Walter Grond Almasy (Almasy) Haymon Verlag, July 2002. 320 pp. ISBN 3-852-18394-4 With The English Patient, both the book and the film, fame came at last to Lazlo Almasy, adventurer, explorer, agent, spy and pilot. Now his character is further explored, and his fame likely to be further enhanced, by the treatment he receives, again in fictional form, from the distinguished Austrian novelist Walter Grond, who burrows beneath the superficial appeal of the earlier treatments, where the love story was paramount, to reveal other and more tantalising facets of this mysterious and magnetic man: his homosexuality, his love of oriental culture, his talent for financial manipulation and his skill, when he needed to use it, in playing both sides against the middle. So here is a splendid mix: the tale with which everyone is familiar, sizzling with sex, Nazi politics, adventure and exotic settings, but now seen from a different angle and through a different pair of eyes. They are the eyes of Nicolas Lemden, the Austrian production manager of a car company sent to Egypt to promote a new desert vehicle named after the explorer. Lemden steps forward as the protagonist of the framing narrative. He is an arrogant, tetchy and ultimately frustrated character, half attracted and half repelled by his assistant Rita but giving the best he can in the way of real warmth to his friend Rupert and his dog. Hana, the Canadian nurse, turns up again in this version, but nursing not Almasy but an unidentified victim, falling for an Egyptian and ending up as a member of the smart, monied, Egyptian/European crowd. There she meets Lazlo, about whom new rumours continue to abound, making him even more fascinating than before. Intense in style, this is a complex, suspenseful, even lyrical and poetic narrative and surely a must for translation, not only because of the frequent appearance of real and famous characters, from Churchill and Unity Mitford on the British side to Rommel and Hitler himself among the Germans, but because, most of all, its focus is a historical figure more at home in the desert than in the salons of his peers.