MAY 2014 - AudioFile
Six narrators read this novel, whose principal characters meet at a cross-dressing Paris club at the end of the Jazz Age. Although each switch in narrator immediately signals a change in point of view, listeners still may have some difficulty keeping track of the shifting time frames, especially because this story of love, betrayal, and survival in the underbelly of the city derives from several fictitious sources, such as letters, a biography, and memoirs . More off-putting, however, is the uneven performances; for example, some of the French accents seem stereotypical; whereas, the Hungarian photographer, who is at the hub of the audiobook, has no accent at all. This novel, which is loosely based on real events from the 1930s and ‘40s, is better enjoyed in print. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Edmund White
Francine Prose is a subtle psychologist and a compassionate humanist, but nevertheless she has created a genuinely evil character in Lou Villars…Prose is careful to show how a decent but under-loved girl becomes a monster. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford referred frequently to the strategy known as progression d'effet. Prose has mastered this kind of narrative magic, revealing the gradual transformation of white to black through tiny gradations…Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 is a novel of great reach and power, a portrait of an entire era. Prose's canvas is crowded with many characters, but they're all well-delineated. She has a miraculous gift for imagining a foggy quay or a smoky cabaret—or a strait-laced banquet given by the Führer…Though there are multiple narrators, each is distinct, since Prose has a knack for parodying different voices.
Publishers Weekly
02/17/2014
Prose’s 21st novel (after The Turning) captures the brilliance of Paris’s bohemian art scene in the ’20s and ’30s, as well as the dark days that followed. Louisianne “Lou” Villars, a talented athlete, travels to Paris as a teenager, hoping to someday compete in the Olympics, but instead she ends up checking coats at the Chameleon Club, famed around the city for its gender-defying patrons and cabaret. Lou’s real-life model is Violette Morris, a cross-dressing professional race car driver turned Nazi spy, immortalized in Brassaï’s iconic photograph, Lesbian Couple at le Monocle, 1932. The novel follows Lou as she falls in and out of love, becomes a professional race car driver, and dines with the Führer in Berlin. This story is told piecemeal through the frequently unreliable and self-serving recollections of Lou’s friends—among them the visionary and egotistical photographer Gabor Tsenyi; Lily de Rossignol, Gabor and Lou’s benefactress; and Nathalie Dunois, Lou’s biographer. The novel skillfully portrays the headiness of Parisian cafes, where artists and writers came together to talk and cadge free drinks, and the terror of the Nazi Occupation. Though the momentum lags at times, Prose deftly demonstrates with a wink the self-seeking nature of memory and the way we portray our past. (May)
From the Publisher
A reading experience like none other-a shimmering library of possible truths and forking pathways…Readers of this extraordinary novel become Villars’ co-biographers, piecing through ‘official’ and underground accounts as ample (and as unreliable) as the human library of memory. I was addicted to this book.” — Karen Russell, author of SWAMPLANDIA
“Prose’s latest book goes further in destroying the concept of a single truth than ‘Rashomon.’ It’s also an uproarious portrait of Paris from the mid-twenties to the Second World War. Prose has always been adept at slaying sacred cows; in this book, she pretty much machine-guns them.” — Gary Shteyngart, author of LITTLE FAILURE, A Memoir
“An engrossing literary mystery…Refracting the vivid, villainous life of Louisianne Villars through letters, memoirs, and the recreations of a biographer, Prose coaxes into kaleidoscopic view both a tortured human being and bohemian Paris before and during the Nazi occupation… she cleverly exploits the vain, self-serving nature of memory itself.” — Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
“A pitch perfect pastiche that interrogates the meaning of art and the limits of loyalty. With a style that is beautiful, strong, modest and absolutely authoritative Prose directs the light of her immense talent on the horrors of fascism and the puzzling, sometimes punishing nature of love. A great novel.” — Scott Spencer, author of MAN IN THE WOODS and A SHIP MADE OF PAPER
“Significant writers are rare. A writer like Prose, who is not only significant but capable of writing brilliantly about pretty much anything-from obsessive love to religious ecstasy to life in Paris in the twenties and beyond-is not only rare. She is, essentially, the Hope Diamond of literature.” — Michael Cunningham
“Brilliant and wicked and funny and right on-never has Europe been done with such savage precision…Every bit funny and appalling, at the end especially, of course. There’s not a French affectation, hypocrisy or depravity left untouched. I love it!” — Diane Johnson, author of LE MARIAGE and L'AFFAIRE
“Prose is the real chameleon here, blending effortlessly into half a dozen disparate voices…The result is a perfect stunner, the novel-as-a Picasso, or a kaleidoscope-vivid, fractured, and spellbinding…Prose is one of our sharpest critics and our most daring novelists, and this is her best book.” — Joshua Ferris, author of AND THEN WE CAME TO THE END
“The breadth, nerve and intricacy of Francine Prose’s big new novel should surprise even her most regular readers. A bona fide page turner…” — The New York Times
“A novel of great reach and power, a portrait of an entire era.” — The New York Times Book Review
“So dazzlingly does Francine Prose re-create this seamy chapter of mid-century Paris that it’s tempting to think of her as not a novelist but an editor who corralled all these people into a raucous work of history...C’est magnifique!” — The Washington Post
“A master of the craft delivers a riveting period piece that probes the origins of evil.” — O Magazine
