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Splendeurs et fureurs
Par une brumeuse matinée de 1934, Elvira Western quitte son confort londonien et son mari pour rejoindre à Paris son jeune amant, Oliver Fenton, un étudiant anglais exalté. Mais, rapidement, l’escapade se transforme en journées languides dans les cafés de Saint-Germain-des-Prés en compagnie de journalistes débauchés, de bourgeois extravagants et d’une danseuse de cabaret désargentée.
De flûtes de champagne en apéritifs, de déconvenues amoureuses en rencontres nocturnes surréelles, Elvira doute de son choix, jusqu’à regretter sa vie avec Paul, son époux, qui tente de la reconquérir.
Ce drame romantique avant-gardiste dépeint, dans le Paris fantasmagorique et électrique de l’entre-deux-guerres, les passions paradoxales d’une femme trop intelligente, espiègle et inconstante pour aimer.
Traduction de l’anglais (Australie) par Lori Saint-Martin et Paul Gagné.
De flûtes de champagne en apéritifs, de déconvenues amoureuses en rencontres nocturnes surréelles, Elvira doute de son choix, jusqu’à regretter sa vie avec Paul, son époux, qui tente de la reconquérir.
Ce drame romantique avant-gardiste dépeint, dans le Paris fantasmagorique et électrique de l’entre-deux-guerres, les passions paradoxales d’une femme trop intelligente, espiègle et inconstante pour aimer.
Traduction de l’anglais (Australie) par Lori Saint-Martin et Paul Gagné.
478 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1936
5 people are currently reading
283 people want to read
About the author
Christina Stead
39 books127 followersChristina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian writer regarded as one of the twentieth century’s master novelists. Stead spent most of her writing life in Europe and the United States, and her varied residences acted as the settings for a number of her novels. She is best known for The Man Who Loved Children (1940), which was praised by author Jonathan Franzen as a “crazy, gorgeous family novel” and “one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.” Stead died in her native Australia in 1983.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 24, 2015
Set in Paris in 1934, this deeply impressive novel depicts a haunting and haunted city, one full of self-absorbed lovers, of Freudian obsessions and sexual tension, of betrayal. It engages with issues of female independence in powerful and profound ways,which often feel way ahead of their time. There is a strong critique of commodity capitalism, and Hegel, Marx and all the rest are discussed throughout, but the socialist characters remain ultimately self-serving - Stead has far too realistic a concept of humanity to believe any of our performed idealism. She weaves her Marxism and her feminism together, so that the economic content has everything to do with the novel's discussion of female beauty and romantic idealism.
The prose is baroque, with riffs of linguistic complexity that, at times, rival those of Alexander Theroux or William Gass. There is a misanthropy in the pronouncements of the most Mephistophelian character, who takes great pleasure in manipulating and mocking the love-addled and childishly romantic lovers. Both of these things are big ticks for me, but I can see how some may be irritated or off-put by them.
A simple test - if the following makes you laugh and tickles your prose-bones, there will be much for you to like here: "He had the sour insouciance of a pedigreed dyspeptic."
Anyway...I found a good review of Stead from Angela Carter so will reproduce some of it here - she remains criminally under-read. DFW apparently thought highly of The Man who loved Children and his edition with notation is at the Harry Ransom Center. Does that get any of you interested?
When The Beauties and Furies appeared in the US, Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker: "I cannot see how anyone can deny Miss Stead's position as the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf."
From Angela Carter's review at the LRB:
"To open a book, any book, by Christina Stead and read a few pages is to be at once aware that one is in the presence of greatness. Yet this revelation is apt to precipitate a sense of confusion, of strangeness, even of acute anxiety, not only because Stead has a devastating capacity to flay the reader’s sensibilities, but also because we have grown accustomed to the idea that we live in pygmy times. To discover that a writer of so sure and unmistakable a stature is still amongst us, and, more, produced some of her most remarkable work as recently as the Sixties and Seventies, is a chastening thing. Especially since those two relatively recent novels – Cotters’ England (1966) and Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife) (1976) – contain extremely important analyses of post-war Britain, address the subject of sexual politics at a profound level, and have been largely ignored in comparison with far lesser novels such as Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. To read Stead, now, is to be reminded of how little, recently, we have come to expect from fiction. Stead is of that category of fiction writer who restores to us the entire world, in its infinite complexity and inexorable bitterness, and never asks if the reader wishes to be so furiously enlightened and instructed, but takes it for granted that this is the function of fiction. She is a kind of witness and a kind of judge, merciless, cruel and magnificently unforgiving.
