Harpo

Publication Date:

January 2020

Pages:

176

Original language and publisher

French | Actes Sud

Territories Handled

Netherlands, North America, Scandinavia

Genre

Literary Fiction

Harpo

Synopsis

In the winter of 1933 without the slightest fanfare, the American comedian Harpo Marx pitched up in Le Havre with his harp following a promotional tour of the Soviet Union with the illustrious Marx Brothers. It is generally accepted that it was this ‘caviar tour’ – no doubt intended as much to win a new Russian audience as to contribute to the thawing of diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR – which brought him to France, but thereafter accounts of this trip vary markedly…

Like a Marx Brothers film rife with madcap invention, Fabio Viscogliosi’s own account reads like a philosophical tale – a paperback odyssey of the great silent clown of American cinema who for a time seems to have become an amnesiac vagabond wandering the byways of France.