Articoli correlati a Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness
A tale based on the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat finds Frenchwoman Lucy Dillon using her beauty and wit to gain entry into the circles of such luminaries as Talleyrand and Germaine de Staël and struggling to protect her family during the Revolution when her contemporaries, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, are executed.
Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
Recensione:
Publishers Weekly
Kohler's writing is often deft....The novel succeeds...in conveying the particulars of Lucy's life, especially her adaptation to the rigors of American country life.
Booklist
Sarah Johnson
Kohler bases her enchanting seventh novel on the life on Henriette-Lucy Dillon, an aristocratic descendant of Irish Jacobites who becomes one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies. Daughter of a general off defending French interests in the West Indies, the beautiful, witty Lucy is raised by her ill-tempered grandmother. Her arranged marriage with Frédéric Séraphin, the future marquis de la Tour du Pin, becomes one of her greatest joys. She shows her mettle during the Reign of Terror—a scene where she and Frédéric survey the sad ruin of the royal apartments at Versailles is movingly portrayed—by ensuring her family’s last-minute escape aboard a creaky ship bound for Boston. A practical woman determined to make the best of everything, Lucy settles into a new career as a dairy farmer on the outskirts of Albany, New York. Kohler’s elegant, clearly written prose conjures a heroine whose enthusiasm for life and learning is infectious, and whose disarming manner is immensely appealing. One of the best of the recent crop of French Revolution novels, and certainly the most uplifting.
More
Andrea Chapin
Sheila Kohler hitches her sensory-rich prose to a really good story.
TimeOut New York
Written in elegant, spare sentences that recall the language of the period...Bluebird forms that rare, exquisite hybrid: a historical novel where the history lesson works to illuminate the life of the hero instead of the other way around. Much of the book's charm comes from Kohler's sensitivity to the danger of allowing the political tectonics to overwhelm the marquise's triumphant narrative. Throughout, it unwaveringly remains Lucy Dillon’s story.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Carol Deptolla
"Kohler, a South African writer living in New York, puts flesh on the bones of this engrossing story - known from the memoir the Marquise de la Tour du Pin wrote at age 50 - and brings it to life. Her vivid writing lets the reader see the pageantry and folly of the royal court, hear the tumult of the revolution, feel the dark prison of the closet in which Lucy's grandmother sometimes locks the child...'Bluebird' is a gripping fictionalized account of a young 18th-century woman who was resourceful and daring not just for that age but for all ages."
New York Sun
Carol Iannone
[Bluebird] focuses our attention on issues of freedom and self-government that are apropos today, and it hints at reasons for the deep-rooted differences between America and Europe that we still face.
Shelf Awareness
Amanda Thoms
This is a touching and inspirational novel based on the true story of a French noblewoman who saved her family from the terror following the French Revolution. Flowing fluently from Versailles to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the heroine never loses her charm or her love of life.
Philadelphia Weekly
Willa Rohrer
The book, set during the French Revolution and its aftermath, is an ambitious portrait of the real-life noblewoman Henriette Lucy Dillon.
Historical Novel Review
Margaret Barr
Upon occasion a reviewer is familiar with the source material for a fictional biographical novel, and therefore dreads the transformation from actual to imagined history. Readers of Madame La Tour du Pin’s magnificent memoir need not be concerned, for Kohler exquisitely and creatively depicts Lucy Dillon’s life and times, tracing her history from the Court of Versailles to a humble farm in America.
A descendant of the Catholic Irish Wild Geese who sought refuge in France, Lucy is raised by her cruel grandmother. During her early years she lives on the periphery of the French court—maturity thrusts her into that scandalous world. A matrimonial pawn, she has the good fortune to marry an admirer of her soldier father. Frédéric is a nobleman, one capable of appreciating and adoring his bride. But for this hopeful couple there can be no happily ever after—married life begins as the sparks of revolution begin to flare. The riots, the executions, the loss of friends are revealed through Lucy’s perceptive and pragmatic mind. When her husband goes into hiding, she disguises herself as a citoyenne in a rural area, bearing a daughter while a suspicious mob rages on her doorstep, carefully planning an escape.
With their son and infant daughter, Lucy and Frédéric sail to America on a dodgy vessel to embark upon an uncertain and unfamiliar life. Lucy rises to the occasion, stocking and managing the Hudson Valley farm that her husband eventually purchases, proudly marking her butter molds with the family crest. She thrives on exile, but it reduces her loving Frédéric to a nostalgic, displaced aristocrat. In the aftermath of domestic tragedy they embark on yet another journey, each harboring different feelings about it.
Anyone seeking quality historical fiction will welcome the publication of this poignant, powerful novel.
"A triumph. Kohler brings the whole fascinating and terrible period of the French Revolution and its aftermath to life — more graceful, more searching, more truly dramatic than most current fiction."
—Lyndall Gordon, author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
"Sheila Kohler is a writer's writer. Her cult admires her for her crisp style, her large conception of the novel, her virtuosity. Bluebird is a page-turner saga... Fiction is seldom written about practical, competent people; this novel is an ode to the half-Irish Lucy Dillon, the woman who had it all."
— Edmund White, author of Fanny: A Fiction
L'autore:
Kohler's writing is often deft....The novel succeeds...in conveying the particulars of Lucy's life, especially her adaptation to the rigors of American country life.
