{"product_id":"the-egyptologist-isbn-9780812972597","title":"The Egyptologist","description":"From the bestselling author of \u003ci\u003ePrague\u003c\/i\u003e comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed  novel about an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king.  This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the desert plains of Egypt in 1922,  then winds its way from the slums of Australia to the ballrooms of Boston by way  of Oxford, the battlefields of the First World War, and a royal court in turmoil.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Just as Howard Carter unveils the tomb of Tutankhamun, making the most dazzling find  in the history of archaeology, Oxford-educated Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush is digging  himself into trouble, having staked his professional reputation and his fiancée’s  fortune on a scrap of hieroglyphic pornography. Meanwhile, a relentless Australian  detective sets off on the case of his career, spanning the globe in search of a murderer.  And another murderer. And possibly another murderer. The confluence of these seemingly  separate stories results in an explosive ending, at once inevitable and utterly unpredictable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Arthur Phillips leads this expedition to its unforgettable climax with all the wit  and narrative bravado that made \u003ci\u003ePrague\u003c\/i\u003e one of the most critically acclaimed novels  of 2002. Exploring issues of class, greed, ambition, and the very human hunger for  eternal life, this staggering second novel gives us a glimpse of Phillips’s range  and maturity–and is sure to earn him further acclaim as one of the most exciting  authors of his generation.“A wildly pleasurable, dazzling reading experience, big in heart and execution: crazed, ecstatic, and entertaining in the deepest sense of the word. Arthur Phillips is a terrifically talented writer, and these pages overflow with wit, mad humor, and, finally, a deep undercurrent of pathos.”\u003cbr\u003e–GEORGE SAUNDERS, author of \u003ci\u003ePastoralia\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eCivil War Land in Bad Decline\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What a splendid, funny, bewitching book . . . Beneath Arthur Phillips’s singular wit and peerless comic timing, lies a spot-on parable of twentieth-century self-delusion and the painfully fruitless quest for immortality.”\u003cbr\u003e–GARY SHTEYNGART, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Russian Debutante’s Handbook\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The dueling voices of a nostalgic detective and the monomaniacal archaeologist he pursues around the world are only part of the treasure contained in \u003ci\u003eThe Egyptologist\u003c\/i\u003e. Crafted with nuanced erudition and literary flair, Phillips uncovers the hieroglyphs (not hieroglyphics–but you’ll learn that) and building blocks beneath how we construct, interpret, and trust our storytellers. Highly textured, quirky, serpentine, surprising.”\u003cbr\u003e–MATTHEW PEARL, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Dante Club\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eArthur Phillips \u003c\/b\u003eis the internationally bestselling author of three \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003eNotable Books—\u003ci\u003ePrague, \u003c\/i\u003ethe winner of the \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; \u003ci\u003eThe Song Is You; \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Tragedy of Arthur\u003c\/i\u003e—and \u003ci\u003eThe Egyptologist. \u003c\/i\u003eHe lives in New York.31 Dec. Sunset. Outside the tomb of Atum-hadu. On the Victrola 50: “I’m  Sitting on the Back Porch Swing (Won’t You Come Sit by Me, Dear?).”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy darling Margaret, my eternal Queen whose beauty astonishes the sun,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYour father and I are heading home tomorrow, back to you—the luxurious  riverboat north to Cairo, a night at that city’s Hotel of the Sphinx,  then by rail to Alexandria, and from there we have booked victorious  passage on the Italian steamer Cristoforo Colombo, ports of call Malta,  London, New York, from where we shall catch the very first train to you  in Boston. You shall embrace your fiancé and your father by 20 January.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUpon my return, our wedding will, of course, be our most pressing  business. Then, after refreshed preparations, I shall lead a second  expedition back here to Deir el Bahari to conduct a photographic survey  of the wall paintings and clear the artefacts and treasures from the  tomb. All that remains this evening is to seal up the tomb’s front,  leaving my find exactly as I discovered it. And then posting you this  package. My messenger is due here presently.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNothing stands in our way now, my darling. My success here, your  father’s reinstated blessing—all is precisely as I promised. You will  be relieved to know that your father and I are again fast friends.  (Thank you for your “warning” cable, but your father’s misplaced anger  back in Boston could never have survived his time here in my company!)  No, he congratulates me on my find (“our find, Trilipush!” he corrects  me), sleepily sends you his love, and sheepishly begs you to disregard  those foolish things he told you of me. He was under terrible strain,  surrounded by jealousy and intriguers, and now he is simply delighted  that I have forgiven him for succumbing, even for an instant, to such  corrosive lies. And now we are returning to you, just as you will  return to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf course, if you are reading this letter, then I have not, for reasons  I can only speculate, made it safely back to Boston and your embrace. I  did not arrive trailing clouds of immortal glory, did not drape around  your white throat this strand of whitest gold I am bringing you from  Atum-hadu’s tomb. And I did not, taking you gently aside, under the  double-height arched windows of your father’s parlour, brush away your  tears of joy at my safe return, and quietly ask you to give me as soon  as it arrives a package (this package), that you would be receiving  from me shortly, stamped with the alluring postage of far-off Egypt,  addressed to me in your care, to be opened by you only in case of my  extended