| Description |
255 pages ; 24 cm |
| Summary |
Ozick's heady fiction springs from her deep critical involvement in literature, especially her fascination with Henry James, which emboldened her to lift the plot of his masterpiece, The Ambassadors, and recast it in a taut and flaying novel that is utterly her own. It's 1952, and Bea has lived alone for decades after a fleeting marriage, teaching English to street-tough Bronx boys she much admires even as she covers their compositions with red ink. Haunted by her ex, a composer who decamped to Hollywood and made a fortune writing movie scores, Bea is also long estranged from her wealthy brother, Marvin. Yet he asks her to fly to Paris to search for his missing son, Julian, whom he surmises is besotted with the city's fabled charms. Instead, Julian's Paris is a dark and merciless place of lost souls because he is in love with a Romanian refugee whose family perished in the Holocaust. Operating in a fugue state brought on by the sudden eruption of deeply buried pain and rage, Bea manages to make bad situations truly disastrous. Ozick's dramatic inquiry into the malignance of betrayal; exile literal and emotional; the many tentacles of anti-Semitism; and the balm and aberrance of artistic obsession is brilliantly nuanced and profoundly disquieting--Booklist. |
| Subject |
Americans -- France -- Fiction.
|
|
Paris (France) -- Fiction.
|
| ISBN |
9780547435572 |
|
0547435576 |
|
