Customer Reviews

Dancer

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Dancer is an extraordinary novel, affecting me more profoundly than any other novel I have read in a long time. Vivid and hard-edged, rather than lyrical and beautiful, it fuses fact and fiction seamlessly, bringing to life ballet star Rudolf Nureyev and the many secret worlds he inhabited. From his first public performance, when, at the age of five he performed an exuberant dance in a hospital ward for Russian soldiers wounded in World War II, he was considered more athletic than subtle, and as he grew older, his legs were regarded as the source of "more violence than grace."

Nureyev's "wild and feral" style of dance meshes perfectly with McCann's prose. Paralleling the athleticism and drive of Nureyev, McCann's writing is bold and straightforward, characterized by short, powerful, descriptive sentences, often in a simple subject-verb-object pattern. Avoiding all frills and sentimentality, McCann favors strength over lyricism, and power over prettiness.

Through the first person observations of almost two dozen characters who touched Nureyev's life in some way, McCann shines light on Nureyev's personality and his development as a dancer. His family, teachers, lovers, and even a schoolboy bully, a stilt-walker, and the captain of an airplane, who filed an "incident report" about his atrocious behavior aboard a plane, all comment on his actions and the choices he makes, personally and professionally, as his career soars.

The deprivation and sadness experienced by most of these sensitive observers in their own lives contrasts vividly with the excesses and hedonism of Nureyev's adult life and illuminate, without need for authorial comment, his arrogance and boorishness. At the same time, however, these multiple viewpoints also humanize Nureyev in many ways by showing the extent to which these other characters are connected by love to others and to their history, while Nureyev becomes a "living myth...cared for and coddled and protected by the mythmakers."

Filled with intriguing characters, ranging from simple Russian peasants to Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, John Lennon, Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and the stars of ballet, the novel is a monument to the power of the creative spirit and a testament to the dangers inherent in a life from which all other controls have been removed. Rudi always "tore [a] role open...by the manner in which he presented himself, a sort of hunger turned human." McCann brings this voracious human to life. Nureyev leaps off these pages in a huge and stunning grand jete. Mary Whipple

Didn't think I was going to like this book much -- I know nothing about and don't care all about ballet, and all I knew about Nureyev was the popular myth of a life lived extravagantly. I'd read McCann before, and thought he was pretty good, but, basically, couldn't have been less interested in this book. But I bought it because of the quote on the back from Aleksandar Hemon, who's one of my favorite writers (and who I can't imagine writing about dance, but maybe...) and I'd never seen a quote from him before. And I guess this is the way those back-of-the-book quotes are supposed to work: it made me take a chance on something I never would have read -- and it turned out to be the best book I've read in months, easily one of the two or three best I've read this year. I read it basically in one sitting (two days of sustained, obsessive reading). I still don't care about ballet, though I can now imagine caring, but the book's not really or at least not only about dancing. It's about a person named Rudi, a person named Rudi who dances with preternatural grace, but more importantly a person named Rudi who moves through the 20th century on the most astonishing arc of a life, the beauty of his work and the generosity of his spirit changing forever the lives of all the people who witness his progress. But the fact that this arc begins in the cold poverty of WWII Russia and makes it all the way to NYC's coke-fueled, sex-filled, money-burning go-go 80s allows McCann to write about much more than one remarkable person -- he opens the book with some of the best, most visceral writing about war I've ever read, and by the end is writing tender love stories about cobblers and French maids, and he's more than up to all of it. It's a difficult book to describe: it's a book full of so much, and it's all so well done, but in the end it's even more than the sum of those parts. Truly astonishing.

