Tag: New York City

Day 422: Studio Saint-Ex

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Cover for Studio Saint-ExAnia Szado has written an interesting historical novel based on the writing of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic The Little Prince. The novel centers around a relationship between the famous aviator and author and a young French-American woman, Mignonne Lachapelle. This relationship is fictional, although Saint-Exupéry, or Saint-Ex, as he is called in this novel, was known to have such connections.

Mignonne is a recent graduate of design school who is struggling to start a career in fashion design during the early days of the American involvement in World War II. Although with Paris out of the picture things are looking up for American design, no one is ready to hire a rank beginner for a design position. So, Mignonne is forced to turn to Madame Véra Fiche, her instructor from design school who stole Mignonne’s ideas for a dress collection to open her own atelier. Fiche takes her on under a vague promise of partnership.

Mignonne has just returned from Montreal, where she has been staying with her mother, but she is already under the spell of the middle-aged Saint-Exupéry, whom she tutored in English the year before. They have carried on a sort of dalliance. On the scene, however, comes Saint-Ex’s tempestuous wife, Consuelo, whom he continually tries to dodge. He claims he cannot get any peace while she is around and cannot work, yet their relationship is more complex than that.

Saint-Ex himself worked to get America involved in the war in an effort to save his beloved France. Lately, he has been lobbying to join the services, but he is considered too old and too frail to fly, having crash-landed his airplanes many times in the course of his adventures. To calm his frustration and anxiety, he begins writing The Little Prince and seeks refuge from Consuelo in the Atelier Fiche studio to work and see Mignonne. Soon Mignonne is caught up in a tangled relationship with Saint-Ex and Consuelo.

This novel is well written and evokes its time successfully. I don’t think I was taken with its characters so much, though. I had some sympathy for Mignonne, but in her own way she is almost as difficult as Consuelo. Consuelo herself seems almost uniformly manipulative and conniving, and it is difficult to comprehend why Saint-Exupéry stays loyal to her, albeit in his own way. I frankly find Saint-Exupéry himself to be not so much a spellbinder as a high-strung and excitable man encouraging the attentions of a beautiful young woman without really paying much heed to her. I don’t find him romantic so much as also manipulative.

Nevertheless, I was engrossed in the story and found the details of Mignonne’s work and her sensual descriptions of the fabric fascinating even though I don’t pay attention to fashion. The story of the launching of The Little Prince around a fashion show and play was interesting, too.

I won this book in a giveaway from Unabridged Chick blogspot.

Day 234: Rules of Civility

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Cover for Rules of CivilityBest Book of the Week!
In 1966, the former Katey Kontent and her husband Val are attending an exhibit of Depression Era photographs at the Museum of Modern Art when they spot two pictures of an old friend of Katey’s, Tinker Grey. In one, he appears as a sophisticated, well-dressed banker, and in the other, shabby and unkempt, but lit from within. Val assumes that the man lost his money in the Depression, but Katey says that is not exactly the case.

Back in 1937, Katey and her best friend Eva Ross are two carefree working-class girls trying to have fun in New York on a very limited budget. On New Year’s Eve, they are at a scruffy jazz club when a young, immaculately dressed man comes in to meet  his brother. It is Tinker Grey, a wealthy investment advisor. The girls end up spending the evening with him and then seeing him regularly. From the first, he seems more attracted to Katey than to Eva, but fate takes a hand and links Tinker and Eva, seemingly irrevocably.

Katey and Eva are introduced through Tinker to the life of privileged young New York, entering the highest echelons of society. As Katey’s future life is decided by the people she meets during the next year, she learns to judge appearances more accurately and to hone her own acute moral sense.

Katey is a smart, witty, and engaging heroine with a strong sense of self. I found the novel to be beautifully written and absorbing. Rules of Civility is an impressive first novel from Amor Towles.

Day 113: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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Cover for Extremely Loud and Incredibly CloseI’m probably the last person to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was enormously popular six years ago. I suspect I avoided it for awhile because of the subject matter, which is, of course, 9/11.

Oskar Schell is an extremely precocious nine-year-old boy who is grieving for his father, a casualty at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Hidden away in a vase in his father’s closet, Oskar discovers a key with a label that says “Black.” Since his father was always leaving him puzzles, he believes that if he can find the person named Black who has the lock that goes with the key, he will get a message from his father. He especially needs this message because that day, his father called repeatedly from the World Trade Center but Oskar could not make himself pick up the phone. In search of this message, Oskar begins visiting everyone in New York whose last name is Black.

