Posted by admin on January 29th, 2010
In a post to this blog yesterday, I reported that a fan of this blog had contacted me to say that a book review of The Lost Symbol had been published in Norway in advance of the novel’s publication. (You can read the post, with a link to the book review, in English and Norwegian, here.)
I can now say that the fan who informed me of this was the author of the book review, May Grethe Lerum (pictured). There has been a great deal of discussion in the comment section of my earlier post regarding the legitimacy of Ms. Lerum’s claim. I can say the following:
- Ms. Lerum has supplied me with scans of the title page and copyright page of the book. (The scans are for my eyes only and I am forbidden to share them. Don’t ask.) Either she is an accomplished forger (or knows one), which I doubt, or she really has the book.
- Ms. Lerum has posted her scan of the copyright page on her blog, which is available here.
- Ms. Lerum repeatedly expressed to me her concern that she did not wish to ruin the reading public’s pleasure regarding the book. I believe that this explains why she was so vague in her review, and why she was so sparing in her details of the book’s contents.
- I have no explanations for many other items: the discrepancy noted in the comments to the previous blog post regarding the train station; why the image is reversed above; why Ms. Lerum has creepy looking mice on her blog.
- On balance, I’d say she has the book. This would imply that her review (for which, see my previous post) is accurate in its synopsis of the novel.
Posted by admin on January 29th, 2010
You heard it here first.
Okay, so Amazon has its copies of The Lost Symbol behind double-locked fences in a warehouse. Okay, so, allegedly, Doubleday’s teams of translators are placed in windowless rooms without Internet access. There’s one thing they forgot about:
The book reviewers.
May Grethe Lerum has published a review of
The Lost Symbol in VG, Norway’s largest newspaper. You can read it in the original Norwegian
here. The Google translation into English — available
here — is not perfect, but it is at least largely intelligible, and good for endless fun; I love the way that it translates the review as saying that
The Lost Symbol is “a luminous bastard of a suspense story.” (I hope someone says that about one of
my novels some day.)
Lerum’s review is respectful, in that it does not give away major plot points. We do, however, learn the following:
- The novel revolves around Robert Landon’s attempt to save his beloved mentor, Peter Solomon. (So that’s where “The Solomon Key” comes in.)
- As in The Da Vinci Code, there is an important truth that mankind must learn, and a sicko pain-loving enemy, “with a hidden past and … many faces” who must be dealt with.
- Freemasonry is prominently featured in the novel, and it looks as if the Masons are the good guys.
- In the Dan Brown universe, Freemasonry includes such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Albrecht Durer.
- Famous physicists from history make appearances, including Isaac Newton, Erwin Schrodinger, and Neils Bohr.
- The reviewer hints at a religious outlook in the novel to the effect that no religion has a monopoly on the truth.
So, there’s enough here to really whet one’s appetite for the book, and yet not so much that it will spoil the experience of reading it.
Many thanks to the informant who notified me about this review.
Posted by admin on January 29th, 2010
Tonight I uploaded the first of a series of videos to YouTube regarding my take on the Doubleday clues and what they say about the content of The Lost Symbol. Enjoy. The first video itself is above; I also give links to the videos in the series here:
Part 1: What Is This Series About?
In a post to this blog yesterday, I reported that a fan of this blog had contacted me to say that a book review of The Lost Symbol had been published in Norway in advance of the novel’s publication. (You can read the post, with a link to the book review, in English and Norwegian, here.)