So I bought this book at the airport -- assuming it was going to be a present for a member of my family when I got home.
How foolish of me.
I started to flick through the pages on the plane and was immediately sucked in. The way the book starts really is astounding --- and the worlds it cuts through as it continues on its journey is breathtaking.
The story is told from different people's viewpoint of Nureyev's life and what they remember of it. The fabric of it all is of course what they remember is the story -- it may not necessarily be the truth of Nureyev's life.
The characters themselves are so wide and varied that at times you want to rush forward to hopefully meet up with them again. But also at the same point there are times when you want to stop and start the book again --- just to re-experience it.
All in all a really wonderful book --- surely destined for something great.
Highly recommended.

Buy this book and read it. I have never read a ballet novel that rose above the level of execrable. This one is a masterpiece. That the NY Times gave it a merely descriptive review should only alert you to the noncommittal torpor into which their book section has drifted of late.

I went to a reading Mr. McCann did here and everyone spent the evening cooing about Nureyev; I saw him here, we worked together there, seeing him on tv inspired me to........ nobody said a word about how brilliant this book is, least of all Mr. McCann, who seems genuinely surprised by it, as if he awoke one Easter Sunday and discovered each of its pages in baskets hidden in his house.

What's slick about the book is that the presentation reflects the subject. As monumental, as unerringly unique as Nureyev's achievements were, and in spite of his incivility to most of the people he encountered, EVERYONE could relate to him in some very personal way, so the book examines him in short vignettes from the viewpoints of the people around him, some of them historical, some fictional, some not even identified.

At the reading Mr. McCann said that he had made up a name for one of Rudik's teachers, and when he visited the real teacher's grave in Russia, the woman who tended the cemetary had his fictional character's name! Now that's either really remarkable, or it's really first rate blarney; either way I admire him for saying it. It's precisely the risk that great artists are addicted to.

The book shows the immense power of our art form to draw all the threads of history into the fabric of the present and the future. It also demonstrates how a dancer starts with mud, blood, and determination and creates the airiest of fantasies.

Mr. McCann is an ecstatic with his feet firmly on the ground, so Nureyev is the perfect hero for him. One segment, I believe the only one from Rudik's POV (other than his "to do" list), that describes one turn around the stage in about 3 pages (I don't have it here, you will know it when you read it) reminds me of that central chapter in Great Gatsby about the party at Gatsby's house that ends "one girl tosses down a drink for courage, steps onto the floor, and the world flies away...." That is, the descriptive power is so realistic and yet the subject matter is so transcendent that we are launched on a miraculous centripetal joyride into the unknowable. Melville's rapturous, rhythmic descriptions of the sea come to mind too.

Whatever you think of Nureyev you shouldn't miss the experience of reading this book. I personally feel all those "Man of the Century" lists three years back were rendered meaningless by omitting him from nomination, not because of his greatness but because so much of what happened in the 20th century flowed through his life. McCann has given us a work of literature as audacious, entertaining, and pitilessly brilliant as its subject.
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Big, bold and audacious, Dancer will probably anger the ballet purists, but those who like challenging, edgy, and stylistically daring literature will probably love this ode to one of the most written about dancers in history. Told from the point of view of several different people who influenced Rudolf Nureyev's life, Dancer takes the reader on a journey from rural 1950's Soviet Union, crippled by war and poverty, to the decadent "West" of the late 70's and early 80's where Rudi tangled with the cocaine fuelled and sexually promiscuous jet set. McCann, using a variety of different narrative styles in the form of letters, diary entries and news reports, paints a kind of semi-biographical portrait of a man who lived, breathed, and was driven by the desire to dance; but was ultimately haunted by his defection to the west, and his inability to return to visit his family to rediscover his roots.

As a child, Nureyev is portrayed as a simple Russian peasant boy, who picks his nose, scratches his crotch, has no manners, and is endlessly teased at school. But his first ballet teacher, Anna could see that "Rudik" was somehow born to dance, "that he was unlettered in it, yet he knew intimately that it was grammar for him, deep and untutored." From the moment he performs for the hospitalized Russian soldiers after World War 11, Rudolf is set on a path that will take him from the boards of the Kirov stage to performing with Margot Fontaine at Covent Garden, London.

