Astonish Me: A novel

by Maggie Shipstead Narrated by Rebecca Lowman

Overview

From the author of the widely acclaimed debut novel Seating Arrangements, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction: a gorgeously written, fiercely compelling glimpse into the demanding world of professional ballet and its magnetic hold over two generations.

Astonish Me is the irresistible story of Joan, a young American dancer who helps a Soviet ballet star, the great Arslan Rusakov, defect in 1975. A flash of fame and a passionate love affair follow, but Joan knows that, onstage and off, she is destined to remain in the background. She will never possess Arslan, and she will never be a prima ballerina. She will rise no higher than the corps, one dancer among many.

After her relationship with Arslan sours, Joan plots to make a new life for herself. She quits ballet, marries a good man, and settles in California with him and their son, Harry. But as the years pass, Joan comes to understand that ballet isn't finished with her yet, for there is no mistaking that Harry is a prodigy. Through Harry, Joan is pulled back into a world she thought she'd left behind-back into dangerous secrets, and back, inevitably, to Arslan.

Combining a sweeping, operatic plot with subtly observed characters, Maggie Shipstead gives us a novel of stunning intensity and deft psychological nuance. Gripping, dramatic, and brilliantly conjured, Astonish Me confirms Shipstead's range and ability and raises provocative questions about the nature of talent, the choices we must make in search of fulfillment, and how we square the yearning for comfort with the demands of art.

Editorial Reviews

APRIL 2014 - AudioFile

Even more than she did in her vastly entertaining debut, SEATING ARRANGEMENTS, Maggie Shipstead soars with this exhilarating audiobook. A world-famous Soviet dancer defects to the West. The American ballerina who helped him escape gives up the stage to marry and have a family. Themes of talent, ambition, passion, and secrets are set up and repeated with variations over 30 years. To perform this intricately constructed story, narrator Rebecca Lowman must seamlessly voice boy, then woman, then girl; Russian speakers; French speakers, old and young. She’s fluid and transparent in a gripping performance of a tale about performance, even subtly aging the voices of characters we meet as children and follow into adulthood. A sensational piece of acting and a flawless production. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

This new novel by the Dylan Thomas Prize-winning author of Seating Arrangements makes an ever so graceful leap into the world of professional ballet. At its outset, Joan Joyce is drawing the same conclusion that most ballerinas must make: that she will never be a featured soloist. With her career fading and her relationship with the brilliant Russian dancer Arslan Ruskov faltering, she turns to motherhood and a marriage with her longtime admirer Jacob. As her son grows to adulthood, he too becomes a gifted ballet dancer and his developing talent brings him and his family back into the force field of her former lover. Not surprisingly, tensions mount and secrets erupt. A spellbinder worth several encores.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171846176
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/08/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

February 1973--Paris

Joan kneels in a dark box in the third loge of the Palais Garnier, the Opéra, peeping over the red velvet railing. Six rickety chairs stand close around her, but she knows they creak and is careful not to disturb them. The houselights are down, but the glow from the stage picks out a profusion of gilded plasterwork: serene deities, trumpeting angels, lyres, garlands, flowers, oak leaves, masks, Corinthian columns, all deeply shadowed, piling up around the proscenium and among the boxes like the walls of a craggy gold cave, climbing to Chagall's painted round ceiling of naked angels and voluptuous ballerinas and goats and chickens and lovers and blue Eiffel Tower and red-splotched rendering of the Palais itself. From the center of this hangs the great sleeping chandelier: an enormous gold and glass thistle hung upside down to dry, darkly gleaming.

The Kirov's orchestra noodles around in the pit, waiting. At stage left, just in from the wings, the young star who has been the subject of so much hubbub stands in a heavy grey sweater, white tights, and thick army-green leg warmers pulled up to his thighs. Joan's angle is not ideal--she is looking steeply down on him--but he seems too delicate and too boyish to be impressive. Most of the corps girls milling around in black leotards and white practice tutus are taller than he is. The ballerina who is his partner, however, is tiny, like a fairy, and she stands facing away from him, smoking a cigarette in a long white holder and absently blowing rings of smoke. Her head is wrapped in a printed scarf. Rusakov makes one smooth turn around her and plucks the holder from her fingers. He skips backward, puffing and making faces at her. Not taking the bait, she watches impassively, then pivots and disappears into the wings. He tires of his own game at once and presses the cigarette in its holder into the hand of one of the corps girls. She appears terrified by the gift and passes it off to her neighbor, who rushes into the wings after its owner.

Joan is not supposed to be watching the rehearsal, but she can always claim she did not understand the remonstrations of the ballet master. Still, to be safe, she had crept in a back door and made her way higher and higher through the gloomy backstage passages and stairways until she emerged into the third loge, which was quiet and a little musty without crowds of gossiping, mingling Parisians. Its balconies overlook the bronze and marble excess of the grand escalier. There is a curved wall of closed doors, each with a round porthole and leading to a box. She had used an usher's key, purloined in advance, to open the door of box 11.

Some invisible cue makes the dancers flee the stage and the orchestra collect itself. The conductor lifts his baton, slices down- ward. After a few bars, Rusakov launches out from the wings. He has shed the leg warmers and sweater, and his body, in tights and T-shirt, is perfectly proportioned, muscled but not bulky. His legs appear longer than they are; his ass is round and high. Rumor has it that the Kirov won't cast him as a romantic lead because he is small, preferring to use him as Ali the slave boy or the Bluebird or the Golden Idol, but his stage presence is aggressive and masculine, arrogant. He has arched, almost pointed eyebrows and very dark eyes that bounce imperiously off the empty theater. At first the raked French stages had given Joan trouble. She would migrate toward the pit on her turns, earning a few kicks from the next girl in line. But the stages in Russia are raked, too, and Rusakov shows no discomfort as he flutters downstage, hooking his body from side to side in a series of...

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