From Publishers Weekly
Edge's second historical (after
The Company) takes as its subject the French artist Théodore Géricault and the genesis of one of his best-known paintings,
The Raft of the Medusa. It is 1818, and Géricault is trying to extract himself from an affair with Alexandrine, six years his senior but much younger than her husband, who happens to be Géricault's uncle and benefactor. Géricault is also at a crossroads in his career: six years after winning the gold medal at the Paris Salon for his painting
Charging Chasseur, Géricault is in desperate need of a subject for a new painting that will get him back into the Salon. At this point Géricault becomes obsessed with the shipwreck of the
Medusa, a frigate that went aground off the coast of Cape Blanco. He interviews survivors and becomes increasingly obsessed with every vivid and unsettling detail of the shipwreck. As Géricault begins to paint his vision of the aftermath of the catastrophe, his own life disintegrates: Alexandrine becomes pregnant and their affair is discovered, with disastrous consequences. This is a thoughtful and richly imagined story about the darker aspects of the artistic process and the costs of obsession.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Shipwrecks fascinate Edge. In
The Company (2001), she fictionalizes a horrific 1629 wreck off the coast of Australia. In her second historical novel, she not only tells the hellish story of the passengers of the
Medusa, a French frigate, who were abandoned on a raft off the coast of Africa, but she also dramatizes the audacious creation of perhaps the most famous of marine disaster paintings, Theodore Gericault's enormous
Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). In pursuit of authenticity, Parisian Gericault--young, wealthy, and feverishly creative--opens his home to two survivors of the criminal maritime debacle, commissions a replica of the raft, brings in cadavers for props, and sketches terminally ill hospital patients. Edge intensifies her live-hard-die-young hero's mania by orchestrating a scandalous affair with his uncle's sexy young wife. Just barely steering clear of cheesy romance and gothic kitsch, Edge achieves an electrifying depiction of the
Medusa catastrophe, a vivid reenactment of Gericault's revolutionary artistic achievement, and a provocative inquiry into the moral quandaries of an artist determined to depict the truth at any cost.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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