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lukerik's review against another edition
adventurous
tense
fast-paced
4.0
Stupendously entertaining account of their attempted fraud. Two obviously intelligent men doing the stupidest things possible. If they’d been morons they could never have attempted anything on this scale, but their intelligence gave them the ability to encompass their own doom.
It’s a confession, but there’s a catch. It’s written like a novel. It has direct reported speech, pacing, tension etc. The book appears to be the same text that was previously published as ‘What Really Happened: His Untold Story of the Hughes Affair’ and ‘Project Octavio: The Story of the Howard Hughes Hoax’. There it’s credited to ‘Clifford Irving with Richard Suskind’. Suskind’s name has been removed from this edition for reasons that are unclear to me, but Irving mentions him in the Author’s Note, saying “many of the passages in this book which deal with shared experiences have been written by him from my point of view.” Well, we call that fiction, don’t we? I think this may technically be a novel. I think Irving is playing a game with the reader. He comes off rather badly and makes no attempt to justify himself or portray himself in a good light. Or rather, there are no passages that do so transparently. He talks about the Autobiography (which I haven’t read) as being a mixture of facts and also lies made of ‘whole cloth’. If the lies here are also made of whole cloth then it’s very difficult to tell where they begin and end.
It’s a confession, but there’s a catch. It’s written like a novel. It has direct reported speech, pacing, tension etc. The book appears to be the same text that was previously published as ‘What Really Happened: His Untold Story of the Hughes Affair’ and ‘Project Octavio: The Story of the Howard Hughes Hoax’. There it’s credited to ‘Clifford Irving with Richard Suskind’. Suskind’s name has been removed from this edition for reasons that are unclear to me, but Irving mentions him in the Author’s Note, saying “many of the passages in this book which deal with shared experiences have been written by him from my point of view.” Well, we call that fiction, don’t we? I think this may technically be a novel. I think Irving is playing a game with the reader. He comes off rather badly and makes no attempt to justify himself or portray himself in a good light. Or rather, there are no passages that do so transparently. He talks about the Autobiography (which I haven’t read) as being a mixture of facts and also lies made of ‘whole cloth’. If the lies here are also made of whole cloth then it’s very difficult to tell where they begin and end.
han_cat's review
2.0
Well I read it, more as a stubborn act of perseverance than enjoyment though. I found it highly weird to read a book about a book that isn’t really a book! A good 4/5 of the book goes into intricate details of the fake meetings with Hughes, this felt a bit weird considering you know from the outset it isn’t real. Basically it felt like a waste of time rather than an enjoyable journey into flight of fancy.
Really what I had expected to get out of this was why he did it, but there was no substantial explanation offered. He obviously is highly egotistical and his supposed shame and guilt (when they finally arrive!) seemed very forced. Almost as though he were trying to imagine and write what he thought he should have felt.
In actual fact I may have liked this book a little more if I hadn’t read the Q&A section at the end (ahead of the movie release), he came across as extremely arrogant and I felt thoroughly annoyed with someone who seems to live totally outside normal behaviour with very few consequences.
Really what I had expected to get out of this was why he did it, but there was no substantial explanation offered. He obviously is highly egotistical and his supposed shame and guilt (when they finally arrive!) seemed very forced. Almost as though he were trying to imagine and write what he thought he should have felt.
In actual fact I may have liked this book a little more if I hadn’t read the Q&A section at the end (ahead of the movie release), he came across as extremely arrogant and I felt thoroughly annoyed with someone who seems to live totally outside normal behaviour with very few consequences.
lnatal's review
2.0
A movie was made based on this book.
From IMDb:
In what would cause a fantastic media frenzy, Clifford Irving sells his bogus biography of Howard Hughes to a premiere publishing house in the early 1970s.
From IMDb:
In what would cause a fantastic media frenzy, Clifford Irving sells his bogus biography of Howard Hughes to a premiere publishing house in the early 1970s.
stephybara's review
4.0
OK, Clifford Irving may be an ass, but this is a highly entertaining account of his fake Howard Hughes autobiography, and for the time that I was reading it, I couldn't put it down.
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