Virtuoso

October 7, 2019
This challenging novel from Moskovich (The Natasha) tells the stories of four queer European women in a filmic, fragmented style. The book opens with Aimée discovering her wife Dominique’s dead body in a hotel room while on vacation in Portugal; from there, the plot quickly zooms across time from the subsequent meeting in Paris of Aimée and Jana, a Czech translator, through their earlier lives. From there, the plot zooms through their earlier lives. Teenaged Aimée falls for the older Dominique, an actor whose mental health deteriorates as she ages. In Prague during the collapse of Communism, school-aged Jana and volatile Zorka fall into an intense friendship with sexual overtones Jana does not fully understand. Zorka abandons Jana and moves to the U.S. to live with an uncle, but has a difficult time integrating with her cruel, homophobic classmates. The snippets become more surreal: Aimée recounts being haunted by the color blue following her wife’s death and Moskovich intersperses erotic online chats between an American teenager and an abused Eastern European housewife. An unexpected reunion ties together all the stories in an emotionally complex and gratifying ending. The novel induces discomfort with its characters’ dark fantasies and blurred senses of reality. Readers who get into the novel’s bleak groove will reap dividends from this striking character study.

October 1, 2019
A fractured, hallucinatory novel about female friendship and who knows what else. Every so often a book comes along that is so utterly strange it can't be classified--it can barely be described. Moskovich's (The Natashas, 2016) latest novel is one. So how to start? The first chapter begins with a body, face down on a hotel bed. An ambulance arrives; the medics labor over the body. It isn't until later that we find out whose it is. That's one storyline. Another involves Jana and Zorka, two Czech girls growing up in Soviet-controlled Prague. Then Zorka lights her mother's fur coat on fire, leaves it burning in the hallway of their apartment building, and disappears. That's another storyline. Yet another follows Jana, now an adult, through Paris, where she works as a translator. And another re-creates chat-room conversations between Dominxxika_N39 and 0_hotgirlAmy_0. And there's more. How it all ties together, and what any of it means, is anyone's guess. Moskovich's novel has more in common with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive than it does with any contemporary piece of writing. The narrative is fractured, and so is Moskovich's sense of reality: Dreams give way to hallucinations, which give way to oddly realist bits of prose that seem, in this context, weirder than anything else. At times, the book is hypnotically engaging; some passages, though, seem to go on and on, with Moskovich dwelling on minor details linked to minor characters for longer than seems necessary--or interesting. Moskovich breaks almost every rule of contemporary fiction but doesn't always manage to do something simpler: engage the reader.

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