Reviews for Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation

The average rating for Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-07-20 00:00:00 Steven Whirley Robert Littell's "Legends" is a pleasantly offbeat spy novel. It aspires to a degree of depth by attempting to investigate psychological effects of assuming different identities for different undercover assignments, but despite the pretentious subtitle "A novel of dissimulation", it does not quite work. The title word, 'legends', refers to fictitious life histories made up for an operative of a spy agency when preparing for a mission. Martin Odum is a private detective in Brooklyn, who - in his earlier incarnations as a CIA agent - might have been Dante Pippen, an Irish specialist on explosives, and Lincoln Dittmann, a college history professor and a Civil War expert. Or maybe these are three different people? Martin does not quite know. A Russian émigré, Stella, hires Martin in Brooklyn to find her sister's missing husband. The case takes Martin (and maybe also Dante and Lincoln) to such places as Israel, Prague in the Czech Republic, an island on the Aral Sea, banks of river Neman in Lithuania, and Moscow, Russia. This current-time (1997) plot thread is interleaved with various stories from Martin's, Dante's, and Lincoln's past. The stories are set in the 1987 - 1997 period and we travel to a Palestinian training camp in a Lebanese village and to the Triple Border region (where the borders of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet), which is the favorite meeting area of arms merchants. The book's most inspired story offers a nightmarishly vivid and sarcastically funny glimpse of the battle of Fredericksburg. It is hard to call "Legends" a novel. It is rather a collection of stories strung together by the Martin and Stella's thread. Some stories are hilarious, for instance, the one about Saint Gedymin's bones, while others are just standard spy fare. I like the juxtaposition of the explosive limb dispersal motif and the artificial limb distribution theme. If one skips the psychological pretense and occasionally boring stories, "Legends" is a good read. Three stars.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-12-13 00:00:00 Sylvia Fino First of all, I didn't read it, I listened to it. I can still hear the voice of the man, as he switched between accents and genders. The author has definitely a handle on details. His story is not drawn in pastels, but rather in pen with all the details clearly visible. It is the details themselves that sometimes make the narrative dry - on the other hand it is the details that make the book good. Go figure. I never tought people can lie so much - is the first thought that jumps into my head when I think of the novel. It seems that most characters who spoke - lied. And not just the spooks. Everyone lied about everything most of the time. And that made me wonder ... The main character and all of his personalities had one thing in common - they seemed not to experience their emotions conciously. They seemed silent - all of them- when it came to fear, anger, grief. They said nothing. What kept the story interesting for me, what drew me in wasn't so much the story itslef, but rather the inherent courage that the 'trio of the main character'possessed. I am fascinated by anyone who possesses that kind of a strength while being perfectly powerless.