Jonah Raskin

The title is accurate in that this is about a search much more than about the person being searched for. Its worth noting that the book - whose author claims he had a publisher's contract - was not published until five years after the events described which sounds problematic to me. There seem to be small imperceptible gaps in the story almost as though the author is studiously trying to remain unaware of a paucity of information on his subject. But this is to be expected when it comes to anyone who seeks anonymity, uses aliases, comes from no where and covers their tracks.

The author seems to be saying that forty years before he did his research B. Traven believed Mexico's indians' social problems were caused the creole and mestizo majority. The author of this book identifies the cause as the CIA and the American corporations with a presence in Mexico. Forty more years have passed since the book was published and now the cause seems to be the drug cartels and the Americans consuming their products. All that passage of time makes me wonder about B. Traven's continued relevance.

There are no photos in the book. Read one with the dust jacket which has four photos. See if you can decide if they show the same person.

I found only one typo, on page 118.

If you think you might be curious about B. Traven, the author of the novel on which the movie "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is based, read the Wikipedia entry first which looks pretty exhaustive.… (plus d'informations)

B. Traven's life was a mystery and this frank, earnest, even witty probe into the origins of the phantom novelist is no less inconclusive than other attempts to limn the life of the author who died still incognito in 1969. In 1975, Raskin was encouraged by Traven's widow, Rosa Elena Lujan, to visit her in Mexico City and with her write an authorized biography. Raskin found the Traven home to be a mausoleum where the clock in Traven's study had been stopped at the moment of his death--a museum of relics and artifacts, manuscripts, international editions of his works, and so on. Rosa Elena turned out to be as unintentionally obscuring as Traven himself; she was a social creature with no head for the sustained work of a biography, and yet eagerly poured out her conflicting stories as if each bit of confusion was equal in the Traven canon: "You know enough, and what you don't know I'll fill in," she told Raskin. So here again is mystery upon mystery. Traven's name may have been Ret Marut (his persona as a German actor-anarchist), though he had more than twenty aliases. In a life that seems not unlike that of the seaman Gerard Gales, protagonist in his first novel Death Ship, he tried unsuccessfully to "reestablish" American citizenship during World War I, claiming variously to have been born in San Francisco and Chicago. More glamorous is the story of his being the illegitimate child of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose picture hung in Traven's study. Raskin interviews acquaintances, each with his ax to grind about the elusive Traven, reads both the Traven correspondence and his notebooks; and even awakes one morning to find his numb arm turned into Traven's. But he decides finally that the only way to understand the sacred mystery of Traven is to study "the incorruptible treasure" in his books. It is an engaging and readable attempt to breach the veil of the mystery that is B. Traven's life.… (plus d'informations)