Booklist
Sarah Johnson
Kohler bases her enchanting seventh novel on the life on Henriette-Lucy Dillon, an aristocratic descendant of Irish Jacobites who becomes one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies. Daughter of a general off defending French interests in the West Indies, the beautiful, witty Lucy is raised by her ill-tempered grandmother. Her arranged marriage with Frédéric Séraphin, the future marquis de la Tour du Pin, becomes one of her greatest joys. She shows her mettle during the Reign of Terror—a scene where she and Frédéric survey the sad ruin of the royal apartments at Versailles is movingly portrayed—by ensuring her family’s last-minute escape aboard a creaky ship bound for Boston. A practical woman determined to make the best of everything, Lucy settles into a new career as a dairy farmer on the outskirts of Albany, New York. Kohler’s elegant, clearly written prose conjures a heroine whose enthusiasm for life and learning is infectious, and whose disarming manner is immensely appealing. One of the best of the recent crop of French Revolution novels, and certainly the most uplifting.
More
Andrea Chapin
Sheila Kohler hitches her sensory-rich prose to a really good story.
TimeOut New York
Written in elegant, spare sentences that recall the language of the period...Bluebird forms that rare, exquisite hybrid: a historical novel where the history lesson works to illuminate the life of the hero instead of the other way around. Much of the book's charm comes from Kohler's sensitivity to the danger of allowing the political tectonics to overwhelm the marquise's triumphant narrative. Throughout, it unwaveringly remains Lucy Dillon’s story.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Carol Deptolla
"Kohler, a South African writer living in New York, puts flesh on the bones of this engrossing story - known from the memoir the Marquise de la Tour du Pin wrote at age 50 - and brings it to life. Her vivid writing lets the reader see the pageantry and folly of the royal court, hear the tumult of the revolution, feel the dark prison of the closet in which Lucy's grandmother sometimes locks the child...'Bluebird' is a gripping fictionalized account of a young 18th-century woman who was resourceful and daring not just for that age but for all ages."
New York Sun
Carol Iannone
[Bluebird] focuses our attention on issues of freedom and self-government that are apropos today, and it hints at reasons for the deep-rooted differences between America and Europe that we still face.
Shelf Awareness
Amanda Thoms
This is a touching and inspirational novel based on the true story of a French noblewoman who saved her family from the terror following the French Revolution. Flowing fluently from Versailles to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the heroine never loses her charm or her love of life.
Philadelphia Weekly
Willa Rohrer
The book, set during the French Revolution and its aftermath, is an ambitious portrait of the real-life noblewoman Henriette Lucy Dillon.
Historical Novel Review
Margaret Barr
Upon occasion a reviewer is familiar with the source material for a fictional biographical novel, and therefore dreads the transformation from actual to imagined history. Readers of Madame La Tour du Pin’s magnificent memoir need not be concerned, for Kohler exquisitely and creatively depicts Lucy Dillon’s life and times, tracing her history from the Court of Versailles to a humble farm in America.
A descendant of the Catholic Irish Wild Geese who sought refuge in France, Lucy is raised by her cruel grandmother. During her early years she lives on the periphery of the French court—maturity thrusts her into that scandalous world. A matrimonial pawn, she has the good fortune to marry an admirer of her soldier father. Frédéric is a nobleman, one capable of appreciating and adoring his bride. But for this hopeful couple there can be no happily ever after—married life begins as the sparks of revolution begin to flare. The riots, the executions, the loss of friends are revealed through Lucy’s perceptive and pragmatic mind. When her husband goes into hiding, she disguises herself as a citoyenne in a rural area, bearing a daughter while a suspicious mob rages on her doorstep, carefully planning an escape.
With their son and infant daughter, Lucy and Frédéric sail to America on a dodgy vessel to embark upon an uncertain and unfamiliar life. Lucy rises to the occasion, stocking and managing the Hudson Valley farm that her husband eventually purchases, proudly marking her butter molds with the family crest. She thrives on exile, but it reduces her loving Frédéric to a nostalgic, displaced aristocrat. In the aftermath of domestic tragedy they embark on yet another journey, each harboring different feelings about it.
Anyone seeking quality historical fiction will welcome the publication of this poignant, powerful novel.
"A triumph. Kohler brings the whole fascinating and terrible period of the French Revolution and its aftermath to life — more graceful, more searching, more truly dramatic than most current fiction."
—Lyndall Gordon, author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
"Sheila Kohler is a writer's writer. Her cult admires her for her crisp style, her large conception of the novel, her virtuosity. Bluebird is a page-turner saga... Fiction is seldom written about practical, competent people; this novel is an ode to the half-Irish Lucy Dillon, the woman who had it all."
— Edmund White, author of Fanny: A Fiction
Sheila Kohler is the author of six previous novels, including Crossways, The Perfect Place, Cracks, and Children of Pithiviers (all available in Other Press editions). A native of South Africa, she makes her home in New York City and teaches at Bennington College in Vermont.
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- EditoreOther Pr Llc
- Data di pubblicazione2007
- ISBN 10 1590512626
- ISBN 13 9781590512623
- RilegaturaCopertina rigida
- Numero di pagine425
- Valutazione libreria
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