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Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932: A Novel
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932: A Novel
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932: A Novel
Audiobook18 hours

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

A richly imagined and stunningly inventive literary masterpiece of love, art, and betrayal, exploring the genesis of evil, the unforeseen consequences of love, and the ultimate unreliability of storytelling itself.

Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom. It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club’s loyal denizens, including the rising Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, the socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol; and the caustic American writer Lionel Maine.

As the years pass, their fortunes—and the world itself—evolve. Lou falls desperately in love and finds success as a race car driver. Gabor builds his reputation with startlingly vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant twenties give way to darker times, Lou experiences another metamorphosis—sparked by tumultuous events—that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more.

Editor's Note

A chameleon, indeed…

Through all the diegetic explorations of perception and truth, with narrators flitting in and out of the tale and journalists openly admitting to stretching the truth, the novel remains compulsively, seductively readable.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateApr 22, 2014
ISBN9780062331847
Author

Francine Prose

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

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Reviews for Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

Rating: 3.6037037303703703 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

135 ratings21 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What a fun book! Great characters, snappy dialogue. A historical novel set in a Paris of 1932 and then into WW2 which teams with quirky unreliable narrators. They tell the story of a club that resembles the one in _Cabaret_ and its patrons – many of whom soon develop into either Nazi collaborators or fierce resistance fighters. Everyone seems to be struggling to maintain either their artistic integrity or moral high ground in their own very personal battle. Hemingway and Picasso are there, but stay pretty much in the background. All these people talking with different voices and from different perspectives manage to collectively capture this wonderfully picturesque milieu. And tell an exciting story populated with interesting and very human characters.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Captures a unique time and place

    It took some time to get used to the structure of the novel about which is told through letters, a biography, and various reports. Captivating and engrossing story of Paris in the 20s, 30s and 40s
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    First, I read this book because I decided a few weeks ago to look into every Francine Prose work that came my way, this because I'd already recently admired Prose's My New American Life, Reading Like a Writer, and The Vixen. Then, this is the second novel in the last two weeks I've enjoyed but not finished. I mean, I read the first sixty pages, then the last few chapters, followed by scattered passages that drew my interest. It spoke to me, but not loudly enough to make me try to understand everything going on in it. Lovers at the Chameleon is a very ambitious book, but one which I am not ambitious enough to follow in depth. It is told from a half-dozen or more points of view, and covers, but not in a linear way, a century of time. It is fiction based on history, where some fictitious characters are mean to represent real people and other are their own imaginary selves. Only by reading reviews and interviews did I get a feel for what was going on or who in the book might have been who in twentieth century France. So this becomes a book, for me at least, emeshed in the web of other books, other documents about life in Paris before, during, and after WWII. It is, partly, about trying to recover a view of the past when there are many versions of the same stories and no real way for me to know for sure how much of each version to believe. I think this is one view Prose wanted me to take away from her ambitious book, and for that I'm glad.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Full of moral ambiguity and complex characters. Breathless, magnificent.I received a complimentary copy of this book via a Goodreads giveaway. Many thanks to all involved in providing me with this opportunity.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I really wanted to love this book, I really wanted to like this book, but it just didn't work for me. Too many narrators (reliable or not), too long, too repetitive, and often too boring. I was distracted by the "based on real people but not really" issue. Without a a Forward or an Afterward I found myself spending frustrating amounts of time trying to ascertain what was true, almost true and what was pure fiction. For some it may not matter, for me, when the subject matter is the Holocaust, the Resistance, a well known work of art, etc, it matters.

    On a different level the relationships between the characters didn't ring true. I never felt the attractions/connections between any of the couples, be they be lovers or friends. I didn't like any of the characters, but that is not necessary for me to like a novel, I just found it odd that I found none of the characters especially sympathetic. At times it felt like the author was just throwing as many "names" at the reader as she could, perhaps to add authenticity to the story...

