In the Palace of the Movie King - Tapa dura

Gonchev, schooled in Japan by disciples of Kurosawa, admits to only one citizenship: Film. As Director, making movies for a Balkan enclave, he, together with his vast movie lot and sets, is already a legend. He finds himself an honored prisoner, and his grim hosts, including the "Committee," in this unforgettable seriocomic world will not release him to see the great cities of his remarkable imagination.
Vuksica, his splendidly loyal wife, once a wanton movie star, plans otherwise. She takes a brigand lover. Gonchev is shanghaied out, not to the Paris of his dreams but to the U.S.A.
Taken to be one of our once-adored "dissidents," he is paraded on the college circuit. Accompanied by the touching Roko, his translator and mistress, carrying as talisman a gutted camera, he encounters New York, tours the heartland, then emerges into a California earthquake. He has seen America, from its sad streets to its billionaire countrysides, with his film-loving eye.
This is a novel out of the world of Milan Kundera, Heinrich Boll, and Danilo Kis, as international as an airplane, flying beyond the political. Immensely quotable, like Gonchev himself, it has the tenor of a European film, with an opera of characters, all singing for their lives.
Once more, Calisher astounds.