Fastovski's Tales of Hampstead

And significant reminiscences of misspent youth

Wallace Fields

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781398497580
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Biographies de sciences sociales

Imagine that Isaac Babel's Cossacks wassail together with Runyonesque Liverpool Jews outside the plate-glass window of a Hampstead café where a Klezmer band is playing to a packed and tea-drinking congregation of jazzmen, Hasidic scholars, surrealists, old soldiers, and retired strippers; and you have the tone and temperature of this unique and unclassifiable memoir – no, not memoir, more a stream-of-consciousness novella – no, not a novella but a piece of autobiographical fiction – no, not autobiography but a picaresque drama conquered from the unreliable and fertile brain of the eponymous Fastovski.And who is Fastovski? Is he real or invented? Is he perhaps the alter-ego of real-life jazz pianist, Klezmer swinger, big band leader and flaneur, Wallace Fields, who stares at us from the book's frontispiece in shades, Diaghilev coat and moustache, over a cup of strong black coffee? Fastovski's not telling and anyway, who cares.This is a book to be devoured, disseminated, denounced, and delighted in. It belongs to all who think art and life are one and that the Arch-Savant of Canterbury, Issy Bonn, Rashid the Manic Berber Chef of NW3, and Mrs Karl Popper, have an equal claim on history. I haven't had such a good time since I shared Sir Ralph Richardson's motorbike with a parrot and a striking grandmother clock.Piers PlowrightAugust 2008

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Biography
• Copyright Information ©
• Synopsis
• Chapter One Bartek’s Apple Pie
• Chapter Two Uncle Hymie
• Chapter Three Issy Is or Issy Ain’t
• Chapter Four Scots Wha’ Hey!
• Chapter Five Whatever Happened to Terry Tan?
• Chapter Six Moss Bros
• Chapter Seven Warrior Avyn
• Chapter Eight Popper’s Private Army
• Chapter Nine Ward
• Chapter Ten The Red Shadow
• Chapter Eleven Confederate Liverpool