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ANAÏS NIN AT THE GRAND GUIGNOL

Name: ANAÏS NIN AT THE GRAND GUIGNOL
Author: Robert Levy
ISBN: 978-1-59021-717-7

by Robert Levy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2019

A finely crafted, Anaïs Nin–centered fantasy with unexpected depths.

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Levy (The Glittering World, 2015) imagines a lost diary from a legendary author, set amid the decadence and eroticism of Paris’s premier horror theater.

In 1933 Paris, Anaïs Nin languishes in her marriage to her husband, Hugo, only feeling alive when in the arms of her lover, Henry Miller, or writing in the pages of her extensive diary, which documents her “mirror life,” as her therapist terms it. When Henry’s wife, June—who’s captured Anaïs’ heart, perhaps even more than Henry has—leaves for New York City, Anaïs seeks solace in the grotesque, ribald productions of the Grand Guignol, about which she writes: “The Theatre du Grand-Guignol is nothing if not an ideal night out for the amorous, lovers who innocently enter the small Pigalle black box only to cling to each other in paroxysms of laughter or fright, the emotionally heightened scenarios blossoming like poisonous flowers upon the stage.” There, she meets the actress Paula Maxa, the so-called “Maddest Woman in the World,” who bears a fleeting resemblance to the absent June. In Maxa, the writer finds a new obsession—one to help fill the loneliness that has haunted her all her life—but for the actress, there is another: Monsieur Guillard, who stalks the streets of the theater district dressed in black. Soon, he begins to haunt Anaïs’ dreams—and then her reality. Levy’s prose is ornate and styled to evoke the emotions of his narrator and her sensuous milieu: “My dark desires, they have long carried a vast and primitive voluptuousness capable of opening doors between places I once thought locked forever.” With it, the author manages to effectively conjure his setting, but the illusion dissipates in the dialogue, which reads as more contemporary in style than it should. Still, the novel is phantasmagoric and appealingly melodramatic, and deeply rooted in Anaïs’ personal demons. The novel’s conclusion is surprisingly poignant, as well. Readers looking for a concentrated cocktail of Années folles splendor will find that this short erotic novel quenches their thirst.

A finely crafted, Anaïs Nin–centered fantasy with unexpected depths.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-59021-717-7

Page Count: 159

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.