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Dancer: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Four winters..." (more)
Key Phrases: blam blam, New York, Covent Garden, Saint Petersburg (more...)

4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (33 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A chorus of voices breathe new life into the story of Rudolf Nureyev, one of ballet's greatest performers, in this vibrant, imaginative patchwork of a novel by Irish expatriate McCann (This Side of Brightness, etc.). As a seven-year-old peasant boy in 1944, Rudi dances for wounded soldiers in a hospital ward during World War II. By the mid-1950s he has outgrown life in the tiny Soviet town of Ufa, his unfailing determination to perform (against the stern wishes of his father) driving him into the wider world. It is his stubborn persistence more than his natural talent that distinguishes him, but his first teachers see great potential in him, and he is accepted into a ballet company in Leningrad. He defects to France and later moves on to Italy, where "the ovations become more exhausting than the dance" and he is sucked into the drug and disco culture of the late '70s, even after his partner Margot Fonteyn urges him to stay focused. A relationship with New York gay hustler Victor Pareci allows Rudi to indulge his wildest impulses, but his brashness and self-absorption are tempered when he journeys back to his homeland in 1987 in the touching conclusion. The sections narrated by different characters, some central and some marginal, create a kaleidoscopic effect. Faithfully capturing the pathos and grim poverty of the Soviet Union at mid-century, McCann also reveals a splashy tabloid affinity for the excesses and effects of fame and notoriety. Though the focus here is narrower than that of McCann's previous works, the novel is a lovely showcase for his fluid prose and storytelling skill.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

McCann's latest (after Everything in This Country Must) is hugely ambitious: a fictionalized account of the life of Rudolph Nureyev-the Cold War danseur noble lauded as the world's first "pop star dancer"-as told by those who knew him. Among the narrators are the irrepressible Yulia, the daughter of Nureyev's first ballet teacher; Margot Fonteyn, Rudik's brilliant dance partner; Victor, a gay hustler from the Lower East Side with a penchant for blow, bath houses, and back talk; and others. What emerges is a pastiche of both the man and the myth, the disparate voices combining to create a lyrical and variegated portrait. The narrative technique can, however, be disorienting and even frustrating, as the reader cares more about some narrators than others and is loath to depart from them. McCann also has a somewhat irksome tendency to over-explain moments he should allow to resonate on their own. Still, the work hangs together well and is finally an enormous achievement. Both the Soviet Union of the war-torn 1940s and the displacement and hopefulness of an exile's life are perfectly evoked, and Nureyev-impossible, erratic, and brilliant-is a golden flame that sets everything ablaze. Recommended for all contemporary fiction collections.
--Tania Barnes, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 356 pages
Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (January 6, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805067922
ISBN-13: 978-0805067927
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds

Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (33 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #470,496 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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#2 in Books > Arts & Photography > Performing Arts > Dance > Choreographers & Dancers > Nureyev, Rudolf

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
Four winters. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
blam blam

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Covent Garden, Saint Petersburg, Big House, Karl Marx Street, Mister Ashworth, Driving School, Leningrad Choreographic, Margot Fonteyn, Andy Warhol, Belaya River, Black Sea, Central Park, Dmitri Yachmennikov, Kings Road, Lenin Park, Victor Pareci, Wisdom Defending Youth Against Love

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 6 books:

Fishing the Sloe-Black River: Stories by Colum McCann in Front Matter, and Back Matter
Everything in This Country Must: A Novella and Two Stories by Colum McCann in Front Matter, and Back Matter
This Side of Brightness: A Novel by Colum McCann in Front Matter, and Back Matter
Eugene Onegin. English National Opera Guide 38 by Tchaikovsky on page 95
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell in Front Matter

See all 6 books this book cites

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	51% buy the item featured on this page: Dancer: A Novel 4.5 out of 5 stars (33)
	31% buy Let the Great World Spin: A Novel 4.2 out of 5 stars (73) $14.62
	11% buy This Side of Brightness: A Novel 4.3 out of 5 stars (39) $10.20
	4% buy The Help 4.8 out of 5 stars (1,118) $12.00

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Customer Reviews

33 Reviews

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4 star:		(2)
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4.5 out of 5 stars (33 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A sort of hunger turned human.", December 31, 2002

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

Dancer is an extraordinary novel, affecting me more profoundly than any other novel I have read in a long time. Vivid and hard-edged, rather than lyrical and beautiful, it fuses fact and fiction seamlessly, bringing to life ballet star Rudolf Nureyev and the many secret worlds he inhabited. From his first public performance, when, at the age of five he performed an exuberant dance in a hospital ward for Russian soldiers wounded in World War II, he was considered more athletic than subtle, and as he grew older, his legs were regarded as the source of "more violence than grace."

Nureyev's "wild and feral" style of dance meshes perfectly with McCann's prose. Paralleling the athleticism and drive of Nureyev, McCann's writing is bold and straightforward, characterized by short, powerful, descriptive sentences, often in a simple subject-verb-object pattern. Avoiding all frills and sentimentality, McCann favors strength over lyricism, and power over prettiness.

Through the first person observations of almost two dozen characters who touched Nureyev's life in some way, McCann shines light on Nureyev's personality and his development as a dancer. His family, teachers, lovers, and even a schoolboy bully, a stilt-walker, and the captain of an airplane, who filed an "incident report" about his atrocious behavior aboard a plane, all comment on his actions and the choices he makes, personally and professionally, as his career soars.

