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cimoreneThis World Fantasy Award-nominated novel is set in New York City of the 1890s, the era of Sherlock Holmes, and has a rating of 3.8/5 on GoodReads. I was hooked by this premise blurb:
And when I started reading at the beginning, I knew almost at once that I wanted to finish it. The writing quality was excellent. It passes muster quite well for its time and place, feeling initially like a potential historical novel, and then when you read a bit further, like magical realism rather than sff genre. That is a ticklish distinction of course, and one I was recently discussing withstranger. It can certainly pass as sff, but I think it's safe to say none of his style feels genre, because the author's wikipedia already addresses this by saying it is "in the fantastic genre tradition, although his works have spanned genres including fantasy, science fiction and mystery". And as you can see, the blurb above (correctly) identifies the underlying plot type of this book as thriller. The style feels rather Literary, although not strongly nor annoyingly so (which is a strong statement coming from me, because I find Literary style as a rule quite annoying).
Aside from what Mrs Charbuque tells the narrator in relating her life story - which rather bring to mind the register of the tall tale in folklore, like Paul Bunyan or the Series of Unfortuante Events series - little that happens in these books is especially fantastic. Or rather, it's not actually all that plausible, but it's mostly within the realm of literary fiction and no less plausible than some of the stuff made up by the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in service of their mystery plots - just more symbolically significant, which is what pushes it into magical realism. (A Series of Unfortunate Events and, say, The House of the Spirits contain some equally implausible events presented with a straight face, and the events are equally real but unquestioned in-verse; but in magical realism, and in The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, the events seem symbolic or allegorical, or as if they could all be happening inside the character's head, like a prophetic dream.)
As a fantastical literary thriller, I give this book very good marks. It's well written, it's well executed, it's interesting, it's colorful and fun.
It's just that the end had me figuratively throwing the book across the room.
As sometimes happens with a male narrator, a recurring thought I had through the middle section of the book was "Is this book sexist, or is it about sexism?"
Let me reiterate the premise, which is that the narrator is a portrait painter who has been hired to paint the portrait of a wealthy eccentric who won't let him look at her. His challenge is to do so based on listening to her life story. He can ask her anything he likes that doesn't have to do with her appearance, but he's mostly getting her life story. He takes this commission because his ego is stimulated by the notion that he alone might be able to actually do it (although he also wants to earn enough money to stop painting portraits and reach his full creative potential instead).
As he takes the commission and starts listening to her life story, his initial attempts to envision her always come out beautiful and sexy, and he is frustrated knowing that it's his own desire he's seeing. He reflects that he's unable to imagine her as a woman who is unappealing to him, and recalls his mentor and father-figure (who died in poverty after he became mad and the narrator turned his back on him in embarrassed self-importance) telling him that all painters are always painting themselves to a degree because their egos get in the way. He becomes obsessed with solving the puzzle. His long-time lover, an actress, sees him pulling away and begins to be jealous, but she and his opium-addicted friend both try to help him: she disguises herself as a tramp and stakes out the woman's house and his friend tracks down people who might have known her as a child and helps him break into a warehouse looking for clues (they find nothing but corroboration that her fantastic story is true... and his lover learns that the woman's butler is faking being blind). Meanwhile a mysterious plague? is striking only women, who die from blood loss weeping tears of blood, and this is eventually determined to be caused by infection with a mysterious exotic parasite.
Mrs Charbuque's far-fetched history is that she was raised by a father whose job was the science of telling the future from snowflakes, who murdered her adulterous mother, and after losing his job went on to construct a stage act for her as a fortune-teller who receives knowledge from two magical snowflakes which she carries in a locket, in the form of cryptic, portentous images. The initial flourish of showmanship that had her hidden from her audience behind a folding screen developed into an absolute mania so that she couldn't stand to be seen by anyone, and after her father's death she hired a vaudevillian as her manager and continued this career and became ever more fabulously wealthy, eventually marrying a man who went insane with jealousy and tried to kill her before being lost at sea.
The narrator starts receiving threatening notes from her husband, however, which progress to holding a knife to his throat in a darkened theater and breaking into his studio to destroy his work in progress. His lover tricks him into revealing that he would cheat on her with Mrs Charbuque if asked, and leaves him as a result. Eventually a reference to a piece of jewelry given by Mr Charbuque makes the protagonist suspect her husband is actually the serial killer attacking the women of the city, and when he tells her and the police this, she disappears overnight, leaving her house empty. The narrator walks in the open door and all the way up to the attic where he finds a stack of portraits of her as different women done by a bunch of artists he knows - all of whom have lost their marbles or their careers, including his helpful friend and his now-dead mentor, but this doesn't deter him.
