Resumo de The King David Report

The King David Report
A retelling of one of the oldest stories in the world, Bathsheba is an account of the later part of King David's rule. It is an earthy, emotional novel full of vividly memorable characters, who attain mythic status while retaining their humanity. The familiar figures ? Uriah the Hittite, Tamar, Absalom, David, Amnon, Joab, Mephibosheth, Nathan and, above all, Bathsheba herself ? and a couple of original minor characters are given room to grow and really come to life. More than just the story is taken from the Old Testament; Lindgren's language has the cadence of biblical models and he handles the powerful (and easily misused) tool of mytho-poetic abstraction with skill. Despite a similar setting, Stefan Heym's The King David Report is a very different novel. It tells the story behind the creation of the biblical account of King David's rule. Ethan the historian is called upon by king Solomon to write The One and Only True and Authoritative, Historically Correct and Officially Approved Report on the Amazing Rise, God-fearing Life, Heroic Deeds and Wonderful Achievements of David, Son of Jesse. He has to balance his own commitment to the truth with the conflicting views of various court factions as to what should be included. The result is both a kind of historical mystery, with the real events of the reign of David gradually revealed through Ethan's investigations, and a political satire (Stefan Heym was an East German, familiar with historical revisionism). This aspect isn't laboured, however, and the result is an entertaining, humorous novel with a serious kernel. The King David Report is one of my favourite historical novels.

Both The King David Report and Bathsheba will be enjoyed by devotees of historical fiction; both are fine novels in any context. While both Lindgren and Heym have used the text of the Old Testament as a launching pad, reading between the lines of the biblical account and offering their own guess at the reality behind the words, their novels evoke very different worlds. The King David Report stresses the similarities between the past and the present; the world of Bathsheba is both more immediate and more alien. My advice is to avoid making a choice and to read both.

In this retelling of the biblical story, King Solomon commissions Ethan the Scribe to write the official history of King David. In return for the finest cooking in the land and the wages of a minor prophet, Ethan must write a proper record, full of glory and battles, statecraft and honor--a tribute to David and, of course, to Solomon, his heir. But as Ethan explores the story, he finds another life hidden behind the iron curtain dividing past from present: the story of a David who seduced, lied, bragged, and plundered his way to power. Ethan wonders: which life should be reported in the King David Report?

Hellmuth Flieg (April 10, 1913 - December 16, 2001) was a German - Jewish writer, known by his pseudonym Stefan Heym. He lived in the United States (or served in its army abroad) between 1935 and 1952, before moving back to the part of his now-partitioned native Germany which was the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany). He published works in English and German at home and abroad, and despite longstanding criticism of the GDR remained a committed socialist

Early life
Helmut Flieg, born to a Jewish merchant family in Chemnitz, was an antifascist from an early age. In 1931 he was, at the instigation of local Nazis, expelled from the Gymnasium in his home town because of an anti-military poem. He completed school in Berlin, and began a degree in media studies there. After the 1934 Reichstag fire he fled to Czechoslovakia, where he took the name Stefan Heym.

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