Love and Other Games of Chance

By Lee Siegel

Subjects: Mountaineers, Birthfathers, Rogues and vagabonds, Fiction, Fiction, action & adventure, Entertainers, Fiction, humorous, general, California, fiction, Jewish men, New York Times reviewed

Description: "The fantastic and flamboyant hero of Siegel's enchantingly playful new novel, Love and Other Games of Chance, is Isaac Schlossberg, circus performer, entertainer, and world traveler. The son of Jewish immigrants to America at the turn of the last century, Isaac spends his formative years in California, performing with his parents in traveling sideshows, Wild West jamborees, vaudeville, and early films. He travels to Calcutta in the 1920s and there assembles a troupe, Professor Solomon Serpentarius' Oriental Oddities and Indian Incredibilities, to take on tour to England. After playing in British music hall and variety theater, he later travels to Paris, where he works a stint in the Grand Guignol theater, and to Hollywood, where he finds himself starring as Ponce de Leon in a Hollywood movie produced by Jewish mobsters.". "Isaac organizes the tall tales of his past into one hundred chapters, or squares, as on the children's game snakes and ladders. As he travels geographically around the world and up and down the game board, he moves through the different phases of erotic love affairs with, among others, a Jewish tightrope walker, the daughter of a Hindu snake charmer, a mystical British aviatrix, a Folies-Bergere danseuse, and a Communist acrobat. The cast of characters in this fantastic literary novelty also includes sharpshooters and fortunetellers, mentalists, magicians, mesmerists, and midgets. There is a feral child, a tiger trainer, and a drunken albino bear, along with cameos from Buffalo Bill, Geronimo, Hitler, Bugsy Siegel, and the Abominable Snowman.". "The memorable players in this zany game are small and vulnerable people with oversized dreams and obsessive aspirations; they are all thrill seekers and fabulists, liars and con artists. Life in the carnival world of Love and Other Games of Chance is, above all else, a sumptuous entertainment, at once silly and grand, absurd yet full of meaning."--BOOK JACKET.