She summons him to her isolated beach house on Long Island, where she tells him a story that she claims is her favorite fairytale from childhood about a boy named Po whose shadow is strangled by a ghost who then takes its place, becoming his shadow except now his shadow can do whatever, so they become a successful vaudeville act, except the shadow is jealous and evil and when he falls in love it kills his betrothed and also a nearby wisewoman, whose spirit survives only in the form of two little sparks of truth. Ok. He then takes one week to paint her, from pure imagination, naked the way she appeared out of some smoke when his friend gave him some opium to smoke.
He delivers the portrait on time - only to be attacked by the husband claiming the portrait is proof he slept with her, and also admitting to the serial killing, which he says is okay because the victims "were all her" (and guilty)... and then changing his voice and becoming Mrs Charbuque. She ties him up and sets fire to the house with him and the painting in it and leaves, but he's saved at the last minute by her manager/butler. The guy reveals he knew she was pretending to be her own husband and doing the murders all along, but thinks she has a legit Norman Bates style split personality and is just killing her "female self" out of legitimate hate for it because of how, uh, women are lesser because it's not safe to be a woman in the world. (He let her keep killing people because he just loves her so much, like a daughter. Ok.) He lets the narrator go, and a week later the narrator learns she's died of consumption, which must mean the manager/butler killed her for the good of mankind, and he goes to her funeral where he is the only guest, enabling him to open the casket and steal her locket. And also see that she looks exactly like he painted her. He then retires from portraits and starts painting the wild landscape of Long Island, and his lover forgives him and follows him there, the end.
***
I mean, it's not just me, right??????
A mysterious and richly evocative novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque tells the story of portraitist Piero Piambo, who is offered a commission unlike any other. The client is Mrs. Charbuque, a wealthy and elusive woman who asks Piambo to paint her portrait, though with one bizarre twist: he may question her at length on any topic, but he may not, under any circumstances, see her. So begins an astonishing journey into Mrs. Charbuque's world and the world of 1893 New York society in this hypnotically compelling literary thriller.
And when I started reading at the beginning, I knew almost at once that I wanted to finish it. The writing quality was excellent. It passes muster quite well for its time and place, feeling initially like a potential historical novel, and then when you read a bit further, like magical realism rather than sff genre. That is a ticklish distinction of course, and one I was recently discussing with
stranger. It can certainly pass as sff, but I think it's safe to say none of his style feels genre, because the author's wikipedia already addresses this by saying it is "in the fantastic genre tradition, although his works have spanned genres including fantasy, science fiction and mystery". And as you can see, the blurb above (correctly) identifies the underlying plot type of this book as thriller. The style feels rather Literary, although not strongly nor annoyingly so (which is a strong statement coming from me, because I find Literary style as a rule quite annoying).Aside from what Mrs Charbuque tells the narrator in relating her life story - which rather bring to mind the register of the tall tale in folklore, like Paul Bunyan or the Series of Unfortuante Events series - little that happens in these books is especially fantastic. Or rather, it's not actually all that plausible, but it's mostly within the realm of literary fiction and no less plausible than some of the stuff made up by the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in service of their mystery plots - just more symbolically significant, which is what pushes it into magical realism. (A Series of Unfortunate Events and, say, The House of the Spirits contain some equally implausible events presented with a straight face, and the events are equally real but unquestioned in-verse; but in magical realism, and in The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, the events seem symbolic or allegorical, or as if they could all be happening inside the character's head, like a prophetic dream.)
As a fantastical literary thriller, I give this book very good marks. It's well written, it's well executed, it's interesting, it's colorful and fun.
It's just that the end had me figuratively throwing the book across the room.
As sometimes happens with a male narrator, a recurring thought I had through the middle section of the book was "Is this book sexist, or is it about sexism?"
Let me reiterate the premise, which is that the narrator is a portrait painter who has been hired to paint the portrait of a wealthy eccentric who won't let him look at her. His challenge is to do so based on listening to her life story. He can ask her anything he likes that doesn't have to do with her appearance, but he's mostly getting her life story. He takes this commission because his ego is stimulated by the notion that he alone might be able to actually do it (although he also wants to earn enough money to stop painting portraits and reach his full creative potential instead).
