Author brings art to life
Alexander Chee’s second novel, “The Queen of the Night,” starts off as perfectly as a novel set in the world of the operas of Verdi or Mozart should.
“When it began, it began as an opera would begin, in a palace, at a ball, in an encounter with a stranger, who you discover, has your fate in his hands.”
Lilliet Berne is a superstar with a past. But when a young writer approaches her at a Parisian ball with the idea of a new opera based on her life story, she fears her downfall is at hand. She embarks on a quest to discover who has betrayed her secrets: her friend, the courtesan; her obsessive patron, the tenor; an enemy, the Comtesse; or her deceased lover, the composer.
Since her childhood on a Minnesota homestead, Lilliet has heard she was cursed because of her magnificent voice. Tragedy befalls the family as befitting an operatic story and she dreams of finding her mother’s family in Switzerland.
This starts her on an incredible journey, from a circus rider known as the “Settler’s Daughter” to the soprano at the height of her powers with stops as a courtesan in Paris, a mute maid to the Empress Eugénie and a singing pupil in Baden-Baden.
Chee, who made his name with his first novel, “Edinburgh,” about a Korean-American boy, incorporates operas such as “Faust,” “The Magic Flute” and “Carmen” to describe Lilliet’s life.
Lilliet speaks throughout, giving voice to a tumultuous era at the end of the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War, the hunger-filled Siege of Paris and the advent of the Third Republic. Real-life figures such as Verdi, Turgenev and P.T. Barnum appear, as does the scheming Comtesse de Castiglione.
“The Queen of the Night” is packed with ever overlapping storylines that, at times, can challenge the reader.
The machinations of its central characters give the novel a zesty attitude, which really depicts the fortitude and cunning needed to live as an independent woman in 19th-century France.
It is like the art of a Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec come to life.