Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or, The bomb party

Format:

Book

Title:

Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or, The bomb party

Other title(s):

Doctor Fischer of Geneva

Bomb party

Author:

Greene, Graham, 1904-1991.

ISBN:

9780671254674

9780671255473

Publication:

New York : Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Physical Description:

156 pages ; 22 cm

Summary:

The enigmatic Dr. Fischer is a millionaire, student of human nature, practical joker, and party giver. His parties are famous or perhaps nortorious for they are part of his experiment to see how far the very, very rich will go to satisfy their greed. His guests risk not only humiliation at his hands, but death.

Subject(s):

Eccentrics and eccentricities -- Fiction.

Rich people -- Fiction.

Parties -- Fiction.

Avarice -- Fiction.

English fiction -- 20th century.

Geneva (Switzerland) -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Geneva (Switzerland) -- Fiction.

Switzerland -- Geneva

Genre:

Black humor

Fiction

Black humor (Literature)

Black humor.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Amity Public Library	FIC GREENE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Author Notes

Born in 1904, Graham Greene was the son of a headmaster and the fourth of six children. Preferring to stay home and read rather than endure the teasing at school that was a by-product of his father's occupation, Greene attempted suicide several times and eventually dropped out of school at the age of 15. His parents sent him to an analyst in London who recommended he try writing as therapy. He completed his first novel by the time he graduated from college in 1925.

Greene wrote both entertainments and serious novels. Catholicism was a recurring theme in his work, notable examples being The Power and the Glory (1940) and The End of the Affair (1951). Popular suspense novels include: The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American. Greene was also a world traveler and he used his experiences as the basis for many books. One popular example, Journey Without Maps (1936), was based on a trip through the jungles of Liberia.

Greene also wrote and adapted screenplays, including that of the 1949 film, The Third Man, which starred Orson Welles. He died in Vevey, Switzerland in 1991.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Bizarre, minor, mini-Greene--an unsatisfying novella redeemed nonetheless by a master's storytelling expertise and by a dozen or more absolutely splendid coloring touches. The essential story: our narrator, middle-aged widower Alfred Jones, meets and loves and marries Anna-Luise, the beautiful daughter of Geneva's Dr. Fischer, a notorious millionaire who gives parties to humiliate and test the infinite greed of a circle of rich, toadying acquaintances; and eventually, after pregnant Anna-Luise has died in a skiing accident, Jones attends Dr. F.'s final greed party--a sort of Russian Roulette with bombs--and tries to ruin it with his own suicide but fails. . . while Dr. F. himself does self-destruct. As parable, the tale hardly works at all: cold, sadistic Dr. F. is frequently equated with God, who is ""greedy for our humiliation. . . he twists the endless screw""--but Greene's familiar pessimism doesn't quite translate into symbolic black comedy; and the cartoon-ish rich dupes here (who eat gross gruel or risk death-by-bomb in order to get expensive prizes) aren't persuasive on metaphorical or any other terms. But trust Greene the storyteller: he uses human, just-slightly-surreal colors to shade his parable toward reality, and they are perfectly balanced, invariably poignant: Jones lost a hand in the London blitz and works as a translator at a Swiss chocolate factory; Dr. Fischer made his fortune by inventing Dentophil Bouquet toothpaste; Dr. F. tortures one of his toadies, horribly bent-over Monsieur Kips, by causing a marvelous children's-book series to be written about him, deformity and all; and most of Dr. F.'s lifetime rage stems from the fact that his dead wife surreptitiously, platonically, listened to Mozart with a humble clerk. Resonant details like these crop up on every other page, projecting Greene's smiling sadness in a way that the central premise never does. And the austerely understated love between Jones and Anna-Luise somehow lingers in the mind longer than the vividly concocted humiliation parties. A few readers may be happy to seize on Greene's cynical and macabre leanings here, happy to construct webs of theme (Catholic and otherwise) around the Dr. F. deity; but most will merely tolerate all that while savoring the by-the-way Greene pleasures that are all the more apparent. and impressive in such a tiny, relaxed book. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.