Following the discovery of an anonymous libretto, a composer comes out of retirement to write an opera based on the life of the infamous novelist-turned-photographer Cyril Vane. A dazzling novel by one of America’s most underrated writers.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Purdy's trademark blend of high camp, bizarre characters, outrageous satire and piercing realism animates this offbeat romp. Over-the-hill composer Abner Blossom resolves to write an opera based on the lives of Cyril Vane, bisexual risque photographer of Harlem blacks, and his harpy Russian-born wife Olga Petrovna, a faded silent-screen star who claims to be a relative of the Romanovs. This odd couple, determined to suppress the truth about their lives, attempt to squelch Blossom's opera, Cock Crow , whose Brooklyn premiere climaxes a narrative that involves a scandalous funeral with hired mourners, a sleepwalker's suicide, a swarthy Sicilian youth who levitates and several gay love affairs. The colorful cast here includes Kentucky-born songwriter Val Sturgis, who is Blossom's obsequious protege, and former screen idol Francis X. Beauregard, who fills his 40-room mansion with servile young men. While Purdy ( Mourners Below ) satirizes avant-garde artiness and America's obsession with celebrities, he displays affectionate sympathy for his comic characters.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this dazzling gothic comedy, one of our greatest writers tells the story of Abner Blossom, loosely based on composer Virgil Thomson, who is busy creating an opera about Cyril Vane--who's even more loosely created from the life of Carl van Vechten, the writer and photographer best remembered for his photographs of African American artists during the Harlem Renaissance. The opera is sure to be a scandal; it will reveal Vane's sexual obsessions with many of his male subjects. Vane's widow, silent screen star Olga Petrovna, is doing everything to block its production. Interspersed are half a dozen other stories, like that of Val Sturgis, Blossom's protege and a classic Purdy lost waif, who gets involved in one tragic gay love affair after another, each more gleefully mawkish than the last. Even while confronting and conflating racial and sexual stereotypes, Purdy has never been funnier. Recommended for larger collections.
- Brian Kenney, Brooklyn P. L.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Brian Kenney, Brooklyn P. L.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a proto-gothic great,
By headman (uk) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Out With the Stars (Paperback)
One of the great New York novels. If you're an admirer of any sort of baroque sensibility, then this is a must-read. Deeply cultured, deeply weird, and deeply original, James Purdy gives us a tour de force of compression, (not a quality usually associated with baroque, I'll agree), spinning a dreamy web around an idea of a certain era in the city's artistic life. These characters will live with you for decades, if you invite them in....
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