Isadora

by Amelia Gray

Overview

Using the scaffolding of Isadora Duncan’s life and the stuff of her spirit, Amelia Gray delivers an incredibly imaginative portrait of the artist

In 1913, the restless world sat on the brink of unimaginable suffering. But for one woman, the darkness of a new era had already made itself at home. Isadora Duncan would come to be known as the mother of modern dance, but in the spring of 1913 she was a grieving mother, after a freak accident in Paris resulted in the drowning death of her two young children.

The accident cracked Isadora’s life in two: on one side, the brilliant young talent who captivated audiences the world over; on the other, a heartbroken mother spinning dangerously on the edge of sanity.

Isadora is a shocking and visceral portrait of an artist and woman drawn to the brink of destruction by the cruelty of life. In her breakout novel, Amelia Gray offers a relentless portrayal of a legendary artist churning through prewar Europe. Isadora seeks to obliterate the mannered portrait of a dancer and to introduce the reader to a woman who lived and loved without limits, even in the darkest days of her life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374712587
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/23/2017
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Amelia Gray is the author of several books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and VICE. She has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and is the winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. She lives in Los Angeles.
Amelia Gray is the author of several books, including AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and VICE. She has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and is the winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. She lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

For the pioneering dancer Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), ideas about how the world should be were not abstract but woven into the bodily art for which she is still remembered. The boldness that defined her dancing, her personal life, her politics, and her sexuality all seem decidedly ahead of her time. In an article in The New Yorker from January 1927, Janet Flanner wrote, "A decade ago her art, animated by her extraordinary public personality, came as close to founding an esthetic renaissance as American morality would allow," and Flanner later dubbed her "the last of the trilogy of great female personalities our century produced."

Amelia Gray's novel Isadora is set over approximately two years of Duncan's life. In a prologue, Gray writes, "April 1913: Isadora Duncan is at the height of her power." That's soon to change, though; an accident in Paris will claim the lives of her two children later that same month, causing her to sink into a severe depression and deepening fissures in her personal life. Duncan retreated into seclusion in Greece for a few years, attempting to recover from the aftermath of these events. Isadora, then, is the story of a figure grappling with an unimaginable loss, and how that affects the people closest to her.

As befitting a novel whose central character upended the aesthetics of her field, this novel also marks a seismic shift in tone for Gray, whose work up until now -- three acclaimed collections of short stories, plus the award-nominated novel Threats -- has eluded easy categorization and pushed firmly into the experimental realm. In the case of Isadora, readers will likely encounter a disorienting sensibility at work -- but it's less to do with perceptions of realities breaking down or the impossible being translated onto the page; instead, it's a sense of personal collapse even as aspects of the world are being remade.

Gray is far from the first writer to translate Duncan's life into prose. Over the last century, she has shown up in literary works by a host of notable figure, a phenomenon that began while she was still alive. John Dos Passos worked aspects of her life into his USA trilogy, while Aleister Crowley's 1923 novel Moonchild, about two camps of warring musicians, included a fictionalized version of Duncan among its cast of characters. And Duncan herself contributed to the mythmaking via her posthumously published memoir, My Life. The version that was published then was edited due to concerns over some of the material contained therein; an unedited version was released by Liveright in 2012.

Writing in the London Review of Books in 2013, Laura Jacobs called My Life "a splendid book, an inspiring book, doors and windows and eyes and arms wide open to the world." Though My Life may have some of its own issues with full veracity. In her review of the 2013 edition in the New York Review of Books, Joan Acocella wrote that Duncan's working process for her memoir was somewhat contentious:

For six months she worked on the book, dictating, as a rule, and usually after a number of drinks. It is reported that her first typist could be heard saying, "Miss Duncan, you don't mean to say this . . . you simply cannot."

Feel free to insert your favorite commentary from the long and recent debate over the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction here. Alternately: it may well be that dance was not the only artistic discipline in which Duncan was ahead of her time.

"I drew some dialogue from her autobiography," Gray says about the writing of Isadora. She also acknowledges that My Life is considered to have taken some liberties with the truth, which appealed to her in terms of fictionalizing Duncan's life. "It was a nod to the reality that she wanted to create, which was this fabulous dialogue and baroque exchanges between people, that no doubt did not actually happen," Gray says. "It ended up being a collage or pastiche of reality. But it was important to me to have it be a jumping-off point rather than the whole stage." In the acknowledgements for the novel, she also cites two works of nonfiction: Peter Kurth's biography Isadora: A Sensational Life and Charles Emmerson's 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War.

Gray first encountered Duncan's life when working on an article about "It Girls" in history. "I read about how she insisted on living her own particular life, despite what was going on around her, and I was really fascinated by that," she says. Her research process included everything from familiarizing herself with the political, social, and cultural climates of the early twentieth century to taking a couple of dance classes. ("[I] learned that it's incredibly difficult.") But for all that choosing to write about circa-1913 Isadora Duncan makes for an abundance of powerful emotional moments in the novel, it also allows for numerous moments of historical foreshadowing, as the First World War and the subsequent rise of fascism in Europe both loom in the background of numerous scenes.