“A tour de force…The result is fresh, layered and nuanced. It’s historical fiction done right and one of the finest accomplishments of this accomplished author…The novel dazzles. With sure, intelligent narrative and elegant detail, Prose has crafted a story that honors its characters and a pivotal time in history.” — Miami Herald
“Engrossing...The narrative twists and turns, circles back to add depth to previous scenes, at other times casts doubt on the reliability of a narrator, and occasionally calls into question the entire endeavor of historical fiction.” — Elle
“Brilliant and dazzling…A tour de force of character, point of view and especially atmosphere” — Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“The circumstances that foster such unhappiness are always elusive, but they can be explored. That’s the task of a good novel, and Prose has done the job.” — The Seattle Times
“[E]xcellent novel… With a deft and frequently scathing touch, Prose sends up nearly every literary type imaginable and then some…” — The San Francisco Chronicle
“Prose’s excellent novel, which treads between lightly mischievous (mocking Henry Miller) and deadly serious (invading Nazis), centers on a fictionalized French Olympic hopeful who spied for the Germans - and was killed by the Resistance in 1944.” — The San Francisco Chronicle
“Prose exuberantly conjures up the romance of that unstable era…filled with felicitous imagery and sparkling period details.” — Wall Street Journal
“[A] stunning novel…a provocative exploration of identity and the search for acceptance.” — BookPage
“Prose’s novel pulses with the heartbeat of real life, brimming with colorful characters as artists (including, notably, Pablo Picasso), petty forgers, Nazis and resistance fighters meet on the page… It is a testament to Prose’s considerable talent that she’s able to execute such an ambitious work so flawlessly.” — Shelf Awareness
Many sure-footed novelists have tried to embody Paris in its boozy, gender-bending, art-and-outrage pre-occupation golden age of the ‘20s and ‘30s before, but the ever-exceptional Prose succeeds in making the city alive by supplying it with a dissonant, avant-garde chorus of voices… — Interview Magazine
“An ingenious excursion into the Parisian demimonde.” — Maureen Corrigan, NPR.org
“A dark and glorious tour de force…In an intricately patterned, ever-morphing, lavishly well-informed plot spanning the French countryside and reaching to Berlin, Prose intensifies our depth perception of that time of epic aberration and mesmerizing evil as she portrays complex, besieged individuals struggling to become their true selves.” — Booklist (starred review)
“The novel skillfully portrays the headiness of Parisian cafes, where artists and writers came together to talk and cadge free drinks, and the terror of the Nazi Occupation… Prose deftly demonstrates with a wink the self-seeking nature of memory and the way we portray our past.” — Publishers Weekly
“A rich portrait of a difficult age” — The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 will be many things to many people–history, mystery, chronicle, commentary–but above all, it’s a generous book that offers complete submergence in a world constructed for readers’ enjoyment. It’s a dark and complicated place, this lamp-lit prewar Paris, but a remarkably entertaining one.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Prose does an impressive job crafting a plot in which each version of the story takes on its own dimensions and echoes - and the biggest question may be just which one of those narrators is the most outrageously unreliable.” — The Tampa Bay Times
“Francine Prose, in a testament to her talents, has managed to create a wartime saga that is both original and epic.” — The Daily Beast
“LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932 is a remarkable work of fiction that feels completely true. Richly atmospheric and utterly engrossing, it is not to be missed.” — BookPage
“[F]ascinating… Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 captures the vibrance and violence of bohemian Paris before World War II…” — W Magazine
“Sexy, cross-dressing athlete Lou Villars is as complex as her Nazi-era Paris home.” — Marie Claire
“At its best moments, the reader almost becomes another character in the novel, searching for meaning amid the menace and beauty of wartime Paris, surrounded by the city’s many conflicting truths.” — The Chicago Tribune
“LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932 paints an unforgettable portrait of Paris between the wars, a time and place that holds endless fascination for readers.” — Bookreporter.com
“Provocative, powerful.” — USA Today
“LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB is a teeming social portrait, told through several peculiar voices - Lou’s is not one of them - and made real by astonishingly authentic details… Prose is versatile and fluid.” — The Asheville Citizen-Times
“The wonder of Ms. Prose’s terrific historical novel is how she takes inspiration from a work of visual art and builds, not just one story, not just one voice, but a kaleidoscope of voices and angles about individuals whose lives intersect at a particular time and place.” — BookBrowse
“Sexy, illicit … the best stories come to us many times over, repeated until even their true parts bear the qualities of fiction. They’re also the ones we can’t possibly know all of. This powerful, perceptive book offers these truths, and-even better-a great story to shroud them.” — Philadelphia Inquirer
“A tour de force of character, point of view and especially atmosphere...” — Kirkus Reviews, Named a Modern Classic
“Epic...this world takes on a depth and breadth that justifies the novel’s sweeping ambitions — Lesbian & Gay Review
Gary Shteyngart
Prose’s latest book goes further in destroying the concept of a single truth than ‘Rashomon.’ It’s also an uproarious portrait of Paris from the mid-twenties to the Second World War. Prose has always been adept at slaying sacred cows; in this book, she pretty much machine-guns them.
