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A Novel
by Anthony Marra
Book Reviewed by:The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini's Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest.
Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won't speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can't escape the studio's narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria's only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.
Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father's past threatens Maria's carefully constructed façade, she must finally confront her father's fate—and her own.
Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life's bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls "a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles."
Sunny Siberia
1
When you entered the executive offices of Mercury Pictures International, you would first see a scale model of the studio itself. Artie Feldman, co-founder and head of production, installed it in the lobby to distract skittish investors from second thoughts. Complete with back lot, sound stages, and facilities buildings, the miniature was a faithful replica of the ten-acre studio in which it sat. Maria Lagana, as rendered by the miniaturist, was a tiny, featureless figure looking out Artie's office window. And this was where the real Maria stood late one morning in 1941, hands holstered on her hips, watching a pigeon autograph the windshield of her boss's new convertible. She'd like to buy that bird a drink.
"It's a beautiful day out, Art," Maria said. "You should really come have a look."
"I have," Artie said. "It made me want to jump."
Artie wasn't known for his joie de vivre, but he usually didn't fantasize about ending it all this close to lunch. Maria wondered ...
Here are some of the comments posted about Mercury Pictures Presents in our legacy forum.
You can see the full discussion here.
Both Maria and her mother keep their emotions inside. How does this help them survive? How does it hurt them?
As a daughter of the Greatest Generation, I saw many characteristics in the characters that I observed in my own parents. Theirs was a generation focused on survival. First, during the Great Depression and then World War II. Like my parents here in ... - JHSiess
Did you learn anything new about the time period covered in the novel? Did anything surprise you?
Was unaware of the movie studio's involvement in war propaganda. I was well aware of the Japanese interment camps, but much to my embarrassment, I was not aware of the Italians and many other foreigner's travel or employment restrictions. - caroln
How do you feel different characters experience exile, both at home and abroad? How do invisible prisons differ from real ones?
Marra did an excellent job exploring the themes of exile and confinement.
Several characters experience both emotional and physical exile, detached from their loved ones, the place they love, and/or the traditions and way of ... - JHSiess
How do you think imprisonment affects Giuseppe?
Giuseppe adapted to imprisonment, developing a close relationship with Nino, searching for coins & other valuables, and writing letters to Maria. He became a "smaller," more docile version of his once-fiery self. He submitted to ... - JHSiess
How does the novel treat its bit players? What do you think Marra was trying to say about whose stories matter? Is there a minor character that really appealed to you?
I didn't perceive any character to "minor" and their stories are all compelling and riveting. I can't imagine which character could be omitted from the novel because each is integral to the whole and the themes that Marra ... - JHSiess
Marra's prose is lush and evocative, eliciting a whole host of emotions from his readers; it's by turns laugh-out-loud funny, joyous, poignant and heartbreaking — but always gloriously descriptive ("The pianist lung[ed] through Schoenberg with the violent elegance of a cat stalking a butterfly across the keyboard"). I particularly enjoyed the author's frequent digressions that have little to do with the plot but ramp up the novel's entertainment value while rounding out the characters. Although the characters are by-and-large fictional, the author sticks closely to the historical record, and I reveled in the details...continued
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(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Marra brings his considerable gifts for scope and scene to early Hollywood, animating, as he does so thrillingly, the city, the players, the war, and the repercussions of small and huge actions on families, fates, countries, and film. And: this fully-realized world is also really funny! I laughed aloud many times, even as I marveled. Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
Crackling with wit and suffused with insight, Anthony Marra's new novel is as epic in sweep as a movie set yet delineates the inner workings of the human heart with a miniaturist's precision. Mercury Pictures Presents explores the endless give-and-take between life and art, the cost of integrity, and the ways we must make peace with the past in order to move toward the future... A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that's a true joy to read. Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Angel of Rome
Mercury Pictures Presents is a wonder—intimate and sweeping, heartfelt and satirical, one of the funniest and most moving novels I've read in a long time. A story of fascism, war, and refugees finding freedom through art and storytelling, it's both a joy to read and highly relevant to our times. Luis Urrea, bestselling author of The Devil's Highway and The Hummingbird's Daughter
Achingly beautiful ... You laugh, then you sigh, then you weep... Extraordinary. Nathan Hill, bestselling author of The Nix
Anthony Marra is a writer of boundless talent: He is a top-notch historian, a razor-sharp social critic, a deeply sensitive psychologist, and an exuberant satirist—all at the same time... A singularly pleasurable read—smart, sad, hilarious, and always full of heart. Sally Mann, author of Hold Still, finalist for the National Book Award
A novel so rich and wondrous, written with such grace and wit, that there's only one word for Anthony Marra: genius. Sara Nović, author of Girl at War and True Biz
Smart, heartfelt, and sneakily funny, Mercury Pictures Presents has all the breadth and power of an epic and the attention to detail of an intimate conversation. I read it in a state of admiration for the beauty Marra has wrung from the English language.
In Anthony Marra's novel Mercury Pictures Presents, the main characters struggle to ensure their movies adhere to the Motion Picture Production Code.
In the early years of the 20th century, as motion pictures were becoming increasingly available to the American public, some segments of the population expressed the opinion they were promoting depravity. In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment (protecting freedom of expression) didn't apply to movies, and individual cities began to ban films they deemed immoral. During the 1920s, the Catholic church considered banning films entirely (meaning prohibiting adherents of the faith from attending any movie).
Fearing such a ban would impact profits and concerned about ...
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