Demons & Divas: Three Novels
For this trilogy of short novels--her first new book in six years--Ursule Molinaro drew upon a wealth of sources (including Balzac, Flaubert, and Hildegard of Bingen) to transform the grotesqueries of our time into timeless tales. Angel on Fire presents Clara Corvo, who was born with three peculiarities--a cloven hoof, phenomenal intelligence, and clairvoyance. Her mother finds her unbearable, and to escape her family takes a young student as a lover. When six-year-old Clara matriculates at Harvard Law School, an almost classical conclusion is inevitable. In twenty letters gathered for the pending canonization of Jacob Erskine Wooster, a picture emerges not of humility but of large contraditions in an ordinary man whose beatification is as strange as his life. Saint Boy is Diane Arbus in prose. In April in Paris, Molinaro spins Southern gothic into French embroidery. An American woman out of her element wherever she happens to be.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0929701593
ISBN13:9780929701592
Release Date:November 1999
Publisher:McPherson
Length:242 Pages
Weight:0.20 lbs.
Dimensions:0.9" x 5.8" x 8.8"
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
Our Marguerite Duras of American fiction strikes again
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 24 years ago
Molinaro is the beloved Marguerite Duras of American fiction and here she strikes again: with great clarity, diplomacy, wit, and poetic grace she cuts to the gendered plays of empire and libidinal politics of desire. Molinaro's fiction, collection by collection, is all of a piece: cosmopolitan, dry, wry, learned, but cutting to the core of the Waikiki night bar or the multilingual streets of New York city and holocaustic mazes of Europe. When Bob Dylan wrote his lyric about seeing Queen Jane, he must have been thinking of this blessed novelist of Jayne steet, this Ursule of the tarot cards and black nails, this goddess in the wilderness of postmodern American letters.McPherson Press is to be applauded once again for its ongoing support of her singular work, as it was (all too belatedly) for its uncanny support of another bypassed US writer, Theresa Cha, now all but appropriated into the identity politics of Asian American banality-- but still a star for all ages and climes, as is Ursule Molinaro. Gratitude and praise are called for from the Pacific islands to Greenwich Village. We need to read her before it is too late,"the groom still waiting at the altar."
Cautionary tales about everyday saints and believers.
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 25 years ago
Demons & Divas could also have appeared in our fiction section but deserves a place here for its powerful spiritual insights which draw on a wealth of sources from Hildegard of Bingen to Flaubert to provide stories of religious and social insights. A trilogy of short novels provides cautionary tales about everyday saints and believers, injected with a healthy dose of social angst.
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