Arrogance: A Novel

by Joanna Scott

Overview

In Joanna Scott's breakthrough novel Arrogance, the Austrian artist Egon Schiele comes to prismatic life in a narrative that defies convention, history, and identity. A self-professed genius and student of August Klimt, Scott's Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth-century Europe. Thrown in jail on charges of immorality, Schiele's Mephistophelean reputation only grows in stature until at the age of twenty-eight, the artist dies in the Great Flu Pandemic. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints and times, this stunning novel won Scott a nomination for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312423889
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Joanna Scott is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Tourmaline and The Manikin. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Award, and lives with her family in Rochester, New York.

What People are Saying About This

Frederick Busch

"Arrogance is a vivid, galvanizing exploration of the shaping of an artist soul. Joanna Scott knows from the inside what most onlookers can at best guess about. She's insightful, just, and tough."

Editorial Reviews

A haunting success...a dazzling literary performance.” —The Washington Post

“Joanna Scott's literary material...are deployed in sensuous, provocative patterns. They resound with rich experiences and intriguing perceptions.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Arrogance, beyond the sheer brilliance of Scott's handling of disparate voices, changing milieus and tangled dates... manages to portray with skill and candor the imaginations, desires, and fears of people whose stories are as timely and important as today's headlines.” —San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

Based on the short and troubled life of expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), Scott's ambitious novel examines the artistic imperative and its obsessive nature, the power of social conventions and fabric of life in Vienna at the turn of the century. Weaving her story around Schiele's 24-day stay in a village jail on charges of seducing the young girls who modeled for his unrestrained sketches, Scott ( Fading , My Parmacheneok Belle ) develops assorted narrative threads. The strongest of these tell of Vallie Neuzil, Schiele's sweets-loving, uninhibited mistress whom he abandons to marry the conventional Edith Harms, and, in first-person, of one of the girls from the village, whose life and memories continue nearly to the present. Scott's intricate approach to her subject(s) is fully imagined and authoritatively handled, yet the novel is finally cool and somehow hollow, more like an innovative treatise on impulse, pain and love than a story of flesh-and-blood people whose suffering and triumphs matter. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Based on the life of Expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), this brilliant new novel by the author of The Closest Possible Union ( LJ 4/1/88) moves forward and backward in time as it circles around one pivotal incident: the artist's imprisonment in 1912 on charges of seduction and corrupting minors. Diverse narrative voices and shifting chronological perspectives create a potentially confusing structure; yet this story is so intriguing, and Scott's richly textured style so mesmerizing, that one is completely captivated. Like Schiele himself, who is ``a victim to his senses, forced to inhale, ingest, absorb the world,'' and like the teenage girl involved in the false seduction charge who cannot stay away from the artist's cottage, the reader too becomes something of a voyeur, lured by the rich descriptions of turn-of-the-century Vienna and the dark nuances of Schiele's voracious imagination. A dazzling, disturbing collage of a novel.-- Elise Chase, Forbes Lib., Northampton, Mass.

Library Journal