Lately, for a variety of excellent reasons, we've been engrossed in discussions regarding: What constitutes the perfect man? Skills? Looks? Brains? Stature? Physique? Do clothes make the man or do they hide the flaws?It's also the height summer, a time of increased leisure reading. I've been asked numerous times: Can you recommend a book?
Therefore, what could be more appropriate this particular summer than a book featuring 'the perfect man'?
Trevanian wrote "Shibumi" in 1979. It took me several years before I happened upon a hardcover First Edition. Prior to that I'd read "Shibumi" more than once, which is unusual for me, and I'd bought every paperback that I chanced upon at garage sales as presents to pass to 'reading friends'. The paperbacks' covers tout five million(?) eleven million(?) TWENTY million(??) copies sold; my husband regularly accused me of buying all twenty(??) million copies.
From the dust jacket:
"In Nicolai Hel, Trevanian has created the perfect assassin for our times: a man wrought out of the crucible of war and devastation. Brought up in China by his aristocratic Russian mother, he found strength and education in the arms of his Japanese warrior foster father, who instilled in him the determination to attain shibumi. Shibumi is a word like charisma. Literally, shibumi means the essence of beauty. But by extension it has come to mean a rare kind of personal excellence.
"Nicholai Hel is taught by the Japanese devastation of China and the American devastation of Japan during World War II an ineradicable loathing fro political killing. But it is killing to which he turns, using his nearly superhuman mental and physical prowess to destroy political terrorists - from the PLO to the CIA.
"...ranging through the subterranean caves of the Basque country to the elegant manor houses of Britain, he demonstrates why he is considered the world's most dangerous man."
The hauteur and perfection of Nicolai Hel has never failed to intrigue me. He even lives in an awesome house. This is a book or all of the guys out there who enjoy our work, and who work along beside us. Nicolai Hel might be a ladies' man, but this is not a ladies' book.