...Furthermore, although she has always written from a profound consciousness of what it is to be a woman, she writes, as they say, ‘like a man’: that is, she betrays none of the collusive charm which is supposedly a mark of the feminine genius. As a result, because she writes as a woman, not like a woman, Randall Jarrell could say of The Man Who Loved Children (1940): ‘a male reader worries: “Ought I to be a man?” ’
Jarrell thought that The Man Who Loved Children was by far Stead’s best novel and believed its commercial and critical failure blighted her subsequent development. (Why did he say that? Was it revenge for having his machismo deflated?) However, at least three of her other novels – I’d say For Love Alone (1945), A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948) and Cotters’ England (1945) – equal that extraordinary novel, and in some ways surpass it, while Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) is, unusually for Stead, a fully-achieved comic novel of a most original kind. But none of her work is negligible....
...Stead’s fictional method obviously presupposes a confidence in the importance of fiction as the exposition of the real structures on which our lives are based. It follows that she has gained a reputation as a writer of naturalism, so much so that, in her introduction to the Virago edition of The Beauties and Furies, Hilary Bailey seems disconcerted that ‘this great writer of naturalism’ should have produced a novel so resistant to a naturalist reading. (Any novel in which a prostitute advertises her wares by reciting the poetry of Baudelaire is scarely in the tradition of George Gissing.) Stead is certainly not a writer of naturalism nor of social realism, and if her novels are read as novels about our lives, rather than about the circumstances that shape our lives, they are bound to disappoint, because the naturalist or high-bourgeois mode works within the convention that there exists such a thing as ‘private life’. In these private lives, actions are informed by certain innate inner freedoms and, however stringent the pressures upon the individual, there is always a little margin of autonomy which could be called ‘the self’. For Stead, however, ‘private life’ is itself a socially-determined fiction, the ‘self’ is a mere foetus of autonomy which may or may not prove viable, and ‘inner freedom’, far from being an innate quality, is a precariously-held intellectual position that may be achieved only at the cost of enormous struggle, often against the very grain of what we take to be human feeling"
found here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n17/angela-c...
The prose is baroque, with riffs of linguistic complexity that, at times, rival those of Alexander Theroux or William Gass. There is a misanthropy in the pronouncements of the most Mephistophelian character, who takes great pleasure in manipulating and mocking the love-addled and childishly romantic lovers. Both of these things are big ticks for me, but I can see how some may be irritated or off-put by them.
A simple test - if the following makes you laugh and tickles your prose-bones, there will be much for you to like here: "He had the sour insouciance of a pedigreed dyspeptic."
Anyway...I found a good review of Stead from Angela Carter so will reproduce some of it here - she remains criminally under-read. DFW apparently thought highly of The Man who loved Children and his edition with notation is at the Harry Ransom Center. Does that get any of you interested?
When The Beauties and Furies appeared in the US, Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker: "I cannot see how anyone can deny Miss Stead's position as the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf."
From Angela Carter's review at the LRB:
"To open a book, any book, by Christina Stead and read a few pages is to be at once aware that one is in the presence of greatness. Yet this revelation is apt to precipitate a sense of confusion, of strangeness, even of acute anxiety, not only because Stead has a devastating capacity to flay the reader’s sensibilities, but also because we have grown accustomed to the idea that we live in pygmy times. To discover that a writer of so sure and unmistakable a stature is still amongst us, and, more, produced some of her most remarkable work as recently as the Sixties and Seventies, is a chastening thing. Especially since those two relatively recent novels – Cotters’ England (1966) and Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife) (1976) – contain extremely important analyses of post-war Britain, address the subject of sexual politics at a profound level, and have been largely ignored in comparison with far lesser novels such as Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. To read Stead, now, is to be reminded of how little, recently, we have come to expect from fiction. Stead is of that category of fiction writer who restores to us the entire world, in its infinite complexity and inexorable bitterness, and never asks if the reader wishes to be so furiously enlightened and instructed, but takes it for granted that this is the function of fiction. She is a kind of witness and a kind of judge, merciless, cruel and magnificently unforgiving.
