The Emigre Book

Eve Holland is a scientist, unsure about the limits of her ambition. Comfortable, but unchallenged by her relationship with Harry Strakhan, the tempo of her life changes irrevocably when Harry introduces her to his relative Count Nikolas Strakhan, conductor, pianist, lascivious rake--and enormously fat. Nikolas' concert leaves the tone-deaf Eve unmoved, but her curiosity about this larger- than-life figure develops into an obsession that compels her to unearth the legendary history of the once-svelte "quick-change artist who sometimes wears all his costumes at once." Half-American, half-Russian, Nikolas descends from one of Catherine the Great's boy-lovers and mid-Western millionaires. A child prodigy he dreams of becoming a concert pianist, but his ambitions for true brilliance are thwarted by the realisation that whilst he is a perfect mimic and consummate performer who can achieve technical flawlessness, there is a silence at the centre of his music--brilliant as he is, he is not gifted enough to make the piano sing, although he is endowed with a sexual genius for making women sing. Grown up and cast adrift from both his family and true talent, Nikolas's diasporic story sweeps the Western world in a palimpsest of beguiling ambition, seductions, heartbreak, confidence trickery, debauchery, and--just once--genuine heartbreak. The Emigré glitters with refracted light from the world of the social élite into whose affections Nikolas inveigles himself in London, Paris, Switzerland and the United States. Brady's sparse prose is as refreshing and rare as the Beluga caviar that is a recurrent narrative motif, writing that sharply condenses a vision of the declining European aristocracy in a century that has outlived it. Posed with equal precision is the novel's preoccupying question about the relationship between talent and economic privilege: "Performers have always come in two parts: talent and money. Maybe the proportions vary, but the one is no good without the other. Which is to say that, one way or another, any devil's gift must cover both." This is Brady's fourth novel. The Theory of War-- for which she won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1993--and Death Comes For Peter Pan established her reputation for brilliant, elegaic writing on traumatic histories. Equally accomplished, the metronome of Brady's writing in The Emigré is set to the different beat of insightful comedy that every so often exceeds beyond perfect timing into extraordinary evocations of desire and human ambition. --Rachel HolmesRead More