Customer Reviews

Blue Nude: A Novel

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I read BLUE NUDE in one take. I couldn't stop. Then I re-read the last section because I felt as if I had raced too fast to the end. The prose is gorgeous--lyrical, exact. It feels to me more like an extended poem than a novel. I don't mean that the writing is "poetic" but that it has the hallmarks of poetry: concision and compression. I wanted there to be more, but that's not a criticism. I think it's just the right length. I think BLUE NUDE is a harder book than Rosner's first novel, THE SPEED OF LIGHT, but that, too, is not a criticism. I think the pain and loss go deeper here; at times, they seem almost unbearable. But Rosner's beautiful, sure writing holds us, compels us forward to a redemption that seems totally earned. The novel ends with a scene that's breathtaking in its inventiveness and its rightness. I can't get the images out of my mind, and I'm grateful to Rosner for giving them to me, for making me see that there is always a choice beyond despair.

On a day when I needed to rejuvenate myself, I headed up a mountain between San Francisco and rural Marin County, the settings of Elizabeth Rosner's new book Blue Nude. I have my dog and the book in tow and settle into finishing this fine description of two divergent souls who meet on a creative journey. What I found so compelling in finishing this book is that it took me into a creative trance, usually only achieved when intimately involved in my own creative process. As an analytical type, I found myself not studying the writing or the characters, but instead being swept away by the accumulation of their experiences that result in art.

In Ms. Rosner's first book, The Speed of Light, I was captivated by the experience of feeling the second-hand smoke of genocide, seen through the eyes of children of Holocaust survivors. It also gave us a more fresh and raw view of man against man, and the inhumanity that unfortunately is experienced by many peoples throughout the world. Blue Nude continues in this vein and explores characters not just for their own experience, but also the experience that have shaped the people that have shaped them. And Ms. Rosner doles out this information in a way that keeps us curious and expectant, while not feeling that any of it is predicable.

I thoroughly enjoyed both books, not just for the story and the characters, but for the feelings they invoked in me while reading. These books are thought provoking beyond their last pages.

Blue Nude takes us on a passionate, sensual journey as the two main characters of the story are thrust into a powerful and erotic confrontation with the hope and the fear that each represents to the other. They are both driven by the shadows they carry, whether from the collective trauma of World War II and the Holocaust or from the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. This brave book, however, is far more than just another story about the Holocaust. It is a living, haunting mystery set in San Francisco and Point Reyes in the early 21st Century. Rosner's passionate, poetic writing style gives the story its own body and bones, making it a living piece of exceptional literature.

As in her first novel, The Speed of Light, Elizabeth Rosner uses her skill as a poet to create a stylistic delight that brings the reader very deeply into the inner worlds of Danzig, a 58 year old German male painter, and Marev, a young Israeli woman and artist's model. Rosner's writing style is uniquely successful in bringing us deeply into the explicitly sexual dimension of Danzig and Marev's confrontation in the artist's studio. This is new territory for Rosner; for unlike the more adolescent Paula and Julian from The Speed of Light, Danzig and Marev are fully formed sexual adults. Rosner's writing shines as she brings us into the depths of their sexually charged confrontation. For example, here is Danzig lusting after Marev while teaching his class on how to draw her body:

"He is only partly stunned by the intensity of this desire to touch her. It has been a long time since a model pulled at him this way, skin looking as though it's made of light, an infinity of refraction making his eyes ache. A lunar light, the way the full moon appears as if it is the source of such illumination when we know it is only borrowing from something else, measuring the distance from the sun, showing us that miraculous brightness.
He imagines this: cupping her breasts and testing their weight in his hands to be sure they fit when his mind has already predicted it and his palms tell him Yes. To press himself against her, fold themselves together seam to seam, the way certain insects mate into one flying beam.
He imagines them ascending."

And in direct counterpoint we hear Merav's inner dialogue, acknowledging the contradiction of her role as a model embodying female sexuality.

"A twisting torso is more interesting than a plain stance; one leg bent is better than both legs symmetrical. Not that she has to consciously decide these things anymore. Her body knows its repertoire, though it is something different than repetition...Marev knows she isn't just a figure for them to study; she is a character in a setting, an actress, a silent film...
Her modeling was about the body, and yet the true source of her work was what lived inside, inescapable and invisible. Hers was the art of remaining present even as she disappeared. Inhabiting her body and dreaming her way out of it.".

Rosner takes us on a wondrous and sometimes very disturbing journey through the inner workings of these two souls. Each character carries within them a deeply wounding, tragic piece of the seminal horror of our recent history. Can there be any hopeful outcome from the meeting of these two deeply tortured, yet vibrant people?

