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摘要
"The Flaming Corsage opens in a Manhattan hotel room, two women and a man present. Into the room bursts a second man, who transforms the scene into what the tabloids come to call "The Love Nest Killings of 1908." The mystery of that carnage will not come fully unraveled until destiny enwraps the novel's principal and most memorable characters, Katrina Taylor and Edward Daugherty." "He is a first-generation Irish American who will break out beyond Albany as a playwright. She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful and seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Theirs is a passionate attachment from the first, simple and unrestrained on Edward's part, more indecisive for Katrina, who, remembering her poet Baudelaire, regards love as apposite to death, "the divine elixir that gives us the heart to follow the endless night." But when the great stalker strikes close to her family in the central event of the novel, a cataclysmic hotel fire, the marriage changes into something else altogether." "With virtuosic skill, Kennedy moves The Flaming Corsage back and forward in time from 1884 to 1912, following the fates of Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs. These others range from their socially opposed families to Katrina's lover, Francis Phelan; Edward's flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa Spencer; the rashly extroverted physician Giles Fitzroy and his wife, Felicity; and Edward's unnerving friend, the cynical journalist Thomas Maginn."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Enthusiastic readers of Kennedy's Albany Cycle novels, which includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, may be disappointed with this thin tale of love, betrayal and class divisions at the turn of the century. Playwright Edward Daugherty, born to hardscrabble Irish Catholic parents in North Albany, wins the heart of Katrina Taylor, daughter of an established Protestant family whose forebears go back to the founding of the city. Predictably, the marriage is not welcomed by either family, but love wins out. When Edward earns acclaim as a dramatist, he feels emboldened to offer a gaudy attempt at reconciling the family: he buys Katrina's father a racing horse, her mother a fur, and pays for a huge banquet for both families. But all ends in tragedy as fire roars through the dining room, killing one person and injuring Katrina (a burning splinter pierces her through her corsage). Edward and Katrina's problems don't end there: Edward falls in love with a young actress, and Katrina, in a promising plot twist that never pays off, has an affair with Francis Phelan, the ill-fated protagonist of Ironweed. By various intrigues, more tragedies occur, most notably the "Love Nest Killings," in which a jealous husband shoots to death his wife and then himself, after wounding Edward in a New York hotel room. Although Kennedy makes an attempt to reflect these goings-on through the prism of Daugherty's plays, the effort smacks not only of a playwright's hopeless desperation to redeem himself but also a novelist's attempt to raise a rather trite novella into a novel of ideas. 100,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
``Leave the dead. Let's salvage the tie left to us,'' the protagonist of Kennedy's latest pleads with his distant, despairing wife. The struggle to escape the past is at the heart of this subtle, wise, original work. This latest installment in Kennedy's ambitious Albany Cycle returns to, and deepens, many of the themes central to the series: the wayward nature of the human heart, the manner in which grief, regret, and enduring need shape and often remake family life, the way in which art, at its best, can clarify and transform life's losses and pain. The sixth in the cycle (previous volumes include Legs, 1975; Ironweed, 1983, which won the Pulitzer Prize; and, most recently, Very Old Bones, 1992) spans the period from the 1880s to 1912. At its center is yet another vibrant, tragic couple: Edward Daugherty, a brilliant playwright, and his equally headstrong, melancholy wife, Katrina. Surrounding them is a cast of other distinct and startling figures: Francis Phelan, Katrina's lover and a hero of Albany's working-class Irish community; the talented, self-destructive journalist Thomas Maginn; and Melissa Spencer, a gifted, conscienceless actress who becomes Daugherty's lover and sets in motion a murder/suicide that comes close to destroying Daugherty. The long, unremitting effort of Albany's Irish population to seize power from the governing elite is never far from the action: Daugherty, given a start in life by a wealthy benefactor, uses his plays to celebrate the resiliency of the Irish and lampoon the Dutch and English who rule the town. That theme, however, never predominates--the long struggle of Edward and Katrina to cope with a series of deaths and betrayals gives the novel its shape and narrative drive. Filled with precise details of Albany's vanished life, narrated in a prose both salty and exact, catching the vigorous cadence of spoken English, this is the most impressive entry in the Albany Cycle since Ironweed. (First printing of 100,000; $75,000 ad/promo)
《书目》(Booklist)书评
As magnetic as ever, Kennedy continues his now epic Albany cycle with a tale of romance gone wrong. The action runs on two timetables. One involves a violent showdown at a Manhattan love nest in 1908; the other takes place in Albany years before and after this debacle. Things start out rosily enough as Edward (an Irish American character we've met in earlier novels) woos Katrina, a wealthy Dutch Protestant beauty far above his humble station. Overruling her parents' objections, Katrina makes sure that she and Edward are compatible as lovers, then converts to Catholicism and marries him. Sadly, her temerity is no match for the brutal and painfully ironic tragedies fate has in store for her, and she retreats into melancholia and morbidity. Edward, on the other hand, weathers all storms and becomes a famous playwright, unabashedly transforming private traumas into public spectacles. Kennedy's escalation of action and emotion throughout this complex drama is masterful. At first, we feel as though we're sitting in a cozy parlor, sipping tea and listening to a clever romance. Then, suddenly, the walls give way, winds howl, and we find ourselves in the center of a great conflagration, a blossoming of blood and flame. But there is such beauty in Kennedy's prose and dialogue, such astuteness in his portrayals, that we are enchanted and even renewed by his contemplation of death in life, by the paradox of a flaming corsage. (Reviewed March 1, 1996)0670858722Donna Seaman
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
The Bard of Albany offers a murder mystery with characters from the "Albany" cycle (e.g., Very Old Bones, LJ 3/1/92). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.