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From Publishers Weekly The midlife crisis of Cary Grant, the founding of the KGB and the Neapolitan years of mafioso Lucky Luciano are just three of the plot lines woven into this dense, playful and always surprising literary behemoth set mostly in the year of the book's title, at the height of the Cold War. Anchoring the tale with a relatively conventional narrative is a young Bolognese man named Robespierre (Pierre), who embarks on a transcontinental odyssey to find his father, Vittorio Capponi, a former Mussolini loyalist who left the Italian army to join the Communists in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Britain's spy agency MI6 approaches Cary Grant (who's in a career slump) with a bizarre proposal: the role of Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito in a propaganda biopic. It seems impossible that the multitudinous names and story threads could converge, but, deliciously, they do—in Yugoslavia, where Grant meets Tito, Pierre finds his father, and Luciano's driver Steve "Cement" Zollo tangles with the KGB, which is about to pull off a big hit. The latest joint effort (after the novel Q) from Wu Ming—a collective of five Italian intellectuals who named themselves "anonymous" in Mandarin—offers political commentary–cum–complicated escapism for the brainiac reader. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From Booklist Written by members of an anonymous arts collective (wu ming apparently means "no name" in Mandarin Chinese), this sprawling survey of the dawning cold war era fittingly focuses on issues of reinvention, both personal and national. At journey's end, as one character puts it, "We will be the same, but we will be new." Moving with assured ease from northern Italy to Southern California, Yugoslavia, Russia, France, and Mexico, the narrative tracks characters ranging from appropriated Hollywood stars, gangsters, and heads of state to invented Italians forging a new postwar society--and even a sentient, deluxe-model McGuffin television that undergoes a tragicomic transformational arc all its own. The meatiest story concerns a young Bologna barkeep who pursues a dangerous affair with a doctor's wife while maintaining his standing as a local dance sensation and secretly longing to match the heroic achievements of his Communist partisan father and brother. This mix of literary thriller and sophisticated satire makes a tasty madcap dessert after the full meal of DeLillo's Underworld. Frank SennettCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more See all Editorial Reviews