About the Book
'If Netflix's The Chair, Lisa Taddeo's best-seller Three Women, and the most compelling passages of Ottessa Moshfegh's Death in Her Hands had a love child (just go with me here), it would be this fiction debut. With a title character who's a sought-after young novelist new to a college faculty,
Vladimir leaves the reader with more questions than answers - about sex, and sexual politics - in the most delicious way.' - Entertainment Weekly
A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students - a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own . . .
When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.
And so we meet our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose husband, a charismatic professor at the same small liberal arts college, is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extramarital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who's just arrived on campus, their tinder-box world comes dangerously close to exploding.
With her bold, edgy, and uncommonly assured literary debut, Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the strictures of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Propulsive, darkly funny, and surreptitiously moving, Vladimir maps the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the messy contradictions of power and desire.
About the Author :
Julia May Jonas is a playwright and teaches theatre at Skidmore College. She holds an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Vladimir is her debut novel.
Review :
Female ageing and desire, sexual agency in the era of #MeToo, the relationship between morality and art, even a nod to Stephen King's Misery: it's all here in this sexy stealthy slippery debut, one of the year's hottest reads.
This deliciously dark American debut . . . A boisterous campus novel with an outrageously acerbic narrator, it delivers uncomfortable truths
This impressive debut . . . A twisty and thought-provoking tale
Haunted by the spirit of Nabokov, this sly satire challenges today’s “insistence on morality in art”
This astonishing debut is anything but another #MeToo morality tale . . . I was utterly hooked . . . [by] this twisty, sexy, shocking treat of a novel . . . How on earth will Julia May Jonas better this?
Darkly comic . . . Jonas’s novel is full of sly satire . . . The first-person narrative is beautifully rich, and the novel is playing enjoyable games with the ghost of Nabokov throughout . . . Vladimir isn’t a novel that cares for the taking of sides. The words “snowflake” and “woke” don’t appear – Jonas is too smart for that laziness – and when the narrator compares her students’ cutlery to “pitchforks”, the simile has Nabokovian skill
Vladimir is peppered with subversions . . . Jonas artfully fashions a protagonist mired in contradictions . . . [An] intelligent knowing portrayal of a woman's midlife crisis
This slippery debut challenges to often electrifying effect the moral pieties concerning women, sex and power that have sprung up in the wake of #MeToo . . . A welcome addition to the growing number of #MeToo novels, many of which feel in comparison a little tired
It is delicious to spend so much time with a narrator who wants the way this one does, who wants so badly she’ll send her life up in flames.
Jonas's assured debut may be operating in Nabokov's long shadow, but it's difficult not to gobble up the unadorned, plot-driven prose, with its hints of kidnap and bondage, at a greedy pace
[An] engaging debut . . . [Jonas’s] storylines are full of nuance, loopholes, granular details that refuse easy definition
'Vladimir contains far too many uncomfortable truths to be merely fun, but . . . it is, by turns, cathartic, devious and terrifically entertaining.’
'Vladimir goes into such outrageous territory that my jaw literally dropped at moments while I was reading it. There’s a rare blend here of depth of character, mesmerizing prose, and fast-paced action.’
In darkly funny terms, Jonas creates a portrait of a narcissist reckoning with her age and vanity, but also the limits of her power.
‘What is more delicious than the despicable narrator? . . . Jonas, with a potent, pumping voice, has drawn a character so powerfully candid that when she does things that are malicious, dangerous and, yes, predatory, we only want her to do them again.’
Very brilliant . . . oblique way of approaching dark academia
If Netflix’s The Chair, Lisa Taddeo’s best-seller Three Women, and the most compelling passages of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands had a love child (just go with me here), it would be this fiction debut. With a title character who’s a sought-after young novelist new to a college faculty, Vladimir leaves the reader with more questions than answers—about sex, and sexual politics—in the most delicious way.
Funny, wise and instantly engaging, Vladimir is how I like my thrill rides: brainy and sexy.
Vladimir is a thrilling debut – smart, sharp, and über provocative. I devoured it with fascination and awe.
A whip smart and ferociously clever tale of swirling allegiances, literary rivalries, and romantic tripwires detonating hidden mines – Vladimir is an extraordinary debut.
Droll, dry, and pacy, Vladimir is deliciously unsparing and enormous fun.
Brilliant and very funny