As Gray tells it, the sense of encroaching political dread was something that echoed her process of writing the book. "I started writing the book right after Obama's second term began," she says. "I had the luxury of not thinking daily about politics. And I was very surprised to see that mirrored in history." To Duncan and her peers, the imminent war would come as a terrible surprise; 1913 hardly felt like the eve of a conflagration. "The stuff you read about in history class was all happening, but people were optimistic and living their lives and enjoying new technology." Their conversation was about "art galleries and shows and performances opening. It started to look pretty similar to today in a way that seems pretty obvious in hindsight."

Part of the challenge for any novelist who puts an artist at the center of their work is the question of description. "Ballet," Gray points out, "has a ton of beautiful terms, and you can visualize them." In writing about Duncan. whose approach to dance turned away from ballet's rigid forms, Gray also needed to find the right language to evoke Duncan's theories and practices. She opted to describe it in terms of "natural movement than anyone can visualize: your toe making a half circle across the floor. Anyone can see that, and most can do that," she says. "And even if one can't, it's a thing that's felt rather than being academically understood."

For Gray, there was also an affinity with Duncan's particular philosophy of dance. "[S]he worked so hard to create what felt like natural movement, what seemed to the audience to be spontaneous natural movement, but had a lifetime of rehearsals and practice and effort behind it," Gray says. "Which is the same thing as writing fiction. The goal is, it comes off invisibly, and the work takes years and years."

While Isadora may seems like an aesthetic break from Gray's past work, she doesn't necessarily see it that way. "I like inhabiting voices, getting really close to how somebody might think," she says. "That was an iteration of that, which I already do. It just happened to be in a totally different sense." Fundamentally, she describes Isadora as "the story of grief, as apprehended through an incredibly self-centered character."

Where will her next work take her? "I find that the artistic life moves in a duet with the real. I have been trying to come closer to my self, to operate in a more thoughtful sense in my life, and in a more meditative sense with my surroundings," she says.

"I don't know what kind of work will come out of that. I'm finding as I move through my thirties, there's a patience with the work that I haven't felt before, and a patience with not-knowing that is new to me. I'm just as curious as anyone, I guess."

Reviewer: Carroll, Tobias

The Barnes & Noble Review

03/27/2017
Gray follows her powerful 2015 short story collection Gutshot with an uneven novel about dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan. In 1913, at the peak of her career, Duncan’s children, six-year-old Deirdre and toddler Patrick, drown in the Seine when the car in which she has sent them home from a restaurant lunch plunges into the river. To assuage her grief and guilt—and avoid a clamoring public—Duncan, the children’s ashes in tow, departs Paris for Corfu, Turkey, Albania, and the Italian port of Viareggio. As she battles physical illness and mental collapse, she spends time with her brothers Augustin and Raymond; her sister, Elizabeth, who runs a school in Darmstadt based on Isadora’s methods; and legendary actress Eleonora Duse, among others. By the time she returns to France to dance again, she is forever changed, if not fully healed. Gray’s striking, sensual language is perfectly suited to her visionary protagonist, and the novel shimmers with memorable prose. But a surfeit of mundane moments narrated in the perspectives of secondary characters (including Elizabeth, her lover Max Merz, and Duncan’s lover, sewing machine heir Paris Singer) blunts its emotional power. Gray’s 2012 novel, Threats, used similarly brief, disjunctive segments to build toward a compelling whole; in contrast, Isadora spreads its attention too thin to fully capitalize on any of its narrative’s—or its author’s—rich possibilities. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A great novel of character: the story of a real woman's real grief and survival . . . Gray’s characters devour the world through their senses, a voracious, bodily quality that's a gift in writing the story of a woman for whom meaning began in the body . . . Though it uses gifts already apparent in Gray's work, Isadora also marks an evolution: Here, Gray's prose is enriched by a profound tenderness . . . Isadora is a heavenly celebration of women in charge of their bodies." —Ellie Robins, Los Angeles Times

"A stunning meditation on art and grief by one of America's most exciting young authors . . . Gray is a gutsy, utterly original writer, and this is the finest work she's done so far. Isadora is a masterful portrait of one of America's greatest artists, and it's also a beautiful reflection on what it means to be suffocated by grief, but not quite willing to give up." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org

"[Gray's] sentences are painfully precise. Thrills come from telling gestures and original thoughts rather than plot twists . . . Isadora is so confounded by her fame and grief that she’s in the dark about her own emotions, even as her expressive dances capture the world’s attention. Gray portrays that great irony in heartbreaking detail and psychological acuity, her language hinging lyrical flight with wry directness . . ." —Josh Cook, Washington Post

"Gray makes [each character] and their suffering tremendously compelling and allows each of them moments of great sympathy . . . [Isadora] is the most deeply sustained of [Gray's] books to date, the most epic and ambitious. It is a brutal novel in many ways, completely unrelenting in its depiction of pain, yet that makes it exhilarating, too." —Gayle Brandeis, Los Angeles Review of Books