As the narrative progresses, Nureyev blossoms into a beautiful man, an obsessive performer, and a glamorous, brawling celebrity that becomes both a fiend and darling of the western media. He was dogged by the paparazzi and fixated over by critics and gossip columnists who witnessed both his technique disintegrate and his health gradually decline before their eyes. But Rudolf's ultimate genius was allowing his body to say things that he couldn't otherwise express - there was more intuition in him than intellect, more spirit than knowledge, "as if he had been here in another guise, something wild and feral."

Intense and oblique, McCann blasts the reader which interior monologues of the people who made up the kaleidoscope of Rudolf's life - from his sister to his housekeeper and even his English shoe-maker. We witness Margo Fontaine ruminating on how her life as a dancer had "been so full and empty at the same time." She's anxious for Rudi to retire; yet she ponders her own life of incessant bloody feet, unending blisters, and chronic headaches (from constantly pulling her hair back). There's also Rudolf's best friend Victor, the Venezuelan hustler who becomes Rudi's "partner in crime" as they furtively cruise the Manhattan bathhouses in search of men and sex. These characters while showing a mixture of self-absorbed views of Nureyev, also throw up colorful, and distinctive shards of his personality, creating an iconic image of a dancer who was also a transcendent celebrity.

Much of McCann's portrayal of Nureyev is unsympathetic: The reader witnesses a fidgety, uncontrolled boy become a hardnosed artist and domineering employer. He's an unadulterated egoist, who's vain, rude, and lacking in any kind of sensitivity. And the images of the sweating collective mill of dance training, punctuated with Nureyev's obsessive internal checklists, show his fanatical desire to perfect his technique, acquire culture and fine-tune his image at all costs. Dancer is a hectic, fast-paced, fragmental novel, which never romanticizes the world of ballet, but offers fervent insights into the hunger and grandeur that this art form ultimately requires. Mike Leonard October 04.

I was vaguely disappointed when I heard that the subject of this novel by Colum McCann, one of my favorite authors, was ballet. It would be tough for me to find a topic I care less about, and I thought that this book would therefore bore me. Boy was I wrong...I should've trusted McCann from the start. This is his best work to date, and that is saying something! This book is vividly imagined and loaded with so much telling detail about the various settings (WWII Russia, 70's New York, Caracas, London, Paris) and of course the subject (ballet, Nureyev and the people who surround him) that you wonder how McCann found the time to do so much research. Nureyev's story is told from his own point of view and through the eyes of those around him. McCann digs deep, giving life to Nureyev's dance coaches and partners, his jealous sister, his suffering mother, his friends, his maid, his shoemaker, even a ballet school rival who gets only a few paragraphs! It all adds up to a rich story. A number of celebrities make cameos, too (Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Andy Warhol, etc.), lending further flavor to the story's time and place. McCann possesses a genius that borders on scary. He draws you in and makes you care about the characters in a way few other authors have made me experience. On a back-of-the-hardcover quote, Frank McCourt lauds McCann for taking big chances in this book...and he does! And they all work. My only disappointment was to learn that Nureyev was a real person. The real Nureyev couldn't possibly have lived a life this perfectly imagined. Bravo, Colum McCann!

Although I have always held a deep love for the ballet, I had never given much thought to dancers I had never seen on stage, except to keep a detached respect in the back of my mind. However, upon reading McCann's book, I have fallen in love with the passionate, willful dancer who is the subject of his novel. Immediately captured by the beginning description of the horrors of WWII and intrigued by his portrait of young Rudik as a boy, I found myself unable to extract myself from the novel. In addition, it made me long to learn more about Rudi--to look at photographs, samples of his dancing, non-fictional biographies. I highly recommend this book for anyone loving dance--but beware. Some of the facts have been changed or omitted to improve the book's readability. If you are someone who gets frustrated by minor deviations from bare facts, this book is perhaps not for you. For anyone else who enjoys richly drawn characters, skillful writing, and engaging stories, buy this book today, for it is surely worth the read.