...Furthermore, although she has always written from a profound consciousness of what it is to be a woman, she writes, as they say, ‘like a man’: that is, she betrays none of the collusive charm which is supposedly a mark of the feminine genius. As a result, because she writes as a woman, not like a woman, Randall Jarrell could say of The Man Who Loved Children (1940): ‘a male reader worries: “Ought I to be a man?” ’
Jarrell thought that The Man Who Loved Children was by far Stead’s best novel and believed its commercial and critical failure blighted her subsequent development. (Why did he say that? Was it revenge for having his machismo deflated?) However, at least three of her other novels – I’d say For Love Alone (1945), A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948) and Cotters’ England (1945) – equal that extraordinary novel, and in some ways surpass it, while Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) is, unusually for Stead, a fully-achieved comic novel of a most original kind. But none of her work is negligible....
...Stead’s fictional method obviously presupposes a confidence in the importance of fiction as the exposition of the real structures on which our lives are based. It follows that she has gained a reputation as a writer of naturalism, so much so that, in her introduction to the Virago edition of The Beauties and Furies, Hilary Bailey seems disconcerted that ‘this great writer of naturalism’ should have produced a novel so resistant to a naturalist reading. (Any novel in which a prostitute advertises her wares by reciting the poetry of Baudelaire is scarely in the tradition of George Gissing.) Stead is certainly not a writer of naturalism nor of social realism, and if her novels are read as novels about our lives, rather than about the circumstances that shape our lives, they are bound to disappoint, because the naturalist or high-bourgeois mode works within the convention that there exists such a thing as ‘private life’. In these private lives, actions are informed by certain innate inner freedoms and, however stringent the pressures upon the individual, there is always a little margin of autonomy which could be called ‘the self’. For Stead, however, ‘private life’ is itself a socially-determined fiction, the ‘self’ is a mere foetus of autonomy which may or may not prove viable, and ‘inner freedom’, far from being an innate quality, is a precariously-held intellectual position that may be achieved only at the cost of enormous struggle, often against the very grain of what we take to be human feeling"
found here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n17/angela-c...
February 1, 2021
Rebecca West described Christina Stead in her early career as ‘insanely ambitious’. Nowhere is this ambition more manifest than in her second novel, ‘The Beauties and Furies’, set in Paris in the mid-1930s where Stead was living and working. It’s not a long book―‘House of All Nations’ which followed it is over twice its length―nor is the story original, on the contrary: a bored English housewife, Elvira, leaves her dull steady husband, Paul, for an affair in Paris with a younger student, Oliver, all playing out with predictable consequences. There are Stead’s standard leftist political rants, but these are just persiflage; bourgeois values, despite being mocked, seemed to hold up pretty well by the end. Rather, Stead’s ambition is in the extended prose phantasmagorias with which she ‘gussies up’ her familiar tale of ‘illicit’ love.
At one point Oliver opines: ‘All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor’. Since this novel is the first, it is almost as though Stead is challenging herself to craft an extraordinary work from ordinary material. ‘The trials of three’ refers not so much to the abandoned husband, who does make a later cameo appearance, but rather to a Machiavellian businessman lace-buyer, Marpurgo, whom Elvira meets on the Paris train and acts as an arch manipulator between the lovers. The character dynamic here, and the setting, is recognisably the same as that in Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Magician’, which Stead would have known, however she moves off on a different tack.
There are a few other players in a fairly restricted cast: Marpurgo’s squabbling business partners, an eccentric family of traditional lace makers (capitalism is destroying art and craft), and a Baudelaire reciting actress/grisette, Blanche, mascot of underworld Paris. But largely we are focused on the trials and tribulations of the Elvira and Oliver and Marpurgo. The characters generally have not the depth and development of those in Stead’s first novel, ‘Seven Poor Men of Sydney’, and this is probably because she has invested less in them.
I mention Maugham but Stead’s literary inspiration here is Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, very much in writers’ minds at the time, in which, again, an ordinary tale is gussied up in an extraordinary way. Thankfully, Stead does not adopt a stream-of-consciousness technique, so her book is easily readable. Where she takes her cue from Joyce is in the prose flights mentioned above which are surrealist/Freudian ‘trips’ or nightmares, most like the dramatised ‘brothel’ section of Ulysses. Whereas in ‘Ulysses’ all the mythical and Freudian paraphernalia is fully integrated into the text, in Stead’s book it is as though the characters, particularly Marpurgo, occasionally just happen to drop into a ‘Daliesque’ landscape which they proceed to describe in vivid linguistic detail. What these ‘trips’, ‘flights’, have to do with the actual story at hand is not readily apparent, to this reader anyway.
