Dimensions
130 x 197 x 50mm
Norman Lewis was the best not-famous writer of his generation, and a better writer than almost all who were. Critics who judged his works of travel and non-fiction as lower than the yardstick of artistic genius represented by the novel have ignored the truth that from the 1950s to the 1990s he wrote books that have survived better than all but a handful of novels.
A pharmacist's son from Enfield, Lewis (1908-2003) became unmatched as a witness to his times. His account of south-east Asia before the Vietnam war, A Dragon Apparent, remains required reading. Voices of the Old Sea, a glimpse of pre-tourist Spain, is a classic in the literature of the Mediterranean. His memoir of wartime Naples, Naples '44, is a masterpiece.
For more than 20 years Lewis spied for the British government. He raced Bugattis before the war, lived in Ibiza after it, and was a crack shot, flamboyant host, and businessman with mafia connections, leading a life of such self-pleasing freedom that his existence at times was closer to a rock star's than anyone else's.
Published to mark Norman Lewis' centenary, Julian Evans' Semi Invisible Man is a fascinating personal view of a suburban fugitive and adventurer; a writer of unsurpassed humour, wisdom and compassion for the ridiculous; the Defoe of our times.
