Delayed Rays of a Star
A Novel
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3.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of the Year
A dazzling debut novel following the lives of three groundbreaking women--Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl--cinema legends who lit up the twentieth century
At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world's first Chinese American star, playing bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father's modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director of propaganda art films would first make her famous--then, infamous.
From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women's lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a bucolic village in the Bavarian Alps to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysées, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, victim, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours.
Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of identity, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and clear-eyed, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its oblique calculations, and its eventual betrayals--and announces a bold new literary voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Koe's ambitious and well-researched debut novel (after the story collectionMinistry of Moral Panic) successfully melds historical fact with expansive and generous storytelling. Inspired by a 1928 photograph that captured Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl posing for Alfred Eisenstaedt at a Berlin party, the overlapping narratives start with that moment and then spiral outwards, exploring the decades that follow in each woman's life. Dietrich, having retreated from the spotlight and become a recluse in her old age, hopes she's found one final admirer. The American-born Wong, whose prospects for leading lady roles were limited by antimiscegenation laws, later grapples with accusations that her career perpetuated Asian stereotypes. And Riefenstahl defends her political and artistic choices, notably Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, which she produced and directed. The book's most emotionally resonant sections often come from the stories of tangential characters an electrician in Riefenstahl's crew, for example, or the elderly Dietrich's young Chinese housekeeper, B b . Very occasionally, the inclusion of the famous characters' biographies reads like a Wikipedia entry; more often, however, the details of each woman's life and work are fully integrated into an exploration of her inner life. Throughout, their stories contend with the notion of authenticity in life and art of how performers define themselves in the public sphere and behind closed doors. Readers will find much to ponder in these vivid, fictionalized deep dives into three women who changed cinema.
