Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel [Paperback]

Wayne Koestenbaum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2004

Pianist Theo Mangrove's planned comeback is imminent, but he's losing his nerve. While restlessly counting down the days until a performance in the French town of Aigues-Mortes, he becomes strangely convinced that Moira Orfei, a 1960s Italian circus queen, must perform with him. As he begins to turn his displaced creativity and relentless sexual energy on a series of male hustlers, random strangers, and music students, Theo wonders whether he will be able to channel his passions into one final celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite." Peopled by pianists, prostitutes, muses, and manipulators, this debut novel by noted poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum hums with obsessive energy and examines one artist's choices at the crossroads of sex, death, and creativity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer of mature and accountable linguistic genius, has taken up the fabulist form and mastered it absolutely, giving us in the narrator's fire-eating, dotted-rhythm negotiation with the mesmerizing eponymous heroine." - James McCourt "Brilliantly imagined, bitterly funny, and emotionally overwhelming, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes is a mordant, exquisite ode to 'the authentic and paralyzing distance between us.' A deep aesthetic and intellectual pleasure." - David Shields"

About the Author

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of four collections of poetry and various works of cultural criticism, including The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist), and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon. He lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (September 22, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932360530
• ISBN-13: 978-1932360530
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #302,464 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this book, February 19, 2009

By 

Rebecca Wolff (Athens, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel (Paperback)

I'm in ecstasy reading this book: it's arch, and pointillist, and hyper-clever, which I love. If you don't like that, you won't like it. If you like Nabokov, and/or Oscar Wilde, you will probably like this.

3 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Moira should sue, February 16, 2006

By 

M. G. Eustace - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel (Paperback)

Wayne Koestenbaum's book MOIRA ORFEI IN AIGUES-MORTES is arse. It's the diary of a polysexual pianist, so it's mostly about arse, although it's more penis than pianist. I thought there were only two sexes, so the most you could get was bisexual, but page after page shows how wrong I was. His diarist loves lists. He mainly loves arse, but he also loves lists. He lists the places he's been, the piano works he's played, the people he knows, what he ate, what he drank, and principally what sexual perversion he indulged, or thought about indulging, wherever he was any place in the World, and believe me that invariably involved arse. It's a sort of perverted and pretentious version of the Diaries of Adrian Mole, but without the laughs.
So where does the legendary Moira Orfei come in?
The pianist, Theo Mangrove, is obsessed with her, so he reminisces about meeting her - the cafe tables they shared, the cigarettes she smoked, the cappuccini they drank - and then corresponds with her, planning that she will bring her circus to Aigues-Mortes to accompany his comeback on the piano. Theo reproduces her letters in his diary, but the problem is that Koestenbaum's version of Moira Orfei writes in exactly the same pretentious way as Theo, so they become indistinguishable, speaking as one voice.
It wouldn't be so bad if Koestenbaum had done his research on Moira, but when he's without facts he makes things up. He describes in detail Moira's role as a Basque masseuse in the "rare Renoir opus" MASSAGE, how she goes topless to serve drinks, and how her exposed nipples upset him. MASSAGE doesn't exist, and neither does the idea that "in every film Moira performs an obligatory knee-jerk, nouvelle vague striptease, usually as finale".
If Koestenbaum wanted to wax lyrical about Moira's nipples, it would have been more honest to reminisce how at some time in the eighties Moira decided to present her circus act topless and was excitingly pictured in Oggi.
Eventually, he lists her Gladiator films, including HERCULES RETURNS, which doesn't exist, and ROCCO AND HIS SISTERS, which isn't a Gladiator film. The only movie of hers that he must have seen is TRIUMPH OF HERCULES, since he twice describes her emerging from red smoke as Pasiphae. But that's about as deep as he is prepared to go before lurching into another paragraph joyously describing homosexual activity.
This book is an insult. Fans of Moira Orfei should avoid it. Moira should sue. It's just arse.