Famous Last Words (novel)

Famous Last Words is a 1981 novel by Canadian author Timothy Findley, in which Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (originally from the Ezra Pound poem of the same name) is the main character.

[1] In the book Findley poses a few ideas involving the flight of Rudolf Hess into Scotland.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times wrote that "[i]n his remarkable new novel," Findley "has mixed fact and fiction, actual people and invented ones, to produce a new and bizarre form of historical romance.

Thomas's The White Hotel and almost as boldly imagined, Famous Last Words reflects on the catastrophe that is 20th-century history and raises further doubts about the possibility of surviving it.

"[2] In The Boston Phoenix, John Domini felt that the novel was "overwritten in places and overindulgent of its idols; yet in its creation of Mauberley, and its investigation of that sensitive man’s entrapment in evil, Famous Last Words carries forward essential work.