As he takes the commission and starts listening to her life story, his initial attempts to envision her always come out beautiful and sexy, and he is frustrated knowing that it's his own desire he's seeing. He reflects that he's unable to imagine her as a woman who is unappealing to him, and recalls his mentor and father-figure (who died in poverty after he became mad and the narrator turned his back on him in embarrassed self-importance) telling him that all painters are always painting themselves to a degree because their egos get in the way. He becomes obsessed with solving the puzzle. His long-time lover, an actress, sees him pulling away and begins to be jealous, but she and his opium-addicted friend both try to help him: she disguises herself as a tramp and stakes out the woman's house and his friend tracks down people who might have known her as a child and helps him break into a warehouse looking for clues (they find nothing but corroboration that her fantastic story is true... and his lover learns that the woman's butler is faking being blind). Meanwhile a mysterious plague? is striking only women, who die from blood loss weeping tears of blood, and this is eventually determined to be caused by infection with a mysterious exotic parasite.
Mrs Charbuque's far-fetched history is that she was raised by a father whose job was the science of telling the future from snowflakes, who murdered her adulterous mother, and after losing his job went on to construct a stage act for her as a fortune-teller who receives knowledge from two magical snowflakes which she carries in a locket, in the form of cryptic, portentous images. The initial flourish of showmanship that had her hidden from her audience behind a folding screen developed into an absolute mania so that she couldn't stand to be seen by anyone, and after her father's death she hired a vaudevillian as her manager and continued this career and became ever more fabulously wealthy, eventually marrying a man who went insane with jealousy and tried to kill her before being lost at sea.
The narrator starts receiving threatening notes from her husband, however, which progress to holding a knife to his throat in a darkened theater and breaking into his studio to destroy his work in progress. His lover tricks him into revealing that he would cheat on her with Mrs Charbuque if asked, and leaves him as a result. Eventually a reference to a piece of jewelry given by Mr Charbuque makes the protagonist suspect her husband is actually the serial killer attacking the women of the city, and when he tells her and the police this, she disappears overnight, leaving her house empty. The narrator walks in the open door and all the way up to the attic where he finds a stack of portraits of her as different women done by a bunch of artists he knows - all of whom have lost their marbles or their careers, including his helpful friend and his now-dead mentor, but this doesn't deter him.
She summons him to her isolated beach house on Long Island, where she tells him a story that she claims is her favorite fairytale from childhood about a boy named Po whose shadow is strangled by a ghost who then takes its place, becoming his shadow except now his shadow can do whatever, so they become a successful vaudeville act, except the shadow is jealous and evil and when he falls in love it kills his betrothed and also a nearby wisewoman, whose spirit survives only in the form of two little sparks of truth. Ok. He then takes one week to paint her, from pure imagination, naked the way she appeared out of some smoke when his friend gave him some opium to smoke.
He delivers the portrait on time - only to be attacked by the husband claiming the portrait is proof he slept with her, and also admitting to the serial killing, which he says is okay because the victims "were all her" (and guilty)... and then changing his voice and becoming Mrs Charbuque. She ties him up and sets fire to the house with him and the painting in it and leaves, but he's saved at the last minute by her manager/butler. The guy reveals he knew she was pretending to be her own husband and doing the murders all along, but thinks she has a legit Norman Bates style split personality and is just killing her "female self" out of legitimate hate for it because of how, uh, women are lesser because it's not safe to be a woman in the world. (He let her keep killing people because he just loves her so much, like a daughter. Ok.) He lets the narrator go, and a week later the narrator learns she's died of consumption, which must mean the manager/butler killed her for the good of mankind, and he goes to her funeral where he is the only guest, enabling him to open the casket and steal her locket. And also see that she looks exactly like he painted her. He then retires from portraits and starts painting the wild landscape of Long Island, and his lover forgives him and follows him there, the end.
***
I mean, it's not just me, right??????
(no subject)
Date: 8 Feb 2022 09:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Feb 2022 10:05 pm (UTC)I could have predicted there was something sketchy about it, because it was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and yet when I look on goodreads it says "None of your friends have reviewed this book yet"--which, given my gr-friends, is VERY unlikely for a good fantasy novel.
(no subject)
Date: 9 Feb 2022 11:11 am (UTC)It's not just you.
Meanwhile a mysterious plague? is striking only women, who die from blood loss weeping tears of blood
This is so not the point, but how can you cry blood fast enough to die from blood loss? The blood vessels in your eyes (especially the tear ducts) are tiny. Wouldn't your eyes clot up?
(no subject)
Date: 9 Feb 2022 01:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9 Feb 2022 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9 Feb 2022 02:05 pm (UTC)