About the Book
Along the glittering coast of southern France, among a jungle of olive trees and aloes, a white villa rose from an earthen terrace. Eileen, a new architect previously known for her elegant chairs and furniture, built it as a haven for her and her lover; she realized each detail, designing the villa around their movements and habits. When the outspoken Le G, a founder of Modernist architecture, first laid eyes on the house, he could see his influence in the sleek lines. Affronted and impassioned, he took a paintbrush to the villa’s clean, white walls . . .
Now, Le G is in the final week of his life. He has spent the last thirty years infiltrating Eileen’s house, erasing her presence and forgetting her name. But finally, the tide has come in, and Eileen is called back to her beloved coastline, where both artists will contend with the transformative power of memory.
Inspired by the real-life collision of Irish designer Eileen Gray and famed Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and the extraordinary place that bound them, Jane Alison boldly reimagines a now-infamous feud into a lushly poetic and mesmerizing novel of power, predation, and obsession.
About the Author :
Jane Alison is the author of The Love-Artist, The Sisters Antipodes, and the craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, among other titles. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Review :
"Elegant and enveloping . . . Ms. Alison’s previous work was the critical study “Meander, Spiral, Explode” (2019), which explored geometric patterns in narrative fiction. “Villa E” artfully puts those concepts into practice."
"A stirring meditation on art and the conflicts that engender sweeping change, whether in architecture or painting or fiction, and the ways age turns us inside out, hardening our resentments — the hopeful innocence of Patti Smith’s 'Just Kids' viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Alison’s loose lyricism relies on syncopated rhythms and fluid punctuation; she stays on point even as she plays with Joycean techniques. Villa E is both paean to the legacies of modernism — from Gray and Le Corbusier to Joyce — and a beautiful book from a writer who boldly tacks against the winds of literary realism."
"Alison has a talent for conjuring the blanched days and eucalyptus-scented nights of the French coast."
"An artful imagining of the tempestuous relationship between [Eileen] Gray and Le Corbusier...Villa E will transfix readers."
"Alison (The Sisters Antipodes) serves up an elegant meditation on aging, art, and nature, inspired by a famous villa in the French Riviera.... The star of the show is the seascape, the power and beauty of which Alison depicts in lyrical prose.... Readers are in for a treat."
"The novel explores the characters and lifelong achievements of both figures: he protean, domineering, and unrepentant; she sensual, committed, enduring. Looping, impressionistic, and atmospheric, narrated in retrospect from both characters’ points of view, the book offers more psychology than plot, but does so persuasively. A remarkable gender parable filtered through a sophisticated imagination."
"The latest novel from Alison...is itself a kind of spiral...aside from the historical anecdote itself (once described as an “act of naked phallocracy”), the most interesting aspect of the book is the way Alison represents these two different consciousnesses on the page—their slipstream thoughts, both recursive and immediate, but each distinct, pinning their bodies in space."
"[A] concentrated tale of an epic duel between two temperamentally opposite artists.... In prose, by turns, as exquisite as Eileen’s creation and as seething as Le Grand’s lust, Alison incisively evokes artistic genius and angst, while infusing a historic scandal with profound heartache and resolve."
"In this extraordinary novel, which somehow manages to be both lush and spare, Jane Alison depicts two artists near the ends of their lives, slowly converging on the exquisite villa one has made, and each has loved. Watching Eileen and Le G spiral down into the past and embrace the future, I, too, was transported to the shores of the Mediterranean: light, water, rocks, a gleaming building. Alison writes like no one else."
"In this nimble, atmospheric novel, two artists are drawn together and must reckon with their distinct creative hungers, the landscapes that shape and haunt, and the grace and the wound of the passage of time. Villa E is a work of tremendous psychological intricacy and physical beauty. Jane Alison writes sentences that are as hypnotic and lyric as the sea."
"Villa E is an irresistible tale of beauty, obsession and hubris. Jane Alison’s portrait of Le Corbusier as a master builder reduced to vandalism by envy is complex and powerful."
