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Magician's Assistant

by Ann Patchett

February 2000

Synopsis

Magician's Assistant"What is to become of a magician's assistant without her magician? This is the question Sabine asks herself after the death of Parsifal, the magician she worked with for more than 20 years and her husband for only a few months. Parsifal loved men, especially Phan, and though Sabine loved Parsifal, she contented herself with his friendship. Now Parsifal and Phan are both gone, and Sabine is left with full responsibility for their possessions and their histories. Always the assistant, her life is still defined by service to Parsifal. But in the world of illusion Sabine has occupied for her entire life, things are rarely what they seem. According to Parsifal, he had no living relatives. Now, with his death, comes the news that he has a mother and two sisters living in Alliance, Nebraska. Inevitably, the strangers will meet and Sabine will be carried away from her beloved Los Angeles to seek the truth of Parsifal's past in the bitterly windswept steppes of Nebraska in winter. It is here that Sabine will learn the truth about Parsifal's father, which lies at the heart of his son's abandonment of his family and of his identity. As the members of Parsifal's family turn to Sabine for help, she realizes that she is something of a magician herself. In this new found strength Sabine may at last find the kind of love she had always been denied." (Publisher)

Reviews

  • "Wonderful. . .Put together with considerable canniness." (Richard Eder - Los Angeles Times Book Review)
  • "Patchett's third novel is something of a magic trick itself -- a 90s love story wrought with the same grace and classic charm of a 19th-century novel...We read Patchett's novel with the same pleasure and awe of an audience watching a chained Houdini escape from an underwater chamber." (Newsweek)
  • "When a gay Los Angeles magician named Parsifal dies suddenly, he leaves behind his heartbroken assistant, Sabine, and a secret past that leads her to Nebraska and a family she never knew he had. Last year our reviewer, Suzanne Berne, called the author "an adroit, graceful writer." (The New York Times Book Review)

Book Club Rating and Comments

If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.

Other Books by Ann Patchett