and inexplicable absence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo, events will proceed just as I have foretold, and you will not read  this letter. I shall arrive before it, shall gently take it from you  before you open it, and all of this will be unread, unnecessary, a  precaution known to no one but me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut. But, Margaret. But. You have seen as clearly as anyone the  malevolence of those who would have us fail, and one never knows when  fatal accidents or worse might befall one. And so I am taking the  liberty of sending to you the enclosed journals. Dear God, may it all  arrive safely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMargaret, you are now holding, if the besuckered tentacles of my  enemies have not yet slithered into the Egyptian postal system, three  packets, arranged chronologically in order of composition. They open 10  October, with my arrival in Cairo at the Hotel of the Sphinx, thoughts  of you and our engagement party still effervescent in my head. Journal  entries never meant for publication are intermingled with those that  were, and with elements of the finished work. Much of the journal is a  letter to you, the letter I never found the right moment to send until  now. I intend to untangle all that back in Boston. The second packet  begins when I exhausted my supply of the hotel’s stationery and in its  place relied on the generosity of colleagues at the Egyptian  Government’s Antiquities Service; several score pages are on the  letterhead of the Service’s Director-General. Finally, I have nearly  filled one very handsome Lett’s #46 Indian and Colonial Rough Diary,  the preferred journals of British explorers whilst working in faraway  heat and sand, advancing knowledge at the risk of their very hides. Do  not worry: the pages torn from its back are none other than the pages  of this letter. Together the three documents compose the rough draft of  my indisputable masterwork, Ralph M. Trilipush and the Discovery of the  Tomb of Atum-hadu.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlso, I am enclosing the letters you have sent me here, your words,  kind and cruel intermingled. Seven letters, two cables, and the cable I  sent you that was thrown in my face yesterday. And your father’s cables  to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI just replaced the stylus, my last but one. This is a lovely song.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am trusting a boy to serve as my messenger to the post.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver time, Margaret, there is erosion. Sands abrade, rubble obscures,  papyri crumble, paints decay. Some of this is, of course, destructive.  But some erosion is clarifying, as it scours away false resemblances,  uncharacteristic lapses, confusing and inessential details. If, in the  course of writing my notes, I have made here and there a wrong turn,  misunderstood or badly described something I saw or thought I saw,  well, at the time one thinks, No matter, I shall edit when I return  home. And I shall. But, of course, should I be beaten to death and  shoved inside a gangly Earl’s travelling trunk and then hacked to  pieces and my shreds lazily flipped overboard to peckish sharks, well,  then, a pity indeed that I did not edit my work when I had the chance.  I shall then need a brilliant and courageous redactor who can puff away  dusty speculation to reveal stark, cold, obsidian and alabaster truth.  You will provide that clarifying erosion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe come to the crucial task I am entrusting to you, my  muse-become-executrix. You are now the guardian-goddess of all that I  have accomplished. These writings are the story of my discovery, my  trouncing of doubters and self-doubt. I am entrusting to you nothing  less than my immortality. I am relying on you, despite everything, for  whom else do I have? If something should happen to my body, then you  are now responsible—by opening this package, by reading these words—to  ensure that my name and the name of Atum-hadu never perish. It is the  least you can do for me, Margaret.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou will oversee the publication of this, my last work. Insist on a  large printing from a prestigious university press. Stamp your pretty  foot and demand shelf space in all major university libraries, as well  as with the major Egyptological museums in the USA, Britain, France,  Germany, Italy, and in Cairo. And the general public! Cover your ears,  Maggie! For there will be a clamour like no one has ever heard when the  news escapes. But hold them all at bay until you are ready. Do the work  as I am telling you, insist that the book be printed exactly as I say,  and give the vultures nothing else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI do not have time to edit just at the moment; events are moving too  fast here. And we leave tomorrow. So I shall do it myself when I arrive  safely home, but, allow me to provide contingent guidance if events  should unwind elsewise.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor example, as I look at them now, certainly some of the early  sketches seem not to have been entirely complete. The eye plays tricks  in dim light, when one is hurried, but the final drawings are  unquestionably precise, so those first efforts can go. And you will  extract my ongoing letter to you, my private or overly candid diary  entries here and there. What is only for you and what is for all the  world fall away from each other; the division is an easy one to see, if  you are careful. I was overeager as a diarist and as your correspondent  at the beginning. There is no need to publish anything about you and  me, the parties and the partnerships. I was excited, and for good  reason, Margaret, as history will attest. And I see now also some stray  meditation, releasing a little scholarly steam here and there, my  second guesses allowed some room to stumble about only to suffocate in  the open air. A careful reading, I beg of you, a careful reading in  private, careful editing, and then find a typist (call Vernon Collins),  use my illustrations from the notebooks, just the last group of them,  when Atum-hadu’s paradoxes were all clear, and I at last understood  what I was seeing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you must be my widow, M., then you will also be my wind. You will  gently erode away the inessential. I started crossing bits out just  now, but I do not have time, and I might cut into bone, so look here: I  shall make your work as simple as I can: the relevant material in  order: Kent, Oxford, the discovery of Fragment C with my friend, his  tragic end, you and I falling in love, your father’s investment,  Atum-hadu’s tomb in all its splendour, the insightful solution to his  Tomb Paradox, sealing up our find for a later return, your father and I  heading home, our unfortunate murder. Or not, of course. It could not  be clearer. Burn the rest as the marginalia of a scholar’s early  drafts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe sunset here is unlike anything I have ever seen. The colour as the  sun melts into the changing desert cliffs—such colours do not exist in  Boston or Kent. These are the hills and cliffs where my life’s story is  indelibly etched.