Jennifer Egan
An engrossing literary mystery…Refracting the vivid, villainous life of Louisianne Villars through letters, memoirs, and the recreations of a biographer, Prose coaxes into kaleidoscopic view both a tortured human being and bohemian Paris before and during the Nazi occupation… she cleverly exploits the vain, self-serving nature of memory itself.
Diane Johnson
Brilliant and wicked and funny and right on-never has Europe been done with such savage precision…Every bit funny and appalling, at the end especially, of course. There’s not a French affectation, hypocrisy or depravity left untouched. I love it!
Karen Russell
A reading experience like none other-a shimmering library of possible truths and forking pathways…Readers of this extraordinary novel become Villars’ co-biographers, piecing through ‘official’ and underground accounts as ample (and as unreliable) as the human library of memory. I was addicted to this book.
The Washington Post
So dazzlingly does Francine Prose re-create this seamy chapter of mid-century Paris that it’s tempting to think of her as not a novelist but an editor who corralled all these people into a raucous work of history...C’est magnifique!
Michael Cunningham
Significant writers are rare. A writer like Prose, who is not only significant but capable of writing brilliantly about pretty much anything-from obsessive love to religious ecstasy to life in Paris in the twenties and beyond-is not only rare. She is, essentially, the Hope Diamond of literature.
Joshua Ferris
Prose is the real chameleon here, blending effortlessly into half a dozen disparate voices…The result is a perfect stunner, the novel-as-a Picasso, or a kaleidoscope-vivid, fractured, and spellbinding…Prose is one of our sharpest critics and our most daring novelists, and this is her best book.
Scott Spencer
A pitch perfect pastiche that interrogates the meaning of art and the limits of loyalty. With a style that is beautiful, strong, modest and absolutely authoritative Prose directs the light of her immense talent on the horrors of fascism and the puzzling, sometimes punishing nature of love. A great novel.
The New York Times
The breadth, nerve and intricacy of Francine Prose’s big new novel should surprise even her most regular readers. A bona fide page turner…
The New York Times Book Review
A novel of great reach and power, a portrait of an entire era.
Shelf Awareness
Prose’s novel pulses with the heartbeat of real life, brimming with colorful characters as artists (including, notably, Pablo Picasso), petty forgers, Nazis and resistance fighters meet on the page… It is a testament to Prose’s considerable talent that she’s able to execute such an ambitious work so flawlessly.
Bookreporter.com
LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932 paints an unforgettable portrait of Paris between the wars, a time and place that holds endless fascination for readers.
The Tampa Bay Times
Prose does an impressive job crafting a plot in which each version of the story takes on its own dimensions and echoes - and the biggest question may be just which one of those narrators is the most outrageously unreliable.
Miami Herald
A tour de force…The result is fresh, layered and nuanced. It’s historical fiction done right and one of the finest accomplishments of this accomplished author…The novel dazzles. With sure, intelligent narrative and elegant detail, Prose has crafted a story that honors its characters and a pivotal time in history.
Lesbian & Gay Review
Epic...this world takes on a depth and breadth that justifies the novel’s sweeping ambitions
O Magazine
A master of the craft delivers a riveting period piece that probes the origins of evil.
Maureen Corrigan
An ingenious excursion into the Parisian demimonde.
Interview Magazine
Many sure-footed novelists have tried to embody Paris in its boozy, gender-bending, art-and-outrage pre-occupation golden age of the ‘20s and ‘30s before, but the ever-exceptional Prose succeeds in making the city alive by supplying it with a dissonant, avant-garde chorus of voices…
Wall Street Journal
Prose exuberantly conjures up the romance of that unstable era…filled with felicitous imagery and sparkling period details.
The Asheville Citizen-Times
LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB is a teeming social portrait, told through several peculiar voices - Lou’s is not one of them - and made real by astonishingly authentic details… Prose is versatile and fluid.
