The Transformation: A Novel [Paperback]

Catherine Chidgey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 13, 2006

Tampa, Florida, 1898: A hazy frontier where the Old World meets the New, where miracles of transformation are possible and the soil is so fertile that dry sticks take root and flower. Dominating the town is the magisterial new Tampa Bay Hotel and dominating the hotel is an exotic creature by the name of Monsieur Lucien Goulet III, wig maker to the wealthy and glamorous. As winter nears its end, Goulet is entranced by a head of hair belonging to the young widow Marion Unger. But this material, without which he absolutely cannot form his greatest masterpiece, is hard to come by, as it is still attached to its owner.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Swampy late–19th-century Tampa Bay is the unlikely romantic setting for this poignant historical novel by New Zealander Chidgey (The Strength of the Sun). Upon the construction of the Tampa Bay Hotel, a Byzantine fairy tale castle that soon attracts fashionable winter travelers, three eccentric American-made personalities descend on the town: a wig maker, a cigar factory worker and a Detroit widow. Marion Unger, a young Detroit wife, had arrived with her bricklayer husband, Jack, who helped build the hotel; he dies soon after its completion. In mourning, Marion finds her way to inimitable Parisian perruquier Lucien Goulet III, recently installed in the Tampa area to make his fortune; he weaves a memorial bracelet for her out of her hair and her late husband's, and becomes obsessed by her white-blonde tresses. Meanwhile, a Cuban immigrant teenager Rafael Méndez, employed as a roller in the local Ybor City cigar factory, is intent on aiding his country in the throes of revolution. When Rafael goes to work at night for the conniving Goulet—picking through people's trash to search for hanks of hair—he meets the chaste, rather naïve Marion and falls in love with her. A "transformation" is the sort of stupendous architectural hairpiece designed by M. Goulet, but here it also stands for the changes ushering in a motley new society. Incorporating her research with an organic touch, Chidgey constructs a tale as enchanting as the hotel rising from its Florida swamp. Agent, Kim Witherspoon. (May 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Whether called a peruke, a postiche, or a toupee, in the hands of wig-maker Lucien Goulet III, it's a transformation. A foundling who learned his trade in Paris (and left the body of his master, dead at his hands, behind), he's the sole year-round resident of the resplendent Tampa Bay Hotel in 1898. An unlikely trio forms: 15-year-old Cuban -cigar-maker Rafael Mendez, hired by Goulet to recover hair clippings, becomes smitten with Marion Unger, a young widow with white-blond hair with whom Goulet has become obsessed and for whom he wants to design the grandest transformation of all. Chidgey specializes in intertwining the lives of unlikely characters, as she did in The Strength of the Sun (2002), and it works to a point here. But the going is sometimes slow, and the close is a letdown. However, the historical details--notably about the hotel and its role in the Spanish-American War--add interest, as does the spiritualism practiced by a group of women that includes Marion (and, she learns, her late husband's lover). Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Picador (June 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312426062
• ISBN-13: 978-0312426064
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,987,611 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars hot, sultry and fantastically weird, November 8, 2007

By 

H. Starr - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Transformation: A Novel (Paperback)

Hauntingly beautiful engrossing summer read. This book sticks with you like sweat hungry flies in the oppressive Florida humidity. Captured the mood of the era just right and gave me all the seediness about it that I wanted. Enjoy this great off-the-radar book with a mint julip in an old creaky beachfront house with hosiery draped over Tiffany lamps for optimum pleasure.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Nobody wanted a chignon, soon my skills would be obsolete", May 10, 2005

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Transformation: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Transformation is all about hair, and widows and Cubans, but it is mostly about hair. Set in 1898 with the century almost gone, and the automobile coming, the story centers on the wig maker Lucien Goulet III - Manufacturer of Ladies' Imperceptible Hair-Pieces and Gentlemen's Invisible Coverings. Escaping a shady background in France, the mysterious perrupuier has found a new home in Tampa, Florida, a world of perpetual sunshine, oranges, mosquitoes, swamps, and the occasional hurricane.

Author, Catherine Chidgey paints a picture of Tampa as a happening place. The railroad magnate Henry B. Plant has just build the Tampa Bay Hotel, with its tangle of Moorish minarets and aches, "its Byzantine domes and its thirteen crescent moons, the Hotel resembles "fairy-tale" castle anchored at the water's edge. Taking a room in one of the minarets, Goulet takes advantage of the Hotel's wealthy clientele, while inwardly sniping at their self-indulgent, decadent ways. In tones of sycophantic menace, he declares that he can work miracles with "a hank of hair, glue and a net."

As Goulet relates his adventures in hair, his narrative interweaves with those of Marion Unger, a local widow and orange grove owner whose silver-blonde tresses so entrance Goulet, and Rafael Méndez, a young cigar-roller who has come to Florida to escape the war in Cuba. He too is drawn to Marion, and drawn into the dark side of Goulet's dream-weaving business: scavenging refuse tips for combings, and eventually scalping the dead. Goulet, whose obsession with Marion's hair, manipulates both and the transformation he determines to make for it, is the driving force of the plot.

The Transformation is obviously meticulously researched and it shows, especially in the pages devoted to Goulet's obsessive rambling about his past in France and his wordy discussions on the art of the perrupuier. Florida of 1898 in recreated in convincing, immediate detail. There is lots of attention paid to Rafael's background and his family back in Cuba, and Chidgey deftly evokes the political climate leading up to the Spanish American War, when the American soldiers were amassing in Tampa hoping to liberate Cuba.

Chidgey portrays Goulet as some kind of hair sucking monster, a man devoted to fakery and deception. In one instance he mocks a customer by employing two actresses to mimic her for his own entertainment. But as the book progresses, Goulet's gleeful inhumanity becomes almost pantomimic and unreal, a caricature of a self-made, foppish and dandified man. In the search for hair, he gloats, "Once I found a stillborn child, but the little hair I could recover was too downy for my purposes."

The Transformation is full of Chidgey's confidant commanding prose, and vivid atmospherics, but the meandering narrative often hampers the overall effectiveness of the book. This reader never really cared that much about the characters or what happened to them - they all seem to sink into the background, weighed down by the author's rather substantial prose. There should be at least a modicum of emotional payoff involved in this story, but Goulet and his obsessions swamp the narrative, sucking the life from all around him, and in the end neither his flighty customers nor most readers will really be that concerned or worried over his fate. Mike Leonard May 05.