"[Isadora] achieves something far more ambitious than documentary fiction . . . Isadora is a portrait of a revolutionary artist who endures extreme misfortune and the flow of history, a novel whose depiction of a world on the brink of horror and atrocity feels utterly contemporary, but it is also a novel about writing, about the creation of literary art . . . This is what is known as "making it look easy," which Amelia Gray has accomplished to the utmost." —Brooks Sterritt, San Francisco Chronicle

"Intricately spun . . . For every raw, grisly passage, there lies a frolicsome wonder at work, and we are treated sentence by sentence to [Gray's] irrepressible exuberance . . . Gray can confidently change the steps halfway through, and it's not until you're knee deep in the weird, the wonderful, the absurd, that you realize you have danced your way far from any recognizable home." —Hilary Leichter, BOMB

"A stunning work filled with profound emotional insights and downright splendid prose. Indeed, Gray's sentences move with a natural cadence that mirrors Isadora's philosophy as a dancer. With each movement, Gray gradually reveals the ambitions and losses of her characters." —Aram Mrjoian, Chicago Review of Books

"Like its subject, [Isadora is] full of contrasts and contradictions, a story wrought with complexity and understated humor that lives comfortably in the nuanced, darkened corners of experience." —Megan Burbank, Portland Mercury

"Isadora is a moving exploration of the way sadness threads through a life, stitching it into new forms and figures as strange as they are resilient." —Margo Orlando Littell, Manhattan Book Review

"Gray displays a wide range of versatility in her dance literacy—often in surprising, pleasurable ways — but she is most eloquent when describing Isadora’s connections to other people . . . [Isadora] has passages of great beauty, exhilarating savagery and humor . . . Isadora transcends the realities of its individual characters to focus on the ties that bind them." —Kristin Hatleberg, The Culture Trip

"[A] deeply inquisitive and empathic story of epic grief . . . Historical novels about artists abound, but few attain the psychological intricacy, fluency of imagination, lacerating wit, or intoxicating beauty of Gray’s tale of Isadora Duncan . . . Gray, performing her own extraordinary artistic leap, explores the nexus between body and mind, loss and creativity, love and ambition, and birth and death. The spellbinding result is a mythic, fiercely insightful, mordantly funny, and profoundly revelatory portrait of an intrepid and indelible artist.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"Captivating historical fiction . . . Gray does a terrific job of depicting not just the bereavement of a mother, but also the bereavement of a mother for whom life is a source of fuel for art. . . A novel equal to its larger-than-life protagonist." —Kirkus

"Gray’s striking, sensual language is perfectly suited to her visionary protagonist, and the novel shimmers with memorable prose." —Publishers Weekly

"Gray isn’t the first or the last novelist to take on Isadora Duncan’s outsize, groundbreaking, tragic life. But she might be the weirdest, in a good way. Gray’s stories have tended toward fabulist absurdism." —Vulture Spring Book Preview

From the Publisher

01/01/2017
A PEN/Faulkner and NYPL Young Lions finalist, Gray envisions Isadora Duncan not as a modern-dance genius but as a mother mourning the death of her two children. How does she keep performing?

Library Journal

2017-02-21
Captivating historical fiction from the award-winning author of Threats (2012) and Museum of the Weird (2010).As the "mother of modern dance," Isadora Duncan pioneered a style of movement that released the body from the rigid discipline of ballet. Her choreography favored free-flowing movements designed to seem more like spontaneous expression than a practiced performance. At first, the feverish, practically Gothic voice that Gray invents for her protagonist seems an odd fit for a woman inspired by the simple lines and unadorned grace of classical art and architecture, but, as the reader goes deeper into Isadora's world, Gray's choice begins to make perfect sense. Duncan's modernism included the concept of the artist as rogue and celebrity—someone whose creativity demanded freedom from everyday norms. And, certainly, fate played a role in making Duncan extraordinary in life and in death. This novel begins when the dancer's two small children drown in the Seine, and early chapters depict Duncan's immediate reaction to this awful tragedy. To say that she is not restrained in her grieving would be a dramatic understatement, but it soon becomes clear that restraint simply is not part of her makeup. Gray's prose is over-the-top but utterly apt. Isadora's words are gorgeous even when they are grisly, and Gray does a terrific job of depicting not just the bereavement of a mother, but also the bereavement of a mother for whom life is a source of fuel for art. Gray also makes the canny choice to include other narrators, observers whose cooler viewpoints are expressed in the third person. Paris Singer, heir to his father's sewing-machine fortune and the father of her son, is the one who takes care of quotidian details while Isadora pursues her muse. And her sister, Elizabeth, is also an excellent foil. As the administrator of the schools founded by the dancer, Elizabeth depends upon Isadora. But, more than anyone, Elizabeth recognizes the performative aspect of Isadora's everyday existence. Together, these interwoven voices tell the story of a singular genius at one of the turning points of history, the moment when the promises of modernism give way to the first total war. A novel equal to its larger-than-life protagonist.

Kirkus Reviews