Booklist (starred review)
A dark and glorious tour de force…In an intricately patterned, ever-morphing, lavishly well-informed plot spanning the French countryside and reaching to Berlin, Prose intensifies our depth perception of that time of epic aberration and mesmerizing evil as she portrays complex, besieged individuals struggling to become their true selves.
W Magazine
[F]ascinating… Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 captures the vibrance and violence of bohemian Paris before World War II…
BookPage
[A] stunning novel…a provocative exploration of identity and the search for acceptance.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
A rich portrait of a difficult age
The Daily Beast
Francine Prose, in a testament to her talents, has managed to create a wartime saga that is both original and epic.
Elle
Engrossing...The narrative twists and turns, circles back to add depth to previous scenes, at other times casts doubt on the reliability of a narrator, and occasionally calls into question the entire endeavor of historical fiction.
The Seattle Times
The circumstances that foster such unhappiness are always elusive, but they can be explored. That’s the task of a good novel, and Prose has done the job.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Sexy, illicit … the best stories come to us many times over, repeated until even their true parts bear the qualities of fiction. They’re also the ones we can’t possibly know all of. This powerful, perceptive book offers these truths, and-even better-a great story to shroud them.
The Chicago Tribune
At its best moments, the reader almost becomes another character in the novel, searching for meaning amid the menace and beauty of wartime Paris, surrounded by the city’s many conflicting truths.
The San Francisco Chronicle
[E]xcellent novel… With a deft and frequently scathing touch, Prose sends up nearly every literary type imaginable and then some…
BookBrowse
The wonder of Ms. Prose’s terrific historical novel is how she takes inspiration from a work of visual art and builds, not just one story, not just one voice, but a kaleidoscope of voices and angles about individuals whose lives intersect at a particular time and place.
Marie Claire
Sexy, cross-dressing athlete Lou Villars is as complex as her Nazi-era Paris home.
USA Today
Provocative, powerful.
USA Today
Provocative, powerful.
Wall Street Journal
Prose exuberantly conjures up the romance of that unstable era…filled with felicitous imagery and sparkling period details.
Miami Herald
A tour de force…The result is fresh, layered and nuanced. It’s historical fiction done right and one of the finest accomplishments of this accomplished author…The novel dazzles. With sure, intelligent narrative and elegant detail, Prose has crafted a story that honors its characters and a pivotal time in history.
The New York Times
The breadth, nerve and intricacy of Francine Prose’s big new novel should surprise even her most regular readers. A bona fide page turner…
MAY 2014 - AudioFile
Six narrators read this novel, whose principal characters meet at a cross-dressing Paris club at the end of the Jazz Age. Although each switch in narrator immediately signals a change in point of view, listeners still may have some difficulty keeping track of the shifting time frames, especially because this story of love, betrayal, and survival in the underbelly of the city derives from several fictitious sources, such as letters, a biography, and memoirs . More off-putting, however, is the uneven performances; for example, some of the French accents seem stereotypical; whereas, the Hungarian photographer, who is at the hub of the audiobook, has no accent at all. This novel, which is loosely based on real events from the 1930s and ‘40s, is better enjoyed in print. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2014-01-04
A tour de force of character, point of view and especially atmosphere, Prose's latest takes place in Paris from the late 1920s till the end of World War II. The primary locus of action is the Chameleon Club, a cabaret where entertainment edges toward the kinky. Presiding most nights is Eva "Yvonne" Nagy, a Hungarian chanteuse and mistress of the revels. The name of the club is not strictly metaphorical, for Yvonne has a pet lizard, but the cabaret is also famous as a place where Le Tout-Paris can gather and cross-dress, and homosexual lovers can be entertained there with some degree of privacy. One of the most fascinating denizens of the club is Lou Villars, in her youth an astounding athlete and in her adulthood a dancer (with her lover Arlette) at the club and even later a race car driver and eventually a German spy in Paris during the Occupation. Villars and Arlette are the subjects of what becomes the era's iconic photograph, one that gives the novel its title. This image is taken by Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, eventual lover (and later husband) of sexual athlete Suzanne Dunois. Tsenyi is also a protégé of Baroness Lily de Rossignol, former Hollywood actress, now married to the gay Baron de Rossignol, the fabulously wealthy owner of a French car manufacturing company. Within this multilayered web of characters, Prose manages to give almost every character a voice, ranging from Tsenyi's eager letters home to his parents, excerpts from a putative biography of Lou Villars (supposedly written by Suzanne's great-niece) entitled The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars, Lily de Rossignol's memoirs and further reminiscences by Lionel Maine, Suzanne's lover before she was "stolen away" by the photographer. Brilliant and dazzling Prose.
