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The Villa Celeste is a lovely house in the made-up town of Ste-Agathe on the French Riviera. Between the two World Wars, it houses a clinic for people troubled in mind or who have TB. Florence, one of my main characters, is a patient there, and Clementine - the other main character, who lives in the present day - visits there also. The novel is set in Paris, New York and the Cote d'Azur.
The Villa Celeste is a lovely house in the made-up town of Ste-Agathe on the French Riviera. Between the two World Wars, it houses a clinic for people troubled in mind or who have TB.
Florence, one of my main characters, is a patient there, and Clementine - the other main character, who lives in the present day - visits there also. The novel is set in Paris, New York and the Cote d'Azur. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain influenced me. That novel takes place entirely in a sanatorium, where the atmosphere is intensely charged, and the characters create their own eccentric society.
I was influenced also by the life of Katherine Mansfield, who died of "consumption" at George Gurdjieff's spiritual centre near Paris. My character Florence March is modelled slightly on Mansfield. The novel concerns two women who struggle with anorexia. They are searching desperately for their true selves, and they fear their desires.
But both women discover passion and purpose, and begin to realise that their real selves lie in the very things they feared. I learned about Europe between the World Wars. It was a time of exhaustion and sickness, but also hope. Veterans were shell-shocked, families were consulting "spiritualists" to commune with their war dead, and lots of people sought help from mystics and philosophers.
I learned about Varian Fry, a real-life war hero who appears in my book. I also learned more about downtown New York in the 1980s and 1990s, where Clementine lives after leaving her wealthy husband. In both novels, food is ceremonial. Lily, in Sustenance, loves the formality of restaurants, and in this new book, both Florence and Clementine perform eating rituals.
A novelist must create a voice to tell the story. That voice is the ether in which the story is suspended. The election of Donald Trump. He had been just a thuggish real estate mogul until, suddenly, he was US president.
Changing Gender by Susan Stryker: A work of extraordinary energy, hope and emotional forc
At The Villa Celeste John Montague Florence March Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain Katherine Mansfield Anorexia Varian Fry Sustenance Lily Moby Dick Call Me Ishmael Donald Trump Susan Stryker Changing Gender
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