So one’s appreciation here hinges pretty much on whether you take to this, or can get into it in some way. It’s almost as if Stead has placed a kind of surrealist template or transfer over her work, but to what end? The only time it makes direct dramatic sense is when Oliver is actually drugged by Marpurgo so his hallucinations have rational (of sorts) basis. Virtually all of Marpugo’s conversations are in this wild baroque vein, and so completely incredible. Even in Paris cafés people don’t talk like this, and hardly anyone anywhere thinks like this, but if the language employed is brilliant, gorgeous and imaginative enough, does that matter?
While I can hardly ignore that ‘Ulysses’ is one of the touchstones of (relatively) modern literature, it is a work I have never taken to. Despite the unrelenting display of amazing linguistic and imaginative fireworks, to cut short a potentially very long aside, my basic problem is that it is largely about Joyce and not itself. This may be a writer’s rather than a reader’s prejudice or a classicist’s rather than a romantic’s, whatever, but I have always liked to keep, as much as possible, in a literary sense, the object in clear view with minimum clutter. There is an episode in Stead’s novel where the lovers travel to Fontainebleau in winter in which a fantastic landscape is only about themselves, and it is profound and moving.
But let me not knock ambition, and the promise here is evident, however it would find a more powerful and complete expression in Stead’s later works. Still, if this kind of thing is your cup of morphia, don’t let me dissuade you.
At one point Oliver opines: ‘All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor’. Since this novel is the first, it is almost as though Stead is challenging herself to craft an extraordinary work from ordinary material. ‘The trials of three’ refers not so much to the abandoned husband, who does make a later cameo appearance, but rather to a Machiavellian businessman lace-buyer, Marpurgo, whom Elvira meets on the Paris train and acts as an arch manipulator between the lovers. The character dynamic here, and the setting, is recognisably the same as that in Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Magician’, which Stead would have known, however she moves off on a different tack.
There are a few other players in a fairly restricted cast: Marpurgo’s squabbling business partners, an eccentric family of traditional lace makers (capitalism is destroying art and craft), and a Baudelaire reciting actress/grisette, Blanche, mascot of underworld Paris. But largely we are focused on the trials and tribulations of the Elvira and Oliver and Marpurgo. The characters generally have not the depth and development of those in Stead’s first novel, ‘Seven Poor Men of Sydney’, and this is probably because she has invested less in them.
I mention Maugham but Stead’s literary inspiration here is Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, very much in writers’ minds at the time, in which, again, an ordinary tale is gussied up in an extraordinary way. Thankfully, Stead does not adopt a stream-of-consciousness technique, so her book is easily readable. Where she takes her cue from Joyce is in the prose flights mentioned above which are surrealist/Freudian ‘trips’ or nightmares, most like the dramatised ‘brothel’ section of Ulysses. Whereas in ‘Ulysses’ all the mythical and Freudian paraphernalia is fully integrated into the text, in Stead’s book it is as though the characters, particularly Marpurgo, occasionally just happen to drop into a ‘Daliesque’ landscape which they proceed to describe in vivid linguistic detail. What these ‘trips’, ‘flights’, have to do with the actual story at hand is not readily apparent, to this reader anyway.
So one’s appreciation here hinges pretty much on whether you take to this, or can get into it in some way. It’s almost as if Stead has placed a kind of surrealist template or transfer over her work, but to what end? The only time it makes direct dramatic sense is when Oliver is actually drugged by Marpurgo so his hallucinations have rational (of sorts) basis. Virtually all of Marpugo’s conversations are in this wild baroque vein, and so completely incredible. Even in Paris cafés people don’t talk like this, and hardly anyone anywhere thinks like this, but if the language employed is brilliant, gorgeous and imaginative enough, does that matter?
While I can hardly ignore that ‘Ulysses’ is one of the touchstones of (relatively) modern literature, it is a work I have never taken to. Despite the unrelenting display of amazing linguistic and imaginative fireworks, to cut short a potentially very long aside, my basic problem is that it is largely about Joyce and not itself. This may be a writer’s rather than a reader’s prejudice or a classicist’s rather than a romantic’s, whatever, but I have always liked to keep, as much as possible, in a literary sense, the object in clear view with minimum clutter. There is an episode in Stead’s novel where the lovers travel to Fontainebleau in winter in which a fantastic landscape is only about themselves, and it is profound and moving.
