The serpentine and confusing plot aside, musicologist Dunlap’s first offers a vivid, entertaining panorama of the period.
A young singer is ensnared by intrigue at the Sun King’s court.
Émilie Jolicoeur, the daughter of a luthier, is 15 when she and her phenomenal soprano are noticed by (real-life) composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier during a visit to her father’s Paris atelier. Charpentier begins teaching her in his studio at the grand house of his patroness, the Duchesse de Guise. Meanwhile, the duchess’s godson, impoverished aristocrat Comte de St. Paul, seeks to exploit the enmity between Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s current mistress, and fête-pooper Madame de Maintenon, 17th-century Versailles’ answer to Billy Sunday. When he hears Émilie sing at his godmother’s soirée, St. Paul sees his ticket out of debt. He conspires with Madame de Maintenon to spirit Émilie to Versailles. They plan to introduce the songbird at court and eventually to the king’s bed; with the help of some time-release poison, the assignation will be enough to put Louis off whoopie in general and Montespan in particular. Montespan, no fool, makes arrangements to have the now 16-year-old Émilie re-abducted after her performance as Alceste in an opera by Lully, Charpentier’s archrival. The re-abductor will be Charpentier, Émilie’s heartthrob. Maintenon is relieved to hear this, because poisoning ingénues is against her religion. Émilie, having captivated the king as Alceste, receives a jeweled brooch and an invitation to present herself at the royal chambers around midnight. Hedging her bets, Maintenon sends her servant François to Émilie’s room with the killer claret. Beset by pre-re-abduction misgivings, Émilie is teetering on her windowsill when...Faked death, a new identity, a secret marriage, a miscarriage, a duel and a re-re-abduction follow, amid a dizzying array of purloined letters, spies and contretemps. Even Guise’s maid, Sophie, gets her own subplot.
The serpentine and confusing plot aside, musicologist Dunlap’s first offers a vivid, entertaining panorama of the period.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6506-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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