First, the writing in this book is as breathtaking as actually seeing Rudi dance--and I have. This book is NOT for the linear/literal minded. James Joyceian, fluid, associate language alternates with standard sentence format, and the combination brings alive the passions and personalities of Nureyev's life. In this book he appears as the larger-than-life character he really was. I have recommended this book to SO many people, and haven't had a disappointment yet. Please ignore the reviews of those who are judging this book by their own fixed expectations of what a book about a dancer should be. This novelized bio is more true than any group of literal facts.

Colum McCann's "Dancer", a fictitious biography of acclaimed 20th Century dancer Rudolf Nureyev, is quite simply the author's finest work of fiction to date. This is truly an engrossing, often mesmerizing, exploration of the dancer's life as seen through the eyes of his family and friends from his childhood to the end of an artistically triumphant life tragically cut short by AIDS. The son of impoverished Muslim Tatar peasants, we meet the young "Rudik" dancing for Russian troops in the waning days of World War II. His teachers in his hometown and then later, in Lenningrad, recognize that here is someone who is destined to dance, culminating with his admittance into the company of Lenningrad's celebrated Kirov Ballet. His Paris defection only leads the young Rudolf Nureyev into scaling Mount Everests of international artistic triumphs, culminating with his dancing with acclaimed ballerina Margot Fonteyn at London's Covent Garden. But perhaps more fascinating is the dark side of Nureyev's personality, which McCann has captured vividly, showing the artist's arrogance and decadent behavior, including his brutal treatment of friends, colleagues and especially, lovers, such as acclaimed fellow dancer Erik Buhn. We see him sink into the seedy underground of New York City's homosexual-dominated sexual pleasure industry in the 1970s, while managing to keep his homosexuality a closely held secret. I concur completely with my former high school teacher Frank McCourt's glowing assessment of "Dancer" on the novel's book jacket as having "... the wingspan of a great Russian novel, which is only fitting for an imagined life of Rudolf Nureyev."

Colum McCann is creating a stir among critics and readers alike: he is insisting that DANCER, his new, immensely successful story about the life of Rudolf Nureyev, is 'made up', that it is not a biography but a story inspired by the quixotic life of the famous and infamous premiere ballet danseur. Whether that public statement being circulated is just a disclaimer, allowing the author to omit and embellish where he choses, or a portal for a more fleshed-out portrait of a controversial character, cannot detract from the fact that this is the work of a fresh writing voice.

Fact or fiction, DANCER is one fine novel! Colum McCann has a keen sense for showing all facets of his main character: he tells his story through the eyes of several of the important people in the life of one of the greatest dancers in the history of ballet. And with each new narrator he alters his writing style to match the voice. The childhood of Nureyev is told in a bleak introductory chapter that enriches our knowledge of post-Csarist Russia with all the atmosphere of the cold climate, tragedy of war upon war, poverty existence of a people caught up in the changes form Csars to Lenin to Stalin to Kreuschev. Out of this milieu rises a lad who loves to dance, eventually rising to the Kirov then defecting to the West. His artistic brilliance and media dominance add to the "created Nureyev" and with every turn in his development as a dancing star and as a libertine we hear the inside story from Margot Fonteyn to the hustler Victor to the lover Erik Bruhn in wonderfully elegant, soaring prose. The result is a rich tapestry of a life, a boy of poverty rising to a world class star. The personlity quirks are all captured with fascinating, almost voyeuristic detail.

DANCER grabs your attention, holds you to the final page, and while painting a photorealistic portrait of Nureyev, the author teaches us much about Russian history, about the mechanics of ballet dancing (including a view of Nureyev's ballet shoemaker), and about he sordid atmosphere of the smarmy side of New York, Paris, London and almost any place where Nureyev lands. Beautifully written, absorbing, enlightening and satisfying. Who cares if the book is true biography or fiction!!!