The story of his grandparents’ past is told in parallel in a series of notes and letters. His grandparents both lost their families in the bombing of Dresden (perhaps too neat a parallel). Later, they met in New York, but his grandfather, severely traumatized and unable to speak, deserted his grandmother when she became pregnant.

Although it has been criticized for triteness, I found Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a touching and funny novel about loss and about the relationship between fathers and sons (but also implicitly about mothers and sons). It is told in the nontraditional narrative style that is becoming almost traditional–in first-person narration by Oskar, in letters and pictures, and even in pages of illegible typing.

Oskar is a frighteningly intelligent, creative, unusual, and quirky child, and the depiction of his character is my major criticism. To me, he seemed very similiar in tone and style, and in repetitions and oddness, to the autistic older boy in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Other reviewers have mentioned Holden Caulfield. In fact, although you will like Oskar, you will also find him annoying at times and, I feel, unbelievably precocious for his age. He does not make a believable nine-year-old, no matter how intelligent.

Day 40: The Damage Done

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Cover for The Damage DoneIn The Damage Done by Hilary Davidson, Lily Moore comes home to New York from Spain when the police call her to tell her that her sister Claudia was found dead in the bathtub on the anniversary of their mother’s suicide. In an effort to support Claudia, but unable to deal with her lifestyle of drug addiction, Lily has been paying the rent on her own apartment so that her sister would have a place to live. Lily hasn’t seen her sister for three months, since she came home to visit a supposedly drug-free Claudia only to find her strung out. Since then, Claudia has not returned any of her calls.

When Lily goes to the morgue to identify the body, she realizes that the dead woman bears only a superficial resemblance to her sister, which makes the circumstances of her death–the supposed suicide on the date of their mother’s suicide–doubly suspicious. Lily realizes that Claudia has been missing for months, and that the other woman has stolen Claudia’s identity. She is determined to find her sister even as the police decide that Claudia is a suspect in the unknown woman’s death.

Davidson has written a capable, fast-moving mystery that keeps your attention. The characters are interesting, and readers will like Lily and her affectionate gay friend Jesse. I guessed one part of the puzzle fairly early in the book, but the solution was more complicated than I thought. The writing could have used another edit, but I don’t think editors actually edit books anymore. Overall, though, the book was enjoyable and fun to read.

Day 31: Look at Me

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Cover for Look at MeIn Look at Me, Jennifer Egan explores the meaning of identity in the modern world, where new identities can easily be created with a few clicks of a mouse. This academic beginning to my review should not dissuade you from reading this absorbing book.

Charlotte Swenson is a fashion model just recovering from surgery after a horrific car accident that smashed every bone in her face. The accident happened near her home town of Rockport, Illinios, which she has not visited in years. She is vague about what happened and what she was doing there: it is hard to tell at the beginning whether she can’t remember or doesn’t want to tell. When she returns to her home in New York, she finds that not even her closest friends recognize her new face. She has become invisible.

Before she leaves for New York, Charlotte meets Charlotte Hauser, the plain sixteen-year-old daughter of her best friend from high school, whom Charlotte has also not seen in years. The younger Charlotte has met a man on a river bank who looks like he has been in an accident.

In New York Charlotte Swenson is futilely trying to resurrect her career when she hears from a private detective who is looking for a mysterious man she met a few times named Z.

In the meantime, Charlotte Hauser has begun studying with her uncle Moose, whose life was changed when he had a revelation about light and history as a young man. Moose has been trying to find a student who can take up his ideas and thinks that Charlotte may be that person. He has struggled with mental problems and was forced to leave a prestigious job in academia to teach part time at a local community college.

Because she made a “timing error” in her first sexual explorations, Charlotte has been ostracized from her high school crowd and has decided to change schools to the rougher one across the river. She is also having an affair with the man she met along the river bank.

Charlotte Swenson has always looked for a way into the “mirrored room” of fame and fortune. Now, without her famous face, she is depressed and struggling to pay the rent until an internet intrepreneur comes to her with a tempting proposal.

Egan skillfully weaves these characters’ stories into an engrossing, thought-provoking novel. Some critics felt the novel suffered from the focus on the empty life of the glitterati that fascinates Charlotte, and truthfully, sometimes you sincerely dislike her. But you also like her pluck and self-truthfulness, and the focus is necessary to the novel’s themes.