In portraying so exquisitely and poetically the specifics of this story, Rosner opens before us the most profound and important questions of our era. Can we overcome the traumas of our past, no matter how severe and unimaginable, and still emerge as fully conscious human beings capable of love? Can we own our fears and projections? Can we stop the cycle of passing on these past traumas to others by our actions that so often create a void of compassion and understanding? And in a more global sense, can we stop supporting policies and collective actions that continue the blind cycle of collective traumatization by war, hatred and blind indifference to human suffering?

As a child of Holocaust survivors herself, Rosner is fully qualified to take on this important journey of exploration. Clearly she is a writer who is willing to face these issues directly. I have learned a lot from her explorations and I invite the reader to delve into her work as well. I believe this book will help open your eyes to the hidden pieces of mystery that create the human condition. This is the most you can ask from a great novel, and Blue Nude is certainly in that category.

Elizabeth Rosner's extraordinary writiing gift is that, like many novelists, she knows how to tell a compelling story that urges you along, yet with her writing you feel organically immersed in a cover-to-cover poetic experience. Rosner gives us flesh and blood characters who are real, imperfect , suffering, spirited and yet always pointed in the direction of love and redemption. Her prose is so exquisite that you can't help but re-read one beautiful line after another, amazed at her ability to touch the depth of human experience in such moving, well-crafted language. Give yourself the treat of a quiet afternoon, the phone turned off, your favorite drink at your side, and a copy of Blue Nude.

This is a beautiful book! The way Merav and Danzig dance with one another is a perfect metaphor for the larger theme: how any two peoples with a very troubled past can approach reconciliation. The reader can tell that Ms. Rosner is a poet. The book is lyrical, and written with compassion and restraint.

People who enjoyed Elizabeth Rosner's first novel, 'The Speed of Light,' will be very glad to find her latest, 'Blue Nude', on the shelves. Just as beautifully written and with a measure of bitter wit to cut the poignancy, 'Blue Nude' leaves you with the belief that people can indeed sometimes bury their demons and that yes, happiness is sometimes possible. I'm so glad I found this novel - a fab read.
a bookworm

Blue Nude is a stirring, subtle and deep rendition of all that makes us human, and secures for novelist Elizabeth Rosner a place in the pantheon of important American authors. Those who were moved by her first novel, The Speed of Light, and hoped for more, can rejoice. Her new work delivers the goods as few second novels have, bearing the unmistakable hallmarks of Arrival.

The subliminal iconography of the story alone is enough to enliven one's dreams. Burning buildings, the naked female form on display, skeletons, corpses and cadavers, swastikas, exploding buses, girls with guns, empty canvases, empty deserts, a car driven into the fog on the edge of a continent. But while the reader's imagination is crowded, the page remains spacious. Rosner's mastery of the poetics of prose is on full display in Blue Nude, showing us the lyrical majesty inherent in the common details of lives without wasting a word.

This is a book that seems to defy gravity along with conventional wisdom. A simple narrative of an encounter and the memories that surround it, Blue Nude keeps lifting off the ground into the cloud filled skies of allegory without ever actually becoming one. It's the in-between places in Rosner's writing that hold the most meaning, perhaps because we are not expecting to find it there. Post-war European apartment buildings come at us like prophets spreading revelations about character and history. Lap swimmers part the water with their strokes the way our decisions separate the past from the future. Brushes are loaded with paint the way our lives swell with intent before action. It's almost as if the `important' scenes are place holders for the `fillers' and the `fillers' hold important messages from beyond - as if some hand other than the author's is directing the action.

It's a story of threatened survival, not of the body, but of the spirit. Our two protagonists scurry forward beneath the impending boot heel of history, and with time running out, their moves are inexorably reduced to turning either toward or away from each other, a choice made excruciating by their pasts. Danzig is German, the son of a brutish Nazi father. Merav is Israeli, the granddaughter of a woman saved from the ravages of the holocaust only by her beauty. Each hopes that their flight from the Old World to the New, from the confines of their cultures to the freedom of personal artistic expression will save them.

They meet in the Danzig's life drawing class at the San Francisco Academy of Art when she comes to model as a substitute. Danzig, a once successful artist, is now blocked as he nears the end of his prime and the demons he has spent a lifetime outrunning come home to roost with a vengeance. Merav, a young woman fighting to maintain her vitality and authenticity in a world intent upon objectifying her, has traded in the Israeli Army for the art studio where she fights a different kind of war. The book opens with her disrobing and standing naked before Danzig and his students, holding her ground with grace and courage as the enforced space between them fills up with enough charge to light a city.

What transpires from there is for you, the reader to discover. Just be prepared to travel through some of your own most closely guarded territory. My advice is to relax and enjoy it; you're in good hands.

Blue Nude tells us a thought provoking story that reads like a beautiful painting whose brush strokes evoke poetry, memory and drama. This novel weaves its way forward and backward through time and ultimately lands us in the present, perched and ready for new beginnings.

