Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel - Softcover

Koestenbaum, Wayne

3.71

92 ratings by Goodreads

9781932360530: Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932360530 ISBN 13: 9781932360530

Publisher: Soft Skull Press, 2004

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Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove’s last recital in Europe from his planned comeback in Aigues-Mortes, "the town of dead water." At home in tiny East Kills, NY, Theo begins jotting in 25 notebooks, purchased all at once and addressed to his mother. Theo’s wife, aside from servicing two of Theo’s twenty daily erections, will have nothing to do with him. The other eighteen taken care of by male hustlers, random strangers in YMCA locker-rooms and naked piano students contribute to Theo’s sense of dissolution as his "comeback" approaches. Overcome with the belief that Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus during the 1960’s, must perform with him, Theo begins to write to her and to pen what may or may not be her cryptic replies into his notebooks. In a fugue of notes and troubling memories, Theo prepares for Aigues-Mortes, struggling with Moira’s guidance towards one final, full celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite." Peopled by piano playing relatives, prostitutes, muses and manipulators; poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s first novel shines a hot light on the treacherous crossroads of sex, death, family and popular culture.

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About the Author:

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of four collections of poetry and various works of cultural criticism, including The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist), and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon. He lives in New York City.

Review:

"Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer of mature and accountable linguistic genius, has taken up the fabulist form and mastered it absolutely, giving us in the narrator's fire-eating, dotted-rhythm negotiation with the mesmerizing eponymous heroine." - James McCourt "Brilliantly imagined, bitterly funny, and emotionally overwhelming, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes is a mordant, exquisite ode to 'the authentic and paralyzing distance between us.' A deep aesthetic and intellectual pleasure." - David Shields"

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