But let me not knock ambition, and the promise here is evident, however it would find a more powerful and complete expression in Stead’s later works. Still, if this kind of thing is your cup of morphia, don’t let me dissuade you.
November 13, 2016
Look, this book is good: like very good. There is so little said directly, and yet Stead communicates worlds, about the sterility of most political argument & the decadence of a society which has had three revolutions and changed nothing; the devastating sexism at the heart of domesticity; about human frailty and the absurdity of people. The book is furiously intense and yet subtle. It rushes you along with a torrent, even though very little happens. But. But, but, but: in the end, it requires spending a good 450 pages with a group of *very* unlikeable people sitting endlessly in cafes getting drunk and attempting to manipulate and/or seduce each other. It gets exhausting, infuriating and is pretty much never fun. I was very glad to finish.
The book works around some clear themes. Each of the characters are constantly reacting to circumstance. Stead is primarily interested in humanity, human nature if you will, but it is a nature created by the environment, and the engagement of an individual character with what society gives and expects from them. Elvira's completely unbearable passivity and, well, whininess, is a Feminine Mystique of the 1930s, a driftlessness created by having no inherent purpose. In contrast, Blanche, born into devastating poverty, is ever hustling, believing absolutely that morality and empathy are both luxuries she is rarely well-enough off to afford. Coromandel, the only vaguely sympathetic character in the book, seems to conclude that only be refusing to be an object of affection can she maintain her own wry intelligence, preserved and developed in a museum-like atmosphere, as rarefied as the obsolete hand-made lace her father prizes. Even Oliver's preposterous hypocrisy and academic play at revolution is underpinned by his economic circumstances, and what is expected of a young man of his class without a fortune. Marpurgo is driven by bitterness, the knowledge above all that he sells his labour power, while the brothers whose fortune he builds, retain control over his life and livelihood. Just as in his business he sells young working class women the illusion that they can get the lace that once adorned only the wealthy, while selling the cheap and easily destroyed, he too operates under an illusion of being one of them, but never quite making it.
The book could have defined 'frenemies': another key theme is the tangled relationships we build with others. The characters are always seeking to have power over each other, everyone wants everyone else to be in love with them; yet to be subordinate or acknowledged inferior. Insults swing to flattery and back again in endless loop.
I probably should have retreated when I read this is inspired by Joyce. Paris is very much a character here, as Dublin if always for Joyce. (Whether Paris was really full of young broke intelligentsia sitting in cafes for 8 hour stretched alternating vermouth and coffee I am unsure.) Like Joyce, every line means something other than what it appears to, and like Joyce, the book feels a little like a contest of wits with the reader at times. Refusing to partake however, is still a pretty rich experience. I just wish it was slightly less work, and slightly more enjoyable.
The book works around some clear themes. Each of the characters are constantly reacting to circumstance. Stead is primarily interested in humanity, human nature if you will, but it is a nature created by the environment, and the engagement of an individual character with what society gives and expects from them. Elvira's completely unbearable passivity and, well, whininess, is a Feminine Mystique of the 1930s, a driftlessness created by having no inherent purpose. In contrast, Blanche, born into devastating poverty, is ever hustling, believing absolutely that morality and empathy are both luxuries she is rarely well-enough off to afford. Coromandel, the only vaguely sympathetic character in the book, seems to conclude that only be refusing to be an object of affection can she maintain her own wry intelligence, preserved and developed in a museum-like atmosphere, as rarefied as the obsolete hand-made lace her father prizes. Even Oliver's preposterous hypocrisy and academic play at revolution is underpinned by his economic circumstances, and what is expected of a young man of his class without a fortune. Marpurgo is driven by bitterness, the knowledge above all that he sells his labour power, while the brothers whose fortune he builds, retain control over his life and livelihood. Just as in his business he sells young working class women the illusion that they can get the lace that once adorned only the wealthy, while selling the cheap and easily destroyed, he too operates under an illusion of being one of them, but never quite making it.
The book could have defined 'frenemies': another key theme is the tangled relationships we build with others. The characters are always seeking to have power over each other, everyone wants everyone else to be in love with them; yet to be subordinate or acknowledged inferior. Insults swing to flattery and back again in endless loop.
