Ezra Pound in his poem sequence "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" claimed that "The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace, / Something for the modern stage." With benefit of a hindsight denied to Pound, Timothy Findley in Famous Last Words takes up the challenge in a "prose cinema" of dazzling brilliance. Like his earlier novel The Wars, the story revolves around a man trapped in wartime events. Transforming Pound's poetic persona Hugh Mauberley into a plausible fictional character, Findley probes the meaning of history with such insight and skill that Famous Last Words becomes a leap forward in his work….

Through his uncanny descriptive powers, Findley moves outward from a base of facts to convey an atmosphere in which the "porcelain revery" of Pound's Mauberley poems is finally shattered as the civilized world cracks apart. (p. 53)

In a novel of wider scope than anything he has yet attempted, Findley...