![]() ![]() Galloway proves the point by offering detailed - occasionally too detailed - explanations of how many of Houdini's tricks worked.īut whether Houdini's audiences knew they were being fooled - much as we do, when we read fiction writers like Galloway - is ultimately irrelevant. Galloway exploits the irony of such confusion in a man who tirelessly drew distinctions between illusion and reality, while insisting that his magic wasn't supernatural but scientific, requiring rigorous conditioning and hours of practice. ![]() "You must maintain your illusion at all costs, because without it you fade away." ![]() ![]() "I don't think you know which parts of you are real and what parts are made up," Bess Houdini tells her husband. In "The Confabulist," novelist Steven Galloway takes that idea and runs with it, telling the story of an artist whose meticulously crafted persona - what Galloway refers to as "a shell to show the world" - led to the eventual disappearance of the underlying man, who vanished as fully as Houdini himself seemed to do when on stage. To the end he would be almost totally unaware of the design of his career, the great map of revolution laid out by his life." Doctorow writes that Houdini "could not reason from his own hurt feelings. Meditating in "Ragtime" on the Hungarian Jew named Ehrich Weiss, who spent part of his youth in Appleton and Milwaukee before morphing into Harry Houdini, E.L. ![]()
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