Book 84: Inamorata

"There was a reason we existed- I existed. To give mankind a reason to strive. In a world that wanted balance, it made sense that something must exist to counter death and disease and suffering. Inspiration. Beauty. Love needed hated. Destruction was necessary for creation. A price must be paid for great and lasting beauty. Art required sacrifice, and that was where I came in. Balance." 

Dates read: August 27-30, 2016

Rating: 4/10

I'm not a creative person. It's something I've long since accepted about myself. I'm an appreciator of the arts, and I enjoy singing and dance even if I'm not especially gifted at either (I've got a decent voice but no training, and a complete and total lack of grace). I took a creative writing course in college and it was like torture for me...any short story I wrote ended in the untimely death of the protagonist, and I took to turning in haikus for my weekly writing assignment until my GSI let me know he was on to me. I know a lot of book bloggers have aspirations towards a writing career of their own, but I'm perfectly happy to read other people's words.

It is art, and its inspiration, that drives Megan Chance's Inamorata. The plot revolves around four characters: Joseph and Sophie Hannigan, twin siblings fleeing New York, Odile Leon, a beautiful courtesan, and Nicolas Dane, one of Odile's former lovers who continues to follow her. It's set in Venice in the 1850s, and the Hannigan twins are just about broke, but hoping that in the city, Joseph's talent as a painter will catch the eye of a wealthy patron so they can support themselves. Odile is on the lookout for new talent herself, but not to patronize it, exactly. And Nicholas is trying to keep Odile from getting what she wants.

Her exact nature isn't spelled out until quite late in the book, but that Odile literally feeds on artistic talent is obvious from the outset. She takes two kinds of lovers: the minorly talented, like one-time poet Nicholas, who often commit suicide in despair after she drains their small gifts and leaves them, and geniuses, who she inspires to create a single transcendent work that they are never able to come close to again. That Joseph has the kind of gifts that Odile seeks is obvious to Nicholas when they meet, and whether he will be able to keep them from each other and what might happen if he fails to do so provides the narrative tension that keeps the story moving forward.

While the actual plot is pretty straightforward, there's actually a lot going on here: female power and agency in a world that wasn't comfortable with either, child sexual abuse, love of family versus romantic love and the tension between the two, the relationship of artist and muse, the difference between sex and love. Not all of it is developed especially well, but all of it comes into play. As a warning for the easily squicked out, the relationship between Joseph and Sophie is...uncomfortable. It's implied that they may have been forced into engaging in sexual acts with each other during their childhood, Joseph depicts Sophie in a sexually suggestive manner in his art, they kiss each other on the mouth in a way that other characters are taken aback by...it's not a full-on Flowers In The Attic situation, but it leans in that direction.

Besides that, my biggest complaint is that it drags. It takes forever to get to the point where Joseph and Odile meet and the stakes get raised. Odile's true identity is treated as a big reveal when it's really not, it became more-or-less clear what she was before it was confirmed by the book. She was probably the most interesting character, in her determination to make her mark and leave a legacy in a world which prized women for their beauty above all. Actually, the women are overall better served by the narrative, since Sophie's story was more compelling than Joseph's (which could have been better, but was underdeveloped) and Nicholas felt like an afterthought. But the writing is pretty good, and while it's occasionally improbable and weird and the pacing isn't perfect, the plot is serviceable if you're not thinking too hard. I wouldn't recommend it per se, but I wouldn't slap it out of someone's hands for their own good if I saw them reading it either.

Tell me, blog friends...if you could be immortalized by any artist, living or dead, who would it be?

One year ago, I was reading: The Six Wives of Henry VIII

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Book 84: Inamorata

Book 24: The Guest Room

Dates read: February 25-28, 2016

Rating: 6/10

"He realized how much he was dreading the sunrise: it would illuminate just how much his world had changed since yesterday- and how damaged was the little bark that carried his soul, how far it was from the shore, and how menacing were the waves in between. No one, he knew, was ever going to look at him quite the same way again."

As someone getting married soon (about a month after this post will go live, but about three-ish months from when I'm writing it), reading a novel about a bachelor party gone horribly wrong is...interesting. Not that I'm worried about Drew having the kind of party that goes on in The Guest Room. If I were, I wouldn't be marrying him.

In The Guest Room, Richard Chapman is just trying to be a good best man when he agrees to host his little brother Phillip's bachelor party at his home. He sends his wife and young daughter away for the weekend, expecting the usual kind of bachelor deal: drinking, carousing, maybe strippers. What he gets are two young Eastern European women in his living room that are clearly more than "just" strippers: they're prostitutes. What he doesn't realize until much later is that they aren't "just" prostitutes, but women who are being trafficked for sex. After he comes close to but ultimately stops himself from sleeping with one of them, his entire world is turned upside down when they violently kill their "bodyguards" and take off. The story splits and follows two tracks: what happens with Richard as the ramifications of that night spiral out of control in both his personal and professional lives, and the story of Alexandra, the girl Richard almost slept with, both before and after that night.

While author Chris Bohjalian does a great job of making Richard a sympathetic character, using him as a lens to show how even fundamentally decent men participate in and perpetuate a culture that treats women as commodities, Alexandra's is the more dynamic story. An aspiring ballerina in Armenia, she is lured away from home after both her parents die by her mother's former employer with promises of dance training and a career. Once she's taken, the 15 year-old is repeatedly raped, groomed to become a high-class call girl over the course of a few years in Russia, and then comes to the US, where the bachelor party is among her first assignments.

There's a distaste, if not recoil, by "normal" people when they think about the idea of a woman having sex for money. What kind of person would consider something like that? Why on earth? I was among them, but over the past couple years, I've been reading Maggie McNeill's excellent blog, and I've come to understand that plenty of women willingly chose the sex trade for lots of perfectly understandable reasons. While sex slavery does exist, it's MUCH less prevalent than most people would believe. So while the story told by Alexandra might be true for some small number of women, your average escort has a much more prosaic background. And while I think Bohjalian chooses to make her story dramatic for the purpose of impact, it still perpetuates a mythology that a lot of people cling to which is ultimately harmful for sex workers.

As I whole, I found the book decent but not great and ultimately forgettable. There's a good amount of suspense built in Richard's storyline, wondering how things are going to play out for him, and even more in Alexandra's storyline once it gets to the "after the murder" part. But the ending felt...undercooked, for lack of a better way to describe it. It seemed like Bohjalian wrote himself into a corner and kind of flailed his way out of it. On a final, nitpicky note, I've never had to Google as many words in the course of one book as I did with this one. I think of myself as having a pretty extensive vocabulary, but there were many words I'd never encountered before. Which is great on one level, because I'm always down to add a new word to my trove. But it struck me as a little pretentious, since most of those words were used when a simpler, more accessible one would have been perfectly appropriate.

Tell me, blog friends...what's your favorite pretentious vocab word?

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 24: The Guest Room