Bestselling author and poet Elizabeth Rosner's second novel (following THE SPEED OF LIGHT) is a rousing tour-de-force --- a window into the artistic lives of two strangers whose pasts, presents and futures are irrevocably intertwined. With delicate yet persistent hands, Rosner explores a multilayered landscape of loss, unrequited desire, passion and isolationism, and weaves a dark and textured story out of what she finds. Her characters are larger than life at times --- bursting with their own specific energies, passions and identities, and righteous in their attempts to make meaning out of the world around them. Yet, they are also nameless receptacles of the universal experience --- mere forms chasing the same questions that have been chased and debated for centuries.

BLUE NUDE is the story of the complex union between two artists in San Francisco --- the elder and once-prominent German painter turned professor, Danzig, and Merav, a youthful Israeli beauty and former art student who makes a living working as a nude model. The two have deep and guarded pasts, both dating back to lives in foreign countries, separate yet intricately connected. Although they are many years apart in both age and experience, their sordid histories haunt their present lives and profoundly influence their decisions, actions and relationships.

Danzig was born immediately following World War II, to an abusive father who played a major role (hinted at, but never explicitly named) in the destruction of the Jews during the war; a painfully submissive mother who did nothing to stand between her violent husband, his post-occupation sullied reputation, and his undeserving offspring; and a depressed and guilt-ridden sister who took her own life when Danzig was seven years old. As he grew older, Danzig became increasingly aware of the events that shaped his upbringing and was disgusted by his father's vulgarity, his mother's lack of self-esteem and inability to protect herself or her children, and his sister's resignation to what she viewed as life's insurmountable injustices. He found solace in painting, however, and eventually left home permanently to relocate to San Francisco in order to explore his art more freely.

Also an expatriate, Merav spent her childhood on a kibbutz in Tel-Aviv and lived with her mother Isabelle and her grandmother Esther, who miraculously survived persecution by the Germans. She learned how to explore herself and life's richness through painting and discovered at a young age the beauty of expression without words. Her neighbor, Yossi, was her best friend, confidant and eventual lover, and taught her that passion could be contained or exchanged in a single touch. They both served their two-year stint in the Israeli army, traveling the vast desert learning (or, in her case, trying not to learn) to kill. Tragically, he was killed after the bus he was on exploded because of an undetected bomb --- an incident that broke her heart (especially because he had just informed her that he was about to marry someone else) and pushed her to move away from a country riddled with death to one where she could begin anew.

In a way, their chance meeting in his classroom in San Francisco --- he, the art teacher, and she, the substitute nude model --- serves as the gateway to their mutually independent yet intertwined rebirth, and infuses life into the deeper, humming themes that resonate throughout BLUE NUDE. Later, as she poses for him, exposed and naked in his studio, he is finally able to move past and through his wrecked childhood, the damaging and ill-fated affairs with two previous models, and resulting period of maddening artistic blockage, to a space ripe with inspiration, confidence and inner peace. She, too, transcends the consequences of her upbringing, Yossi's death, and failed marriage to a photographer who loved her only as a sum of photographable body parts, and walks willingly into a future alive with hope. "She does not want to live as if about to be annihilated. She will not accept that as the truth." Neither will he. Life begets Art begets Life.

BLUE NUDE is an exquisite and quietly beautiful story, told by a writer with surefire talent, grace and profound insight into human frailty. Elizabeth Rosner's knack for waxing poetic is witnessed on every page --- her sentences, deliciously thick with implication and symbolism; her characters, flawed yet persistent, each grappling with life's choices in his or her own way. There are a number of captivating moments that readers will relish and languish on, as they burrow through chapters that jump back and forth in time in each character's life, and shift from perspective to perspective. Of course, the ubiquitous relationship between Art, Truth and Life pulsates throughout these well-drawn pages, offering up many burning and delightfully unanswerable questions so vital to the human experience. Stunning.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

This book is as much a work of art as it is a book about art and artists. The language flows like water and the sum is much bigger than its parts. The book is very simple from the flow of plot but is packed with complexity and emotion behind the scenes. The book centers around two main characters, an artist and an artists' model. The artist, Danzig, is German and the model is Israeli and both have dark histories surrounding the Holocaust/WWII and the historical animosities between their cultures. Despite this darkness, the two are drawn to one another as artist and muse and the chemistry awakens Danzig's lost passion for producing his own art. Both of the main characters are facially calm and closed off but have a world of emotional history behind their calm exterior. "Smooth waters run deep" is a good label for both. I didn't find either of them particularly loveable but they were totally compelling. I read this book in a single day; somehow I just couldn't put it down. The author did an excellent job of bringing art to life and also bringing a fresh perspective and new life to a difficult subject matter that has been addressed in a million ways already.