The Same River Twice

Zusatztext 77467405 Informationen zum Autor Ted Mooney is the author of Easy Travel to Other Planets , Traffic and Laughter , and Singing into the Piano . His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Granta, and The New American Review , and he received grants from the Guggenheim and the Ingram Merrill foundations. He died in 2022. Klappentext A New York Times Notable BookOdile Mével is a French clothing designer! her American husband! Max! an independent filmmaker. When Odile agrees to buy a selection of ceremonial May Day banners in the Soviet Union and deliver the contraband to Paris she earns a new job description: smuggler. Soon her fellow courier disappears! her apartment is ransacked! and her friend's houseboat is firebombed. While Max has no inkling of Odile's dealings! he finds himself embroiled in a baffling film world mystery of his own. As their escapades deepen and their deceptions multiply! Odile and Max discover their secrets are connected-endangering not only their marriage but their lives. Chapter 1 THE PALE RUSSIAN youth whom Odile had engaged as her driver displayed neither fear nor pity as he sent his battered panel truck hurtling through the streets of north Moscow, and he now assailed her additionally with the plot development of a movie in which he seemed to be inviting her to invest. Odile spoke no Russian and he no French, so he framed these imaginings in an imperfect English that from time to time required him to take both hands off the wheel and, for her benefit, shape the vectors of his desire in the air before them. It was a slate-gray afternoon in March that threatened snow. Odile, having been in Moscow for three days, found herself quite ready to leave. Assuming the success of the present outing, her fifth of the day, she and her partner, Thierry Colin, would in less than three hours be boarding the train that would return them to Paris. Though she had no regrets about agreeing to this venture, all was not well at home, and only her driver's studied recklessness kept her from brooding over her troubles. In due course, they arrived intact at an open cobblestone square off Tsvetnoy Bulvar, not far from the Circus and the old Central Market, now padlocked. Along the square's eastern periphery ran a row of dilapidated kiosks, only one of which, lit feebly within, might conceivably be open for commerce. Her driver stopped a short distance away, executed a brisk three-point turn, and backed his vehicle up to the mouth of the scorched-looking structure. The day's business had taught them that it was impolitic to leave the engine running, as prudence might otherwise dictate, and he hastened now to shut it off. After taking a moment to collect herself, Odile got out of the truck and headed with as much aplomb as she could muster to a spot behind the kiosk where three men stood smoking in the frigid air. They didn't look particularly surprised or happy to see her. Good afternoon, she said in English. I am told you are well stocked with the merchandise I require today. Perhaps we can discuss it. The spokesman for the group, a compact, muscular youth barely out of his teens, considered her carefully. You like drugs, sweet-pie? Hash from Afghanistan? He smiled accommodatingly. Or maybe you like big American refrigerator? Anything you need, gorgeous, we fix you up. Odile had left Paris somewhat impulsively and hadn't thought to pack for the weather. She had been cold since Warsaw, her pleated plaid overcoat was self-evidently French, and the offer of refrigerators struck her as an insult of some kind. She shrugged and said nothing. As if they had been waiting for just this signal, the other two men approached a steel storage bin appended to the kiosk. One produced a key and, cursing immoderately, set about unlocking it. We have also souvenirs, patrio...

“A cut-throat Russian businessman, two ruthlessly ambitious and beautiful young women and a scheme to make unlimited amount of cash—and voilà, you’re caught up in the momentum of a great story. . . . Magnificent.” —The New York Times

“The Same River Twice is a philosophical entertainment doubling as a riveting, unconventional thriller. . . . Dazzling . . . shimmering, charged.” —The Boston Globe

“The Same River Twice is the tale of beautiful losers living on the edge. . . . [A] lushly cinematic mystery . . . for the highbrow set—those who take their thrillers with a dash of art history.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“It’s too bad that Alfred Hitchcock isn’t still around to direct a movie adaptation of this kaleidoscope of a novel of intrigue.” —*St. Louis Post-Dispatch

• “The Same River Twice could almost be filmed straight from the page. . . . [Mooney’s] up-to-date stylistic concerns, art world experience, and nods to 1980s-style branding lend an indefinable chic to a solid thriller.” —The New York Review of Books

“A riveting tale of intrigue and sexual attraction with the Russian mafia lurking in the shadows.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
“The Same River Twice is that very rare literary beast—a literary thriller. . . . Patricia Highsmith couldn’t have done it better.” —Jay McInerney
 
“Mooney writes sophisticated, unstrained prose. . . . Having spent thirty years as senior editor of Art in America magazine, [Mooney] has honed a penetrating eye. . . . The best passages lay the art world open like a gleaming pomegranate.” —The Plain Dealer

“A tour de force. . . . A taut and lively literary thriller that mingles the worlds of Paris and New York art collectors and filmmakers with a seamy and violent criminal underworld as it explores the nature of art, fate, and inevitability.” —Library Journal
 
“Read this stunning novel once for the pleasure of the hunt, and twice for the treasure between the lines: the pounding of the human heart, the intricate tick-tock as the gears of destiny accelerate. Mooney is a magician, and his new books sparkles like a mysterious city.” —Jayne Anne Phillips
 
“Mooney’s women [are] among the most shimmeringly intelligent in contemporary fiction.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Mooney is a risk-taking adventurer in novelistic possibilities.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A superbly written and wonderfully paced novel, rich with mystery and foreign intrigue.” —Oscar Hijuelos
 
“A novelist with a gift for razor-sharp dialogue, for the brilliantly chiseled sentence and the memorably vivid scene.” —Newsday
 
“Rich, multilayered, powerfully unsettling. . . . [The Same River Twice] succeeds on a number of different levels: as a page-turning mystery in which conceptual art meets the scientific vanguard of stem-cell research and as a meditation on the trusts and betrayals of marriage, on truth and illusion and the relation of each to artistic creativity. . . . The whole comes together in a morally ambiguous manner that seems equally surprising, disturbing and inevitable.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“[Mooney] is one of those rare writers whose take on the world is so original that one avidly reads whatever he chooses to write about.” —Chicago Tribune

Auteur

Ted Mooney is the author of Easy Travel to Other Planets, Traffic and Laughter, and Singing into the Piano. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Granta, and The New American Review, and he received grants from the Guggenheim and the Ingram Merrill foundations. He died in 2022.

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A New York Times Notable Book Odile Mével is a Fr…