The deprivation and sadness experienced by most of these sensitive observers in their own lives contrasts vividly with the excesses and hedonism of Nureyev's adult life and illuminate, without need for authorial comment, his arrogance and boorishness. At the same time, however, these multiple viewpoints also humanize Nureyev in many ways by showing the extent to which these other characters are connected by love to others and to their history, while Nureyev becomes a "living myth...cared for and coddled and protected by the mythmakers."

Filled with intriguing characters, ranging from simple Russian peasants to Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, John Lennon, Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and the stars of ballet, the novel is a monument to the power of the creative spirit and a testament to the dangers inherent in a life from which all other controls have been removed. Rudi always "tore [a] role open...by the manner in which he presented himself, a sort of hunger turned human." McCann brings this voracious human to life. Nureyev leaps off these pages in a huge and stunning grand jete. Mary Whipple

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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Surprise!, December 29, 2002

By A Customer

Didn't think I was going to like this book much -- I know nothing about and don't care all about ballet, and all I knew about Nureyev was the popular myth of a life lived extravagantly. I'd read McCann before, and thought he was pretty good, but, basically, couldn't have been less interested in this book. But I bought it because of the quote on the back from Aleksandar Hemon, who's one of my favorite writers (and who I can't imagine writing about dance, but maybe...) and I'd never seen a quote from him before. And I guess this is the way those back-of-the-book quotes are supposed to work: it made me take a chance on something I never would have read -- and it turned out to be the best book I've read in months, easily one of the two or three best I've read this year. I read it basically in one sitting (two days of sustained, obsessive reading). I still don't care about ballet, though I can now imagine caring, but the book's not really or at least not only about dancing. It's about a person named Rudi, a person named Rudi who dances with preternatural grace, but more importantly a person named Rudi who moves through the 20th century on the most astonishing arc of a life, the beauty of his work and the generosity of his spirit changing forever the lives of all the people who witness his progress. But the fact that this arc begins in the cold poverty of WWII Russia and makes it all the way to NYC's coke-fueled, sex-filled, money-burning go-go 80s allows McCann to write about much more than one remarkable person -- he opens the book with some of the best, most visceral writing about war I've ever read, and by the end is writing tender love stories about cobblers and French maids, and he's more than up to all of it. It's a difficult book to describe: it's a book full of so much, and it's all so well done, but in the end it's even more than the sum of those parts. Truly astonishing.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enthralled, December 29, 2002

By A Customer

So I bought this book at the airport -- assuming it was going to be a present for a member of my family when I got home.
How foolish of me.
I started to flick through the pages on the plane and was immediately sucked in. The way the book starts really is astounding --- and the worlds it cuts through as it continues on its journey is breathtaking.
The story is told from different people's viewpoint of Nureyev's life and what they remember of it. The fabric of it all is of course what they remember is the story -- it may not necessarily be the truth of Nureyev's life.
The characters themselves are so wide and varied that at times you want to rush forward to hopefully meet up with them again. But also at the same point there are times when you want to stop and start the book again --- just to re-experience it.
All in all a really wonderful book --- surely destined for something great.
Highly recommended.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Dancing, prancing..wanting...

DANCER is a raw edged novel about the life of the legendary Russian ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev. Read more

Published 8 months ago by Savvy-Suz

5.0 out of 5 stars Fiction that Reads like Truth
Starting in vivid horror with war on the Russian front, McCann joins brilliantly imaged players with walk-ons by yesterday's celebrities to deliver a can't-put-it-down book... Read more

Published 15 months ago by C. P. Jackson

5.0 out of 5 stars Uniquely Crafted and Fascinating
From the beautiful, stark cover art to the last finely crafted word, this story riveted my attention late into the night. I've never read a novel crafted in this unique way. Read more

Published 18 months ago by Mandy Evans

5.0 out of 5 stars WOW
This is a review of Dancer but actually we listened to it on the long drives to and from my daughter's ballet school. I loved it, maybe even more than she did. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Girl from Ipanema

5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting
This is one of the best written books I have read in a long time. Collum McCann's writing style just blew me away. Read more

Published on December 1, 2006 by Mycatsandme

5.0 out of 5 stars A Dancer's Psyche Explored
In my possession is an old and increasingly fragile newspaper clipping which depicts a portrait photograph. Read more

Published on November 24, 2006 by Adele Cosgrove-Bray

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ultimate Dancer
Dancer is a fictional biography of the great Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev written by Colum McCann and is told by people who knew him or had the chance of meeting him . Read more

Published on May 25, 2005 by Billur Guner

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb fictional look at Nureyev from McCann
Colum McCann's "Dancer", a fictitious biography of acclaimed 20th Century dancer Rudolf Nureyev, is quite simply the author's finest work of fiction to date. Read more

Published on May 11, 2005 by John Kwok

5.0 out of 5 stars A riveting and moving novel
Mr McCann offers readers an astonishingly gripping biography of the Russian dancer Rudolph Nureyev written as a piece of fiction. Read more

Published on February 9, 2005 by Philippe Horak

5.0 out of 5 stars "Here now the board is yours, explain to me my loss"
Big, bold and audacious, Dancer will probably anger the ballet purists, but those who like challenging, edgy, and stylistically daring literature will probably love this ode to... Read more

Published on October 20, 2004 by M. J Leonard

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