Left Bank
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- 5,49 €
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- 5,49 €
Publisher Description
A chic peek at the glittering inhabitants of Paris’s most exclusive neighborhood
With the sting of a good Camembert, Kate Muir’s fiction debut is a sophisticated, fun, and delightfully ironic look at family life, Left Bank style. Olivier and Madison Malin are the toasts of Rive Gauche. A philosopher and media personality, Olivier is the darling of the Paris cafés with his perfectly tousled hair and mistress de jour on speed dial. An American film star turned Parisian “It” girl, Madison busies herself playing the part of the bon vivant. But when a crisis occurs with their daughter, these self-centered parents are forced to focus on something more than their own reflections.Left Bank is at once a delicious satire of Parisian pretension and a celebration of the city’s alluring glamour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
London Times columnist Muir's impressive fiction debut, an atmospheric tour of Paris, follows the contretemps of "the Great Mind and the Great Body of the Left Bank": Olivier Malin, descendant of an old-line French family (Victorieux Touts is the family motto) and author of Chechnya: Beyond Philosophy, is the telegenic intellectual pere de famille with an insatiable appetite for fine cheeses and slender young mistresses, while his wife, Texas-born "sub-pornographic art-house" film star Madison, is too old for nude scenes, but too young to retire. The discomfiture underlying their marriage ignites when their seven-year-old daughter, Sabine, disappears in a theme park. As Olivier and Madison search for Sabine, the family's circle of servants and supporters, knowingly or not, pulls the couple apart. Paul, a museum curator, has an unrequited passion for Madison; Anna, the English nanny, consummates Olivier's passion for her at the H tel Select; and Madame Canovas, the nosy concierge, keeps the gossip circulating. Muir's book is filled with sensations, insights and barbs ("She was exquisitely polite but rather formal, with the reserved expression of the recently Botoxed") and is enriched by perceptions about culture, politics and the doomed love affair between America and France.
