Paris Red: A Novel

by Maureen Gibbon

Overview

For readers of Girl with a Pearl Earring, a "beautiful, brilliant, delicious" (Elizabeth McCracken) novel about Edouard Manet’s muse.

Paris, 1862. A young girl in a threadbare dress and green boots, hungry for experience, meets the mysterious and wealthy artist Édouard Manet. The encounter will change her—and the art world—forever.

At seventeen, Victorine Meurent abandons her old life to become immersed in the Parisian society of dance halls and cafés, meeting writers and artists like Baudelaire and Alfred Stevens. As Manet’s model, Victorine explores a world of new possibilities and stirs the artist to push the boundaries of painting in his infamous portrait Olympia, which scandalizes even the most cosmopolitan city.

Manet becomes himself because of Victorine. But who does she become, that figure on the divan?

Intense, erotic, and beautifully wrought, Paris Red evokes the unconventional love story of a painter and his muse that changed the history of art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393352238
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/11/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Maureen Gibbon is the author of Paris Red, Thief, and Swimming Sweet Arrow. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, Literary Hub, Playboy, and other publications. Gibbon resides in northern Minnesota.

Editorial Reviews

"Maureen Gibbon’s Victorine is a fearless working girl with sharp wits and calloused hands who ‘wants and wants’ and follows that wanting right out of one life and into another. You will feel her losses and her triumphs as though they were your own—and the next time you look at Manet’s Olympia she will look right back at you."

Alyssa Harad

"An intense and erotic depiction, this novel explores the legacy of artist, muse, and masterpiece."— Harper’s Bazaar

"You’ll be caught up in the rich and sensuous world that Gibbon’s weaves right from the beginning."— InStyle

"Wonderful…[Gibbon] takes readers on a mesmerizing, erotic journey not only to another time and place, but inside the mind of an artist…an insightful and riveting account."— Publishers Weekly

"Very few writers, living or dead, can convey the progress, pains, and pleasures of the sensual life as fully, vividly, and unapologetically as Maureen Gibbon."— Amy Grace Loyd, author of The Affairs of Others

"Maureen Gibbon’s Victorine is a fearless working girl with sharp wits and calloused hands who ‘wants and wants’ and follows that wanting right out of one life and into another. You will feel her losses and her triumphs as though they were your own—and the next time you look at Manet’s Olympia she will look right back at you."— Alyssa Harad, author of Coming to My Senses

"No one evokes the raw, confusing desire of young women with crappy jobs, threadbare clothes, and a lusty eye better than Maureen Gibbon does, and with Paris Red she has distilled and bottled it: every sentence is fragrant with passion."— Maud Newton, author of America’s Ancestry Craze

"A rare treasure: a powerfully written novel with a sensual, fierce, intelligent heroine. Gibbon’s language is muscular and precise and gorgeous, and she evokes a Paris so viscerally real, I could taste the potato soup, smell the smoke and paint, and feel Victorine inhabiting her own skin as she discovers her powers. What an amazing book."— Kate Christensen, author of Blue Plate Special and The Astral

"Maureen Gibbon brings to life a Paris charged with erotic immediacy and honesty. The novel illuminates the transformative nature of art and is engrossing with sensual details. Amazing."— Cara Black, author of Murder Below Montparnasse

From the Publisher

Gibbon's novel turns the tables on the customary relationship between artist and model, giving voice to the subject of Manet's work…the story [Gibbon] tells is an important one. By detailing the hardships faced by working-class women in 19th-century France, she shows how much courage and drive a female painter like Meurent needed to stay true to her own vision.

The New York Times Book Review - Sarah Ferguson

2015-01-22
Manet's muse ponders color, power, sex and love in vibrant 1860s Paris. Based on the true relationship between artist Edouard Manet and model Victorine Meurent and set on the cusp of the impressionist revolution, Gibbon's (Thief, 2010, etc.) novel explores this landmark time in art history through the eyes of the artist's subject. Victorine lives and works with her best friend, Denise, for whom she harbors some secret attraction, until one day they encounter a mysterious and seductive stranger who turns out to be the famous painter. At first he seems interested in having both girls together (artistically and sexually), but it is Victorine, the quiet one, who harbors great hunger (both artistic and sexual), who sleeps with him and then leaves her friend and her old life in order to become Manet's model, ultimately inspiring his Olympia. But Victorine, like any modern heroine, refuses to serve as mere object or even as mere inspiration. Instead, it is suggested that she's responsible for triggering the creative use of color that came to define the art of this period. Her voice is sometimes immature, but she's only 17, and her self-awareness and sexual awareness are both engaging and deep. Gibbon writes in a rather fragmented style, with short chapters that often end on a "poetic" statement. ("Whatever my body wants, I give her. Bitter things as well as sweet.") Sometimes this makes the novel feel a bit spacey, but the overall effect is lyrical and fits the shabbily gorgeous Parisian setting. There's a lot of sex, but it tends to be tasteful and concerned with equal pleasure, and it's more hinted at than described in detail. Fans of art history, Paris and contemporary Künstleroman like Girl With a Pearl Earring will enjoy the new perspective and the strong female voice.

Kirkus Review