A mild recommendation. An interesting scenario told in a brilliant format, with a disappointing ending. The dust jacket (as shown here on Goodreads), boasts of an unpredictable ending, but I (not the brightest or readers) saw it coming for at least half the book. This is a story of two men. The first is an Australian detective hired to find the lost, bastard, child of an English philanderer. The second is the Egyptologist, Ralph M. Trilipush, who is leaving his professorship at Harvard to find t...

Sometimes I question my sanity. Why I kept reading this tortured narrative, hoping against hope I would -- eventually -- find it to be as "witty, inventive, (and) brilliantly constituted" a novel as promised by the flyleaf copy, is quite beyond me. Especially given that I have authored flyleaf copy!

I considered giving this four stars instead of five, but I'm bumping it up because I think the Goodreads average is ranked low primarily for the "I don't like the characters" reason or the "I guessed the ending" reason, and frankly, while the characters are not all that likable, they are complex and surprising and highly memorable, and while I guessed the ending, I was still surprised by how it came about and what it all meant. The Egyptologist tells a story about the impossible quest for immort...

This book was so bad I'd be willing to burn it. The main character is repellent, the twist in the plot is apparent way too early, and it's generally vile.

This is my second time reading this book and I think it's brilliant. I admit to being predisposed to it. I've read Howard Carter's three-volume work describing his discovery of the tomb of boy-pharaoh Tutankhamen twice too, never wanting that to end either. Here, Phillips gets it all right. What a perfect ear he has for the language, style, and cadences of that era. He captures it all, then turns it on its ear. The book is alternately witty, wise, darkly comic, achingly beautiful, wildly funny,

Fantastic book! One that operates on so many levels... Character study; satire; mystery/thriller. An Egyptologist goes off to find some legendary tomb shortly after WWI. Through his correspondence with his fiance (the daughter of his financier), we learn much about the man--maybe more than he would like us to know. Thirty years later, another set of correspondence from a provate investigator throws a different light on the situation. This is one of those books that gets me wondering how on earth...

To describe his frenetic creation Wile E. Coyote, the great cartoonist Chuck Jones liked to quote the philosopher George Santayana: ''A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.'' Ralph Trilipush, the title character of Arthur Phillips' novel ''The Egyptologist,'' is a bit like that. He doesn't get bonked with any anvils, but he has the Coyote's single-minded self-destructiveness, working himself deeper into a mess when the wiser course would be to cut and run. ''The...

Wasn't sure what to expect from this book, but the synopsis sounded interesting. Once I started it, however, I was absolutely hooked. Set alternatively in the relative future (1960's, I believe) and the early 20th c., it is an epistolary novel that tells the story from two entirely (and usually contradictory) viewpoints: a young Egyptologist eager to make a name for himself even while Howard Carter is discovering the archeological find of a lifetime, and an Australian detective bent on finding a...

I heart unreliable narrators, and this book is full of 'em. Set in 1922, it tells the tale of Ralph Trilipush's quest to find the tomb of an apocryphal king/erotic poet named Atum-hadu (which translates to Atum-Is-Aroused). Amusingly, his expedition is concurrent with Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of King Tut.The story is mostly in the form of Ralph's journal, which he is specifically writing to document his findings to be published as a book. He also adds in loving messages to his fianc...

Yesterday on the plane back home to North Carolina I finished Arthur Phillips’ second novel, The Egyptologist. The book had been recommended to me by one of my mother’s friends, and reading the praise on the back and inside covers, nearly all of which mentioned Nabokov, I decided that it would be worth my time. Wrong. I am left wondering if any of those critics has actually read Vladimir Vladimirovich’s work. Phillips is very obviously, even painfully so, trying to be Nabokovian: unreliable narr...

One of the strangest pieces of fiction I've ever read, but enjoyable. This epistolary novel moves back and forth from 1922 Egypt and America and 1954 Sydney, Australia. It consists of entries in a journal of an archaeologist, Ralph Trilipush, on the track on the tomb of an obscure king, Atum hadu [Atum-is-Aroused] who has written erotic verse; letters and cables to and from his [Ralph's] betrothed; and correspondence from a retired detective, Ferrell, in an old folks' home in Sydney to a certain...

Recommended for Nabokov fans, amateur archeologists, opium addicts, people who address each other as “Ducks”.The old “unreliable narrator” gambit. Taking the book as a whole, it’s easy to dismiss this book as a failed attempt at pulling off the conceit. As I was reading, it held together until about the final quarter of the book. This is a funny, engaging book whose parts are better than the finished product and ultimately a engaging commentary on immortality and madness.

Should you find yourself entombed in ancient Egypt, hope that your minions included a copy of Arthur Phillips's new novel among the gilded tools and ebony furniture. It'll make the time fly, and it's practically bright enough to read by its own light. "Yes, Ra, that Underworld sounds great, but I really want to get back to my book.""The Egyptologist" is nothing like Phillips's bestselling debut, "Prague" (2002), and yet it's full of all the dazzling talent he showed there. Presented as a collect...

I didn’t liked this book at all.. Think that it is waste of time. Was difficult even to read it. I really like history, and therefore was expecting much from it… But my expectations didn’t fulfill.

Phillips, whose work in his debut novel, Prague, gained much acclaim manages to string together a dull, predictable, overly verbose, and frustrating "mystery" novel in The Egyptologist. Having figured out what happened by the time the first third of the novel was over, I was left to slog through this remaining avalanche of words only to be provided with a tremendously unimaginative and thoroughly unsatisfying explanation of what happened.And what a slog it was. Told exclusively through letters w...

Imagine coming across a mound of papers scattered across a desk or perhaps dumped in a box. Imagine that these papers span decades and are letters, interviews, journals and other correspondence. Now imagine that the only way to make any sense of them is to pick up and read each and every page. Now you know what it's like to read The Egyptologist.It's by no means an easy book to read. There are 416 pages of in a tiny typeface with no chapter breaks and no rhyme or reason to how the information is...

I must say, this was a very interesting work; it's very hard to discuss it without spoilers, so I'll try to be as vague as possible.First off -- it's about Egypt (I know, shocking, right?). If you couldn't care less about Egypt, give this one a pass.The book itself is extremely well-crafted. Meticulously so. This is a positive and a negative; on the positive side, it's engaging and easily appreciated. On the negative, it's a little too well-crafted for a book that is, in essence, simply letters

This book had a lot of things going for it. For one, it was funny. I don't often laugh out loud when I read books, but I cracked up several times during the course of this one. The author has a tremendous knack for phrasing, and it's used to full advantage during the funnier parts of this novel. But, there's a whole lot more going on here. The story presents itself as a puzzle. We are given journals and letters from the characters, and the true mystery of the novel is trying to find out where th...

Begins as a delicious satire set during the post-WWI mania for Egyptian exploration/exploitation; descends into a dark maze of plot twists that feels as if the reader is being led by torchlight into a newly opened tomb by a most untrustworthy guide. Part adventure story, part history, part psychological horror, with more twists than an M. Night Shamalan film. The audiobook is performed by a splendid ensemble including Simon Prebble. I’m so sorry this book is over.

Arthur Phillips might be an evil genius; in real life the man is a Jeopardy! champion, after all!If I hadn't known better, I'd absolutely believe that an aged Australian with a working-class chip on his shoulder, a troubled young American woman and others actually did exist, and that I actually read their letters. This ability to contort his voice so well by mixing up the vocabulary & the rhythms of his characters' speech so smoothly is part of this man's genius. Another part of this genius is t...