    I did like the descriptions of the Chameleon Club and Paris at night, as well as Hitler's Berlin. Looking at Brassai's (on whom, I assume, Gabor is based) photography you can see the genius he had capturing/recreating the grit and beauty of night time/underground Paris. The author did a good job making me see how a photographer may have found his niche and survived financially and creatively. That's about all that I enjoyed about the novel.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I liked the writing and the style. I hated the ending.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's really hard to describe this book... artists and lesbians in inter-war Paris, a club for transvestites, female athletes and racecar drivers. It sounds sordid and sensationalist, and it is, but it is also vivid, convincing, and utterly absorbing.The novel comprises several letters, memoirs, and biographies, all interspersed to tell a story based on true facts about a lesbian athlete and Nazi sympathizer. The story focuses around a few photographs taken by one of the main characters - the photographs actually exist, and are easy to find online. I couldn't put this down. The characters were interesting and vivid. The multiple viewpoints were very interesting, particularly when different characters described the same event. Paris in the '30s and '40s is a fascinating setting, and Prose evoked it very effectively (after reading the book, I found a bunch of the photographs the book was based on, and they all looked exactly how I imagined they would from reading the book).There is depth here too - the book raises questions about the nature of good and evil. Why do some people do good things, and others do bad things? Is personal history responsible for whether people do good or bad? Love and relationships seem closely intertwined with good and evil, but that is also a chicken and egg question. A thoroughly enjoyable read!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Richly textured story of the life of Lou Villars in 1930's Paris and during World War II. Using multiple viewpoints, Lou is explored by famous photographer whose book cover is graced by her photograph, the photographer's wife, the wife's self-proclaimed grand-niece, the photographer's benefactor who hires Lou to race for her family's automobile company, and an American writer who is the photographer's best friend. Like the many viewpoints. Lou can be described by many labels, of which neglected daughter, abused sister, athlete, lesbian, race car driver, performer, lover, Nazi collaborator and mechanic are a few. All of this hints at but cannot fully describe Lou, who longs for love and acceptance and falls deeply in the thrall of anyone who appears to provide those things - only to time and time again find herself rejected and alone.The side stories too are fascinating. Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi si a compelling character, and his drive, creative process and life are fully explored in much of the novel. His patron the Baroness Lily de Rossignol and his wife Suzanne are as well. I found the landscape of Paris between the wars compelling, with its air of license and debauchery and its magnetism for artists of all sorts. The title comes the photograph Gabor takes of Lou and her lover at the time, Lou in a tuxedo and Arlette decidedly feminine, taken in a recreation of The Chameleon Club, a nightclub where cross-dressing is one of the normal behaviors. In many ways the photograph serves as a fulcrum for Lou's story, highlighting the point where she is confident in her persona, and in love, although grasping to hold on to a lover who is inching away and who will become her nemesis through the animosity of her next lover, a policeman and gangster. The photograph will also abet her demise as a race car driver, which ultimately attracts her to Nazi Germany.Again I return to the word "fascinating", and it was. Recommended.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Was about 25% too long and it felt like it was trying to be very avant garde but fell flat. The "psychological mystery" part of it also rang a little false.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set in Paris just before and during WWII, the novel focuses on various characters who visit the Chameleon Club, which is reminiscent of the musical Cabaret. Genders slide easily at the club, where anyone can change their colors. The central character is Lou Villars, a transvestite woman who trains for the Olympics, sidetracks into dancing at the club, becomes a race car drive and then betrays her country by working for Hitler. She is apparently based on an actual historical individual. The story is told through the writings of different characters. The journals of the Baroness, an aloof patron of the arts and particularly of Gabor, a Hungarian photographer who tells his view of events through letters home to his parents. There is also a journal by Suzanne, Gabor's lover, a French teacher. Gabor's friend is an American writer, supposedly modeled after Hemmingway, and sections of his Paris memoir are included. And, there is Lou Villar's biographer, trying to make sense of them all.It is an entertaining, sometimes droll cast of characters set in a fascinating time period. However, the different voices and montage of writings often seems contrived