The Dream Lover" is well outside his usual ballpark, and unfortunately it just doesn't work, though there are moments when feel as if it was on the verge of doing so.

"The Dream Lover" is about an embattled 1920s Hollywood executive named Eli Hebron, who has just lost his beloved wife, suffers from acute anxiety, and is struggling to accept the fact that the age of the silent movie -- his own age -- is coming to an end. The lonely Hebron falls head over heels for a young starlet (her youth is a critical feature of the plot) who is trying to make into a big movie star so he can arrest the sliding fortunes of Magna Pictures, the studio his uncle owns, which he stands to inherit. He envisions a star vehicle for her called "The Dream Lover" which ultimately comes to stand as an allegory for his own romantic yet tragic view of life. Meanwhile, Hebron's studio nemesis, Charlie Royce, who is eager to embrace the future of talking pictures, is plotting to destroy him, and casts a complex and cruel web of deceit around Hebron to achieve his downfall. This is the plot of the book, and unfortunately this is also as far as the plot goes. Without giving anything away, what amazed me about the novel was its lack of any real twists or turns. The few we get we see coming, and I was convinced a shrewd plotter like Sanders was serving them as lukewarm red herrings to get us looking the wrong way. But nope, not a bit of it: the plot chugs along a single track with almost no deviation, to the point where even though we understand Hebron is in a bad mental state and behaving like a man experiencing a multifaceted midlife crisis both personally and professionally, it's impossible to believe he could have survived a week as a Hollywood executive, where jealousy, treachery and sabotage are everyday occurrences. He has almost no allies or friends, no "people," and is utterly oblivious to the scheming around him. Helpless and clueless both. In the end, I found it simply unbelievable. The whole point of a tragedy, in my mind, is that the tragedy must NOT be inevitable: it is the result of poor choices usually made with good, loving or at least honest intentions.

Other readers have described this book as a bore and a slog. At times, it is. Sanders seems to have forgotten how to plot, or pace, or sub-plot in a way the audience cares about. There is a subplot romance between two writers which is pointless and uninteresting. Nor is the prose up to his usual standard: it often feels hurried, loose, vague. It is true that his reconstruction of the mechanics of 1920s moviemaking is excellent and fascinating, and I did enjoy to some extent the sheer bloody-mindedness of studio intrigue (amoral, cruel, shameless), but even this is too one-sided to enjoy and he fails to reconstruct 1927 Los Angeles in the way he routinely constructs New York City in other novels. The picture is blurry and unconvincing. His characters feel like they are dressed in costumes. In short, this novel, despite its promise, simply fails to deliver on same. I should very much like to see an adaptation of it for the screen, but heavily rewritten to make the story a duel between competing conceptions of the future and not a slaughter. 2.5/5.

[Thomas]

I will start by saying I am a big Sanders fan. I devoured his Sin and Commandment series in high school. Loved his New York setting,( being a New Yorker) he portrays everything spot on. Even the food is memorable.
20 years later, I saw a huge Sanders lot on Ebay. I purchased it and decided to read them in chronological order. I had no memory of this book. Until I came to Goodreads I didn't know he had written this under a pseudonym (Upton).
The book is a slog fest. It's hard to believe Sanders wrote this. Boring all the way through and an ugly ending.
Don't recommend. Never thought I would say this about a Lawrence Sanders book. Really 1.5 stars but I gave it 2 stars out of sympathy. Big disappointment.

[John Lyman]

I rarely read fiction these days, but I found this book and, as a fan of Sanders, (Upton?), I decided to check it out. It was interesting semi-historical fiction. I enjoyed it pretty well until about the last 10% of the book. It seemed the author was rushing to end the story and he turned to a much more broad/vague style of prose that left me with the feeling the book had ended without resolving most of the issues raised in the story.

[AJ]

what a mess, boring and silly at the same time, but not in a fun way!!!

[Tina]

A good solid story.

[Jim]

Not up to Sanders best work, and he may have realized that as the book was originally published under the pseudonym Mark Upton. The work plays as a diabolically over-acted silent film, much like the setting of the story itself.

[Michael]

Has it's moments but not quite as good as his other works.

[Dream Apollysus]

(8/10)
Very Good.