8/18/2023 0 Comments Survive the night book summaryShe does this without significant adherence to chronological order (as theater or opera might have it) and often entangles the past with what continues to unfold in the novel’s present. As the narrator says, “In an opera this moment would signal the story had begun, that the heroine’s past had come for her, intent on a review of her sins decreed by the gods.”įrom here, Lilliet reverses the act of having her story taken from her by describing her life up until the point of The Queen of the Night ’s beginning. Simonet would also like Lilliet to star in an opera featuring the same story. Though the party is meant to celebrate Lilliet and her voice, the setting evokes fairy tale trope when Lilliet discovers that a male stranger, a novelist named Frédéric Simonet, has “ fate in his hands.” All the secrets of her life have inexplicably ended up in Simonet’s novel despite the fact that he has never met Lilliet. Author, Alexander CheeĬhee’s novel begins at a ball, the fabled site of so much Western feminine performance, of so much Western feminine transformation. ![]() ![]() It is the story of a woman who continually insists on having power and a choice, a voice as she moves through impossible European landscapes and climbs up through Paris’ dangerously complex social circles. The Queen of the Night is the story of a woman who is continually told she has no power and no choice. The I that leads us through mystery, war, celebrity and love is an opera singer, a rare Falcon soprano named Lilliet Berne, a prostitute named Jou-jou Courrèges, a traveling European circus performer called The Settler’s Daughter, a mute grisette to France’s last Empress and a starving woman collecting chestnuts with her Argentinian lover in the midst of the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. The I that leads us is a woman who played many different women, a woman who had to be many different people in order to survive. What’s incredible about Alexander Chee’s second no vel, The Queen of the Night, is that he gives us historic and syntactical lushness far more plentiful than water in the nearest ocean while carefully engaging with the intricate life of his late 19th-century female narrator. These narratives mythologize and prioritize whiteness, male glory and female fragility. ![]() The heroic simplifications present in movies like Stonewall, Dances with Wolves, The Patriot or any blockbuster about royalty are examples of easy portrayals of historical details that turn context into drama for the sake of feeling good about a collective past. We’d much rather have opulence, a romance with the past. Historical fictions can, and often do, slip into a brand of nostalgia that leaves little space to conceive how life in another time might have been small, suffocated, perilous or desperate. I couldn’t explain, but no, I did not feel ruined.” “Men always said it that way - I’ve ruined you.
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