and the ending is weak and disappointing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "Lovers at the Chameleon Club..." was first book by Francine Prose that I read. I liked it lots. As noted in Edmund White's review, it is indeed "a novel of great reach and power" and features a cast of "well-delineated characters". As I have learned from various commentaries, the main characters (e.g. Lou Villars, Lionel Mane, and Gabor Tsenji) are loosely based on real people who, in some manner, exemplified the time. So the novel is by no means a free-form imagination of Parisian life prior to and during WWII. But I liked the book without knowing any of that real-world background, and even though the main character (Lou) proved to be a misguided, sadistic, and evil person. Prose early on established the chameleon metaphor as a framework for her story. Having grasped that idea, I enjoyed following its explication as the ever-changing, adaptive personalities of the characters, and their lives and choices, unfolded as the story progressed. More than any other character, Suzanne struck me as the one person who remained consistent and true to her roots. I believed in her from start to finish...and yet, at the very end, I couldn't agree that her book-ending account of the historical facts was completely credible. No doubt it was the author's intended result to leave the reader hanging. All the more credit to Francine Prose for doing so, and for skillfully investing such inventiveness and ambiguity into the story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Historical fiction taking place in Paris from the 1920’s up to the French Resistance during WWII that is all about love, art, and betrayal all expertly woven together into a cohesive story. SRH
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Historical fiction taking place in Paris from the 1920’s up to the French Resistance during WWII that is all about love, art, and betrayal all expertly woven together into a cohesive story. SRH
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    After her "Reading like a writer", I was curious about Francine Prose's writing. Does she do as she says? (uhmmm..., in this case does she write as she writes?). She does and the result works really well.Interesting time and place (Paris just before WWII), well developed (fictional) characters and some real ones, a good story with cliffhangers in the right places to keep the tension and all together well written. Usually I find myself skipping paragraphs in the books ("oh!, just blablabla") and that never happened in this one. Each sentence was leading to the next dragging me along.It was a great reading, although after all the character work and fine description of their motivations, the book doesn't land on a solid conclusion. As another reviewer said, its self-proclaimed "examination of evil" is rather naive. I finished it with the feeling that I had a great time reading but lacking some deeper human meaning that makes it memorable.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I thought this was a highly inventive story. When I read Prose’s explanation about how she got the idea for the book I was amazed to find that the main character, Lou Villars, was based on a real person, discovered in a photograph the author saw. How Prose brought Lou to life brought a different meaning to the Chameleon Club. Sure it was a popular club for cross-dressers in 1920’s Paris, where Lou found work as an actress. Like the chameleon Lou can change her persona, from athlete to actress, to race car driver and finally as a spy for the Gestapo. Told in intertwining stories from the points of various people who know Lou as well as chapters providing more information by the person writing a biography of Villars it includes American, Hungarian, French and German voices.. The final chapter leaves one wondering how much of this story shows the true Lou Villars, or like a chameleon is she able to adapt to her surroundings.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I echo lisapeet's disappointment. The novel reads well enough to hold the reader's interest through to the end, but there is indeed something lacking: lisapeet called it passion; I would add, something like necessity that drives the fiction. Ultimately, the invented characters pale next to their real-life inspirations (Brassai, Henry Miller...)... And as far as the "examination of evil" goes, I found the insights rather naïve. My personal preference in fiction is for writing that pushes the boundaries of reality, that - indeed, with passion, and empathy - tries to reconstruct, by imagining them, the missing connections between the available documents, the motivations behind the visible gestures... rather than sweep aside those documents in order to build something that falls rather short of that reality (be it the history of modernism or the history of wartime Resistance and collaboration).