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Virtuoso

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2020

'A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song ... Moskovich writes sentences that lilt and slink, her plots developing as a slow seduction and then clouding like a smoke-filled room.'
Guardian
Zorka. She had eyebrows like her name.
1980s Prague. For Jana, childhood means ration queues and the smell of boiled potatoes on the grey winter air. But just before Jana's seventh birthday, a new family moves in to their building: a bird-eyed mamka in a fox-fur coat, a stubble-faced papka - and a raven-haired girl named Zorka.
As the first cracks begin to appear in the communist regime, Zorka teaches Jana to look beyond their building, beyond Prague, beyond Czechoslovakia ... and then, Zorka just disappears. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris for a Czech medical supply company, hasn't seen her in a decade.
As Jana and Zorka's stories slowly circle across the surreal fluctuations of the past and present, the streets of 1980s Prague, the suburbs of 1990s Wisconsin and the lesbian bars of present-day Paris, they lead inexorably to a mysterious door on the Rue de Prague ...
Written with the dramatic tension of Euripidean tragedy and the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film, Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel of love in the post-communist diaspora.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

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Languages

  • English

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