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Steven Galloway’s ‘The Confabulist’ Reimagines the Legend of Harry Houdini and Explores the True Power of Magic..

Steven Galloway’s ‘The Confabulist’ Reimagines the Legend of Harry Houdini and Explores the True Power of Magic..

By Morgan Ribera for Bustle..

Magic: the art of illusion, the masterful practice of sleight of hand and deceit, the tools through which magicians can make others believe, if only temporarily, in something they know to be impossible. Such magic, and its evolution in the early 20th century, is the subject of Steven Galloway’s latest novel The Confabulist (Riverhead). In it, he explores the veracity of memory, the fictionalization of identity, and the role of magic and illusion in our everyday lives through the story of infamous illusionist Harry Houdini.

The novel opens with narrator Martin Strauss, a magic enthusiast and rather ordinary man whose story is told alongside Houdini’s in alternating chapters. Strauss is Galloway’s fictional version of the real life fan who allegedly punched Houdini in the stomach at a Montreal theater in 1926. In this opening chapter we find Strauss in a therapy session…

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Steven Galloway interlaces history, imagination around Houdini’s death..

Steven Galloway interlaces history, imagination around Houdini’s death..

 In-depth article by Marsha Lederman for The Globe and Mail..

Master of the escape, conqueror of chain-wrapped contraptions, self-liberator from handcuffs and jail cells – and from his own humble roots – the great American magician Harry Houdini met his match on Canadian soil: blows to the stomach – in the dressing room of the Princess Theatre in Montreal – that, the story goes, killed him a few days later.

It is the beginning of Houdini’s end that forms the basis of novelist Steven Galloway’s much-anticipated followup to his 2008 novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo. The Confabulist reimagines the life and death of one of the world’s most sensational illusionists. And in alternating chapters, it tells the story of Martin Strauss, a character Galloway invents as the thrower of the Montreal punches that became the stuff of legend

“Houdini’s death has always really interested me,” Galloway explains during an interview in his book-filled office at the University of British Columbia, where he is acting chair of the Creative Writing program. Even more intriguing to the novelist: “What would it be like to be the guy who punched Harry Houdini in the stomach?”

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