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Vaguely disappointing. The story was interesting, and the manner of telling it, from varied points of view, should have really sparked it. I mean, a chronically lovelorn and disappointed cross-dressing French patriot turned Nazi collaborator? With supporting characters that included a Brassai-like photographer of Paris' seamier side, a sexy but celibate countess, and a Henry Miller type literary rake who managed to cash in on his disappointment with the bright lights of late 1930s Paris, a neurotic and possibly unhinged biographer? But there was something a bit arms'-length to the whole thing. Even with a great cast of characters, and knowing that each was supposed to be unreliable in his or her own way, the storytelling was lacking a certain traction; it never quite carried me along in the way I would have liked. I stuck around till the end and never quite flagged in my attentions. But I'd really hoped for a bit more passion.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have tried to describe this book to several people now and it always comes across as sounding very strange indeed. I'm not sure they believe me when I say that it all fits beautifully within the context of the story and that it is a fascinating tale based, at least in part, on real people. I mean, who is going to believe that a novel about a lesbian, cross-dressing, French, race car driving woman who despite being a patriot became a spy and then a torturer for the Nazis in Occupied France? Crazy focus for a novel, right? And yet, it not only works, but Prose's newest novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, comes together as a marvelous tale about love, desire, art, betrayal, and the seeds of evil. Paris in the years leading up to WWII had a giddy, frenetic feel to it and that sense of grabbing life around the neck was nowhere more evident than at The Chameleon Club, where men dressed as women and women dressed as men. People came to the club to listen to the owner, Yvonne, croon about her long dead sailor and to let their hair down, free to be themselves as they could nowhere else. And the club is the place that the narrative circles back to again and again, a place that all the characters have been too and that some know intimately. Narrated by multiple characters in multiple ways (letters, essays from the time, published and unpublished memoirs written later, and a biography written in the present), the novel swirls around the person of Lou Villars. Although Lou is not always the central character in the narrations, her presence and her ultimate war crimes, which are made clear in the very beginning of the novel, are the threads that connect all the players together. Lionel Main is an American writer who is searching for fame as he writes (and embellishes or even makes up out of whole cloth) about a decadent Paris for readers at home. Gabor Tsenyi is the Hungarian photographer who snaps an iconic picture of Lou in a tuxedo with her lover Arlette in a fancy party dress while sitting at the Chameleon's bar. Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi is Gabor's ever tolerant girlfriend and ultimately his wife. Baroness Lily de Rossignol is a frigid but wealthy woman who bankrolls Gabor's photography and employs Lou as a race car driver for her gay husband and his brother's brand of French cars. And finally Nathalie Dunois is a teacher in the present who is writing a biography of Lou Villars called The Devil Drives, humanizing and even identifying with this woman who has been so demonized for her role in Nazi Occupied France that her life is rarely, if ever, spoken of. Telling the story of Lou's life from childhood through her impressive athletic displays as a young woman and on into the disappointments and betrayals of her adulthood, this novel seeks to understand the genesis of evil. Does Lou become an informer and torturer because of her upbringing? Does she become open to evil because of the way that life and the people in it maltreat and take advantage of her? Or is it something else, the seed of which has always been in her? How could a French patriot who venerated Joan of Arc willingly collaborate with the Nazis? Lou never narrates her own story and so despite all the evidence, we cannot fully know. The other characters, who do narrate, explain not only what they knew of Lou but also their own lives in that increasingly ominous time before the war and the decisions that led them to their roles during the war. All of the narrators are contemporaneous with Lou except for Nathalie Dunois, her biographer, who becomes less and less reliable as the book progresses. Each of the different modes of narration and the different narrators widen the tale with their overlapping observations, making this an incredibly nuanced read. The beginning of the novel, as the reader is meeting each of the characters in the story, and there are many beyond just the narrators, can be a bit overwhelming but once they are all in place, the story starts to race along to the inevitable conclusion, and one that the reader knows from the outset. The journey to that end is definitely worth the ride as the stories tell and retell, expanding on each other as Lou's decisions, desires, and even sometimes her naivety push her ever closer to the wrongheaded justifications she will use to excuse her participation in evil. Prose is a masterful writer and she manages to keep all her balls in the air with this complicated and unusual novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When I was about a third of the way through this book, I read some of the blurbs on the back of my copy and noticed that one of the reviewers referred to this as a mystery. That was very surprising to me, because