Gazelle

Rating:
Summary: A perfumed rememberance of things past.
Review: 13-year old Elizabeth lives with her parents, a bumbling professor father and an exquisite, hot-blooded beauty of a mother, in Cairo of the 1950s. When Elizabeth's mother leaves the family, for sexual excitement, Elizabeth finds that she has to care for her father's increasing mental and physical deterioration. At the same time, she finds herself drawn to the beauty and mystery of Egypt, embodied in the "gazelle" man, her father's friend Ramses, who is a perfume-maker. It's a languid, episodic brief novel, with slight detours into the occult, reminiscent of the work of Jeanette Winterson. Like Winterson, Ducornet creates postmodern philosophical fables that masquerade as novels. With painterly precision, and a certain word-sorcery, "Gazelle" muses on the nature of love and sexual awakening; memory; perfume making; illness; and mother-daughter, father-daughter relationships. The reader is well served by just immersing themselves in the rich and quirky prose, and the exotic scents and smells of Egypt. The scenes with Elizabeth's cold and glamorous mother provide much needed tension in this vaporous, attar-scented novel.

Rating:
Summary: A perfumed rememberance of things past.
Review: 13-year old Elizabeth lives with her parents, a bumbling professor father and an exquisite, hot-blooded beauty of a mother, in Cairo of the 1950s. When Elizabeth's mother leaves the family, for sexual excitement, Elizabeth finds that she has to care for her father's increasing mental and physical deterioration. At the same time, she finds herself drawn to the beauty and mystery of Egypt, embodied in the "gazelle" man, her father's friend Ramses, who is a perfume-maker. It's a languid, episodic brief novel, with slight detours into the occult, reminiscent of the work of Jeanette Winterson. Like Winterson, Ducornet creates postmodern philosophical fables that masquerade as novels. With painterly precision, and a certain word-sorcery, "Gazelle" muses on the nature of love and sexual awakening; memory; perfume making; illness; and mother-daughter, father-daughter relationships. The reader is well served by just immersing themselves in the rich and quirky prose, and the exotic scents and smells of Egypt. The scenes with Elizabeth's cold and glamorous mother provide much needed tension in this vaporous, attar-scented novel.

Rating:
Summary: Psychologically true, atmospheric.
Review: Gazelle is a first person account by a 13 year old of the summer in which her mother finally decides to leave her father, and herself. The novel is psychologically true, and one can observe the change in the girl as this event, and puberty alter her, but that is not the primary reason for reading Gazelle. The book is set in Egypt in the early 1950's, but it is a timeless Egypt that is evoked, the days of ancient Egypt as well as the bazaars of the 1950's.. The writing captures the impressions on all the senses, and has as a major character a seller/producer of perfumes whose ambition it is to rediscover some of the perfumes of the ancients. I recommend Gazelle especially to those readers, like myself, who have struggled with any of the novels of the Alexandria Quartet and found it mostly inaccessible. Where I feel Gazelle fails is in the character of the father. He just doesn't add enough to the novel for a character who is on stage so much.

Rating:
Summary: Psychologically true, atmospheric.
Review: Gazelle is a first person account by a 13 year old of the summer in which her mother finally decides to leave her father, and herself. The novel is psychologically true, and one can observe the change in the girl as this event, and puberty alter her, but that is not the primary reason for reading Gazelle. The book is set in Egypt in the early 1950's, but it is a timeless Egypt that is evoked, the days of ancient Egypt as well as the bazaars of the 1950's.. The writing captures the impressions on all the senses, and has as a major character a seller/producer of perfumes whose ambition it is to rediscover some of the perfumes of the ancients. I recommend Gazelle especially to those readers, like myself, who have struggled with any of the novels of the Alexandria Quartet and found it mostly inaccessible. Where I feel Gazelle fails is in the character of the father. He just doesn't add enough to the novel for a character who is on stage so much.