"Terrific."--Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes and
Letters to Camondo
"Makes you want to travel, do somersaults and stretches, drink champagne
in evening dress, read, think ... Intoxicating."--
Publishers Weekly
Along the French Riviera in the early 1900s, an illustrious family in
thrall to classical antiquity builds a fabulous villa--a replica of a
Greek palace, complete with marble columns and frescoes depicting
mythological gods. The Reinachs--related to other wealthy Jews like the
Rothschilds and the Ephrussis--attempt to recreate a "pure beauty" lost
in the 20th century. The narrator of this brilliant novel calls the
imposing house an act of delirium, "proof that one could travel back in
time, just like resetting a clock, and resist the outside world." The
story of the villa and its glamorous inhabitants is recounted by the son
of a servant from the nearby estate of Gustave Eiffel, designer of the
Paris tower, and the two contrasting structures present opposite
responses to modernity. The son is adopted by the Reinachs, initiated
into the era of Socrates and instructed in classical Greek. He joins a
family pilgrimage to Athens, falls in love with a married woman, and
survives the Nazi confiscation of the house and deportation to death
camps of Reinach grandchildren. This is a Greek epic for the modern era.
Reading group guide for Villa of Delirium is available free of
charge at newvesselpress.com.
