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3.0 

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

By Francine Prose
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A richly imagined and stunningly inventive literary masterpiece of love, art, and betrayal, exploring the genesis of evil, the unforeseen consequences of love, and the ultimate unreliability of storytelling itself.

Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom. It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club’s loyal denizens, including the rising Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, the socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol; and the caustic American writer Lionel Maine.

As the years pass, their fortunes—and the world itself—evolve. Lou falls desperately in love and finds success as a race car driver. Gabor builds his reputation with startlingly vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant twenties give way to darker times, Lou experiences another metamorphosis—sparked by tumultuous events—that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more.

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41 Reviews

3.0
Surprised Face with Open Mouth“I liked all the different narrators and trying to piece together what “actually” happened (there’s no way to know, just like with actual history). I loved the exploration of how deep rejection and self loathing can cut, especially for butch lesbians. Anyone who has loved a brash butch with the tenderest softest baby heart inside will feel a pang for Lou, and I think Prose did a good job showing the nuances of morality and evil. My main complaint was: not enough lesbians. Basically just Lou and the straight women she slept with, and plenty of gay men. I could tell the author was straight. But I enjoyed this book.”
“Lovers at the Chameleon Club excels as an experiment with the format of the novel. It's written as a sort-of biography of the first female French race car driver-turned-Nazi spy Lou Villars, and is constructed mainly out of the supposed source material for said biography: the letters, journal entries, and memoirs of her social circle, as well as some reflections by the biographer putting it all together. It's wildly inventive, and gives Prose a unique opportunity to examine Lou's story from the perspective of the people whose lives her actions most directly affected. And yet, I feel like this would have been more successful as a story if it had shed that pretense. I feel like I got to know the letter-writers, the journalers, the memoirists better than I got to know Lou herself and that was somewhat disappointing. But Prose is a fantastic writer who provides us with some interesting insights on the concepts of gender, art, war, and what it means to be good or evil. This was ultimately a compelling character study occasionally hindered by its unique construction, still very much worth checking out.”

About Francine Prose

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

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