it was reading like a historical novel. From that point on, I was on the alert of what aspect of this story, set in Paris from the 1920’s to just after World War II, could make it a mystery.The novel is set up as a combination of letters, biographies and autobiographies of the main characters. This mix of point of views, voices and writing styles holds the reader’s interest and allows for a multi-faceted picture of the events described as Paris transitions from the ex-pat era of the 20’s to the Nazi occupation. It’s also interesting to see how some of the characters get to speak in their own voice, and some are spoken for. The format in which the characters are portrayed ends up playing almost a bigger role than the characters themselves.One of the best aspects of the book was the way that Francine Prose, while describing a very unique and transformative time in history, still manages to create characters most readers have met – ones who are instantly recognizable despite the huge differences of time, place or nationality.“And everyone has, at some point, met a man like Chanac: those lucky individuals who continually fail upward, who are fired for incompetence or for some abuse of power and instantly find a better job. We ordinary mortals would have wound up in jail or on the street! But these chosen ones rise higher – in politics, business, or even at a sleepy provincial high school. And so this pattern repeats itself: promotion, crime, exposure, failure, bigger crime, bigger failure, bigger promotion.” This story of love and war and betrayal, good and evil, uses as one of its main characters a woman named Lou Villars. The reader is told from the beginning that she betrayed her country and helped the Nazis, and then step by step, is led down the path from her childhood to adulthood – with significant events highlighted along the way. Her biographer (who entitles her book “The Devil Drives”) points out each and every event that might have sculpted Lou – led to her views and actions.“Looking into the sources of evil, as I have in writing this book, I have developed a profound respect (if respect is the word) for the power of resentment, the corrosive acid produced by the conviction that a person has been overlooked, cheated, or betrayed.”The other characters surrounding Lou tell their stories as well – their tales of the city they love, their reasons for the choices they made and the actions they took. Especially in the lead up to and beginnings of the war, their stories become more introspective. “Later, when such stories could be told, everyone had a story about the moment they decided to do the right thing.”These stories that circle around and intersect with that of Lou Villars start to fit together, piece by piece – to create her portrait. “Was it wrong to make one person suffer to prevent harm to many? When Lou pondered that, when she tried not to, it gave her a headache. She’d leave those questions to the philosophers and do what she did best.”Only at the VERY end of the book, did I understand the mystery of it. As I finished the book, I thought back on so much of what I had read, so many things I had accepted without questioning. I looked back on a quote from earlier in the book - “Everyone who has ever written a biography, everyone who has ever lived, will have notices how often a dark thread runs through the weave and weft of a life.”And I understood then that this book was not what I thought it was about at all. While it is about people and how they react in certain circumstances, how they cope and adapt to that which life throws at them, it just wasn’t about the people I’d thought it had been. Mystery revealed.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Prolific author Prose has written a complex and stirring historical novel based on real events and people. She weaves together six narrative strands to make a complete picture of not just the main subject of the story- Lou Villars, athlete, auto racer, mechanic, lesbian, Gestapo spy and informant- but of the people, rich and poor, around her and Paris itself just prior to the German occupation and during it. The characters and the city come alive in her tale of a French patriot- maltreated by her own country and seduced by false promises from Hitler- who, by leaking the location of the end of the Maginot line, quite possibly, single handedly, made the occupation of France possible. Lou Villars is based on Violette Morris, who did all the things that Lou does in the story, including having an elective double mastectomy that made it easier for her to steer a race car. She lived openly as gay and dressed in male clothing. She could have gone down in history as a great athlete instead of as the torturing monster she became. Why did someone who claimed to love France betray her country? Prose has come up with a pretty convincing possibility. Many of the other characters, artists and writers, are based on real people as well. The story is not just a fictionalized biography, though. The scope is wide and includes love, art, courage, and how the truth is seen from different perspectives. The writing is excellent and, despite the grim subjects, very engaging. I stayed up late trying to finish it and got up again in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep without knowing how it would end. It was worth being sleepy today.