Costalegre: A Novel Inspired By Peggy Guggenheim and Her Daughter
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3.5 • 11 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Delightful ... In Lara, Maum has given a little-considered daughter a more hopeful future." —Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review
“Maum’s slender, intelligent Costalegre is about many things: art as spectacle and art as discipline; life as joke and life as tragedy; the role of unreason in paintings and politics. But most of all, it’s about the youthful desire to be, in Lara’s words, contemplated and considered — to be, in short, loved." — The Boston Globe
One of Glamour's Best Books of the Decade and a Best Book of Summer at AM New York, Moda Operandi, GOOP, Publishers Weekly, TIME, Southern Living, and Thrillist.
It is 1937, and Europe is on the brink of war. Hitler is circulating a most-wanted list of “cultural degenerates”—artists, writers, and thinkers whose work is deemed antithetical to the new regime. To prevent the destruction of her favorite art (and artists), the impetuous American heiress and modern art collector Leonora Calaway begins chartering boats and planes for an elite group of surrealists to Costalegre, a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle.
The story of what happens to these artists when they reach their destination is told from the point of view of Lara, Leonora’s neglected fifteen-year-old daughter. Forced from a young age to live with her mother’s eccentric whims, tortured lovers, and entourage of gold-diggers, Lara suffers from emotional, educational, and geographical instability that a Mexican sojourn with surrealists isn’t going to help. But when she meets the outcast Dadaist sculptor Jack Klinger, Lara thinks she might have found the understanding she so badly craves.
Heartbreaking and strange, Costalegre is inspired by the real-life relationship between the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen. Courtney Maum triumphs with this wildly imaginative and curiously touching story of a privileged teenager who has everything a girl could wish for—except a mother who loves her back.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maum's third novel (after Touch) is a rich and delectable tale of art, love, and war. The narrative, which is based on Peggy Guggenheim and her set, is enlivened by 14-year-old narrator Lara, who elevates the book from juicy gossip to a beautiful meditation. The year is 1937 and Leonora Calaway, a wealthy art collector, has gathered up the artists "the F hrer decided were the most degenerate in Europe" and sailed to Costalegre in Mexico, where Surrealists and Dadaists, writers and painters, all live together to wait out the coming war. Her neglected daughter, Lara, always a tag-along on her mother's globe-hopping adventures and the only child to be found in Costalegre, writes in her diary that she's "burning up inside to have someone just for me." As the Mexican heat and the lack of news take their toll, a new figure, Dadaist sculptor Jack Klinger, arrives, charming everyone, especially Lara, who feels, like the artists, drawn to him. The highlight is Lara, whose searching intelligence and insightful observations anchor the story. This is a fascinating, lively, and exquisitely crafted novel.
