Thirty-three Swoons: A Novel [Hardcover]

Martha Cooley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 2005

Martha Cooley, bestselling author of The Archivist, returns with a long-anticipated novel that ranges over the puzzles of family, the marvels of scent, and the release of constricted love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cooley (The Archivist) delivers a craftily plotted, multilayered Manhattan adventure involving the incongruous intersection between an American perfumer and the Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1999, middle-aged Camilla Archer co-owns, with her ex-husband, a West Village theater accoutrements store and nurtures Danny, the 25-year-old daughter of Camilla's recently deceased cousin, Eve. Danny's true father is unknown, and she besieges Camilla—who has her own issues with her deceased perfumer father, Jordan—with inconvenient questions. Backstory: Camilla's mother died while giving birth, and the infant Camilla was brought to New York to live with Eve's parents. Eventually, Eve fell in love with her uncle Jordan, to devastating results. Meanwhile, a witty interloper narrator, who calls himself Meyerhold's doppelgänger, recounts the strange, brief encounter between Jordan and the Russian director Meyerhold in the 1920s. This narrator is a kind of dream-meister, who urged Meyerhold on a course of denial with his Soviet interrogators, to no avail, and stages Camilla's dreams about her father, whom she hasn't truly let go. Cooley demonstrates a solid grasp of the making of a perfume industry "nose," as well as the hip insouciance of the longtime Manhattanite. The narrative is set up as layers of theatrical contrivance, and the Meyerhold slant lends a compelling artifice to this quirky production. Agent, Deborah Schneider. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Since the death of her semiestranged cousin, Eve, Camilla has been having strange dreams--that her dead father and an obscure Russian theater director named Meyerhold visit her. What Camilla doesn't know is that the dreams, and part of her subconscious, have been overtaken by Meyerhold's doppelganger. The doppelganger feels guilty about Meyerhold's execution in the Russian Revolution and tries to help Camilla solve her familial problems as a way of making amends. The novel is alternately narrated by the doppelganger and Camilla--the doppelganger an interesting, somewhat gimmicky, effect added onto a rather conventional family tale of distant parents and mistaken paternity. Eve's daughter, Danny, wants to learn more about her parents. Camilla wants to make a decision about her long-term relationship with a married man, and everyone wants Camilla to be more honest with them and with herself. Some of the dialogue seems self-consciously forced, especially that of Camilla's gay best friend, but this is an enjoyable read. Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1ST edition (May 9, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316159018
• ISBN-13: 978-0316159012
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,229,882 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Stand Back and Give it Some Air, August 13, 2005

By 

Elinor Teele - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thirty-three Swoons: A Novel (Hardcover)

Thirty-Three Swoons is a tightly constructed novel, but perhaps a little more space would have allowed Cooley's book to breathe. The narrative centers around Camilla Archer, a woman whose life has been put on hold by complicated relationships in life and death with her father, Jordan, and cousin, Eve. When the dream figures of Russian theater director Meyerhold and his mysterious doppelganger begin to manipulate her dreams and intrude on her decisions, she is brought into conflict with Eve's angry daughter Danny.

Cooley has a careful technique. She interweaves the lives of Camilla, Jordan, and Meyerhold in distinctive worlds, evoking the mysterious quality of perfumes and the theater, and making ties with them to memory and love. At times she has a lovely classical restraint to her prose, especially in descriptions that morph into themes: "And with the `orientals' - opulent scents such as amber and vetiver - Jordan created fragrances that were provocative without ever resorting to vulgarity...I think of Jordan's perfumes as secret passwords each wearer decoded on her own."

Yet Camilla's quest never grabs hold of your heart and pulls you along with it. The novel's basic conflict between children and parents is an old and tricky one, and Camilla's pent-up character gives little away. Less dialogue and description about the shop or what someone is wearing, and more about Camilla's emotional history with the people she loves would have strengthened the New York characters and Camilla's dilemma. Cooley's prose is powerful - sometimes it just needs to let loose and enjoy all the possibilities she has created for it.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Moderate Disappointment, July 6, 2005

By 

Inna Feldbach (Tallinn, Estonia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thirty-three Swoons: A Novel (Hardcover)

As a translator of the author's truly wonderful first novel "The Archivist" into the Estonian I was thrilled when the publisher of the translation presented me with Martha Cooley's next work. However, from the start of the omniscient doppelganger's monologue in the first chapter I was struck by the artificiality of its tone and puzzled by the purpose of including the Vsevolod Meyerhold parts in the overall composition. It feels over constructed and the alien voice inserted in the interludes disrupts rather helps to make the tale a polyphonic one as probably intended. The connection to Russia's Stalinist past and its victims is strained and hardly justified from the point of view of the rest of the story, which in itself is masterfully told. The best episode on this plane is Stuart's make-up séance with Camilla who, on seeing her transformed image in the mirror, is shaken into better understanding of her father ("A man of feeling, fully alone.") The descriptions of Jordan's perfumes also constitute some of the best parts of the book. Still under the spell of "The Archivist" I wish the author luck in her future endeavors despite my criticism.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Passes the smell test, July 26, 2005

By 

Oswaldo S. Costa (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thirty-three Swoons: A Novel (Hardcover)

In very different ways, I found Thirty-Three Swoons as satisfying as The Archivist, Cooley's excellent first novel. The structure is more complex and inventive, with a variety of voices - dream narratives, soliloquies, and traditional narrative - sustaining that curiosity - and frustration at unresolved tension - that propels the reader forward. I see this difference between the two novels as evidence of the writer's sensitivity to the need for different languages and structures to fit different subject matters. I also found the olfactory thread that runs through the book very fresh and a nostril-opener. The strands come together in a satisfying and unpredictable way, and the prose is often beautifully turned. How lucky can a reader get?