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLast stylus. I do love this song.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf, Margaret, you are reading this letter, sobbing, horrified at your  double loss but girding yourself and your pen for the vital tasks ahead  of you, then I do not hesitate to accuse from here, before the  commission of the dreadful crime itself, the maniacal Howard Carter,  whose name you may perhaps have heard in recent weeks, the half-mad,  congenitally lucky bumbler who tripped over a stair and fell into the  suspiciously well-preserved tomb of some minor XVIIIth-Dynasty  boy-kinglet named Trite-and-Common and who, in his crippling jealousy,  has several times threatened my person in the past months, both whilst  sober and whilst intoxicated on a variety of local narcotic inhalants.  If I have neglected to note in my professional journals Carter’s  unceasing attitude of hostility and barely contained violence towards  me, such delicacy is only a pained professional courtesy to a  once-great explorer, and is, moreover, an example of that certain  bravura I have always displayed and you have always admired. Thus I  have ignored his repeated threats to make me and my “noble patron, Mr.  Chester Crawford Finneran, disappear inexplicably.” Obviously, should  your father and I not step off the Cristoforo Colombo in the port of  New York, you may be quite certain that we were done in by Carter or  one of his thugs, like his money-man, a lanky English Earl, whose mild  manner frays and scarcely covers a vicious character, stretch it though  he does, or by their hideous orange-haired confederate, whom you know  only too well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMost beautiful Margaret, these months have not lacked in  misunderstanding between us. But for all the harsh letters and harsher  silence you sent me, I know that your love for me remains just as my  love for you; there is nothing in this life that I value more highly  than your embrace. The gramophone recording has come to an end again  and now only wheezes in exhaustion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was my last stylus from the hundreds I brought with me. The  thought that I have seen you for the last time, that I shall never  again hold you, trembling in the breezes that dance through your  ballroom when the windows swing open to the garden, that the pallor of  your throat and the colour of your limbs will never again be revealed  to me seizes me so roughly that I can scarcely write now. I cannot bear  the thought that I shall never see you again. I cannot bear it. I  cannot bear that you will think of me as your father described me, not  as I really am, as I know you saw me, at the start. Please think of me  at our happiest, when you were most proud of me, when you found the  hero you had so long been seeking, the only man you could imagine, when  we talked of the world at our feet. Please think of me like that, my  darling darling. I love you more than you can know, in ways you will  never imagine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI will see you soon, my love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYour Ralph\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSunset on the Bayview Nursing Home\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSydney, Australia\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDecember 3, 1954\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDear Mr. Macy,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am in receipt of your letter of the 13th November and I’m delighted  to make your acquaintance, if only by post. I’m sickened to hear of  your lovely aunt Margaret’s passing. It’s my dearest wish that she  thought of me fondly now and again. We met in times of crisis, high  drama. You never forget those, I can tell you. She was a beautiful,  vibrant woman when I saved her back in ’22. I never saw her again after  I brought to justice the man who caused her suffering.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI’m certainly most intrigued by your “small request to tap into [my] no  doubt excellent memory.” True enough, sir, it is still excellent, and  I’ll make an extra effort to prove it to you. In my day, I was known  for having perfect recall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI might also add that you’re no insignificant sleuth yourself to have  tracked me here to this hellhole of a pensioners’ house, this human  wastebin, thirty years after the facts, young Mr. Macy. Should the  investigative field ever interest you professionally, I think you  well-suited, and that’s high praise, that is, coming from me. Of  course, maybe you’re the sort of fellow who doesn’t have to work at  all, eh?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo answer your first question, which maybe was only politeness showing  off your breeding, even in a letter to a stranger, but nevertheless,  the answer is: bored. Bored nearly to death, thanks, which I suspect is  the idea behind these places. Drink up the last of our savings and then  bore us to death to open up the narrow, sagging bed and one of the few  stinking pots to piss in, ’cause the next old fellow’s crossing his  legs for it.Author of Prague; National bestseller [quote]--San Francisco Chronicle","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303514722533,"sku":"NP9780812972597","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812972597.jpg?v=1767739142","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-egyptologist-isbn-9780812972597","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}