Ardent stories of female self-empowerment from all corners of the art world.
Five captivating tales of women as both artist and muse.
An accomplished journalist (Another Day in Paradise: International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories, 2003), short-story writer, memoirist (Searching for Fritzi, 1999), biographer and NYU writing instructor, Bergman is no stranger to capturing the unique alchemy that makes a character come to life. Here, she collects stories depicting strong women coming into their own, whether as artists—King Tut’s mother Tia, Maria Izquierdo—or in their relation to famous male painters of their day—Gustav Klimt, Marc Chagall, John Singer Sargent. With the exception of "When I See Her,” set in ancient Egypt, these refreshingly feminist tales explore challenges faced by late-19th and early-20th-century women attempting to break from the persistent Victorian role as "Angel in the House.” The title story follows the trapped life of the beautiful Anna Glass, whose husband offers her favors to Emperor Franz Joseph; Glass decides to sit for the philandering emperor’s great rival Klimt in hopes of turning the emperor’s attentions away from her by seducing the artist, but much strife ensues in this tragic tale from war-torn Austria. "Lovers in Blue & Green” traces friendship against all odds, in the story of Marc Chagall and his wife’s move from Russia to Paris to New York as they and their Jewish friends flee Nazi-ravaged Europe. The worlds of art and politics also collide in “Three Women,” in which Maria Izquierdo recalls the hard-won artistic triumphs of her Mexican triumvirate with Lola Ãlvarez Bravo and Frida Kahlo, here movingly described in her last days as “translucent, she was a bulb shining through a shade.” The most fully developed story, "In Full Sail,” places Victorian conventions squarely on the block, when a budding artist who befriends Sargent must acknowledge and embrace her own values as she encounters both his homosexuality and the shifting topography of the modernist art scene.
Ardent stories of female self-empowerment from all corners of the art world.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-40382-0
Page Count: 162
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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