I probably should have retreated when I read this is inspired by Joyce. Paris is very much a character here, as Dublin if always for Joyce. (Whether Paris was really full of young broke intelligentsia sitting in cafes for 8 hour stretched alternating vermouth and coffee I am unsure.) Like Joyce, every line means something other than what it appears to, and like Joyce, the book feels a little like a contest of wits with the reader at times. Refusing to partake however, is still a pretty rich experience. I just wish it was slightly less work, and slightly more enjoyable.
July 21, 2009
Some 40 odd years before History of Sexuality V.1, this weird, brilliant little novel explores the everyday discourse of sex, Marxism's challenges to marriage, abortion, and the creepy sexual megalomania academic culture breeds in men. Oh, and it's set in the French archives. What's that Chris Kraus quote about women's narratives as theory?
January 16, 2017
Disappointed. So much self-indulgence from characters. Some influence of surrealism? Coromandel; pretty, but was any person ever named this ever? The first novel by Christine Stead that I have read. Not sure I want to try any others.
February 2, 2017
I didn't like this. A bit of a show off book for me. Lots of words I've never seen before. I am not good a stream of imagination stuff. The basic story is fairly simple. It is all the other stuff I didn't like. I know osme people rate it as a masterpiece just not me.
March 3, 2022
A long, long read. In fact, why did I finish it? I really should have abandoned it.
November 15, 2016
It’s not easy to explain how much pleasure there was in reading Christina Stead’s second novel The Beauties and Furies, (1936), published by Peter Davies, London in 1936. It is such a dynamic novel, rich with wonderfully complex characters and a compelling storyline, and all through it there are little surprises alluding to contemporary political events, which remind us that Europe was becoming alarmed about the rise of fascism.
As can be seen from the Opening Lines which I posted last week, the novel is set in Paris, and now that I’ve read the book, I know that those lines introduce the curious triangle of characters who dominate the action of the novel. The young woman on her way to Paris is Elvira Western, abandoning her husband in London to meet her lover Oliver Fenton, a student of socialism. The Italian gentleman is the villain of the piece, a Machiavellian pseudo-sorcerer, who interferes in the lives of others for the amusement of it. Elvira doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to cause all sorts of trouble…
The reader, however, knows from the very first chapter that the relationship with Oliver is doomed, and that is because Elvira exhibits signs of irritation and boredom already. Oliver is very interested in politics, but she’s not. She gets a crick in her neck from resting her head on his shoulder. She keeps mentioning her husband, and she smiles at Oliver’s vanity. And she bristles when he starts trying to remake her to suit Paris:
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/11/15/t...
As can be seen from the Opening Lines which I posted last week, the novel is set in Paris, and now that I’ve read the book, I know that those lines introduce the curious triangle of characters who dominate the action of the novel. The young woman on her way to Paris is Elvira Western, abandoning her husband in London to meet her lover Oliver Fenton, a student of socialism. The Italian gentleman is the villain of the piece, a Machiavellian pseudo-sorcerer, who interferes in the lives of others for the amusement of it. Elvira doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to cause all sorts of trouble…
The reader, however, knows from the very first chapter that the relationship with Oliver is doomed, and that is because Elvira exhibits signs of irritation and boredom already. Oliver is very interested in politics, but she’s not. She gets a crick in her neck from resting her head on his shoulder. She keeps mentioning her husband, and she smiles at Oliver’s vanity. And she bristles when he starts trying to remake her to suit Paris:
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, but you don’t know how to dress. A French woman built like you would build up her bosom. I’ll take you to a dressmaker who will study your style and bring out your femininity. You kust go, the very first thing, to the Printemps, or to Antoine, and have your hair done too. Oh, you’ll spend fortunes on yourself before you’ve been in Paris long. You’ll be quite a different woman. You can dress, you know. You’ll be splendid when you’re dressed like a French woman. Everyone will say, How adaptable she is.’
She gave him a long surprised look and began to laugh.
‘Oliver, so I don’t suit you? You brought me over to make me a French woman. You’re an incredible chauvinist.’ (p. 13-14)
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/11/15/t...
June 7, 2018
Trois femmes libres, dans le Paris bohème de 1930. Un récit à la fois réaliste et onirique.
Want to read
September 30, 2010mentioned here: http://www.thesmartset.com/article/ar...
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July 28, 2017Kirkus
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews