A richly imagined and stunningly inventive literary masterpiece of love, art, and betrayal, exploring the genesis of evil, the unforeseen consequences of love, and the ultimate unreliability of storytelling itself.
Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom. It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the … jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club’s loyal denizens, including the rising Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, the socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol; and the caustic American writer Lionel Maine.
As the years pass, their fortunes—and the world itself—evolve. Lou falls desperately in love and finds success as a race car driver. Gabor builds his reputation with startlingly vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant twenties give way to darker times, Lou experiences another metamorphosis—sparked by tumultuous events—that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more.
more
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 is, at its heart, the biography of Lou Villars, a cross-dressing, javelin-thrower-turned-race-car-driver, Hitler revering, collaboratrice extraordinaire. In her first pages, Francine Prose, tells her readers that this is the story of a woman whose embrace of evil knows no bounds. Lou – Lou who professes to love nothing about sport, God, and France – is the very same who told the Germans exactly where the Maginot line ended, who cost countless Frenchmen their lives by her espionage and her treason.
What has driven her to do this? Lou loves France, but after France denies her her livelihood simply for preferring pants to skirts, she will stop at nothing to “fix” her country. Her relationship with a fellow race car driver, the German Inge Wallser, leads her into thrall with Hitler – and to the conclusion that Germany seeks only to aid France, a quest into which Lou throws herself body and soul.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club is also an ode to Paris. It begins in the 1920s, amid the decadence of the Roaring Twenties, when Americans and ex-pat artists of every nationality people the city (think A Moveable Feast), continues through the worst of the Great Depression and the build up to war with Germany, the drôle de guerre of 1940, and finishes in the midst of the German Occupation (à la Suite Française). Through the years, Paris is the star, and the lovers of Prose’s novel as much in love with the city as with one another.
The most amazing thing about Lovers at the Chameleon Club is not the plot or the characters, but the book itself. Prose has written, essentially, the biography of a woman who never existed (Lou Villars) written by an author who never existed (Nathalie Dubois), the chapters of which are interspersed with chapters from the memoir of a heroine of the Resistance (Lily de Rossignol), the unpublished diary of another Resistance hero (Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi), famous works of an American writer and Hemingway contemporary (Lionel Maine), and letters to his parents penned by a Hungarian photographer (Gabor Tsenyi). There are also chapters devoted to the memories of the owner of the Chameleon Club (Eva “Yvonne” Nagy).
Their lives and stories, which are each told with a unique voice and perspective, intersect in intricate and meaningful ways. And let me say again: none of these people actually existed. Yet, Prose does this so convincingly that I actually Googled more than one of the characters early on thinking I had missed something and that this was historical fiction that drew heavily on actual people.
That she was able to accomplish all of this is a testament to Prose’s skill as a writer – and her imagination. Lovers at the Chameleon Club is an experience unto itself, a fabulous, dizzying ride at the end of which the reader can’t help but wish to have been there, Paris’s lover, if only for a moment.
(This review was originally published at http://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2014/11/lovers-at-chameleon-club-paris-1932.html)
The account of Lou Vilars life and her collaboration with the Nazi occupiers was haunting; it is difficult to fathom how a person becomes an informer and torturer and this account did a good job of keeping to facts and to reflect history without distortion. The book was difficult to read because so many fates were interwoven.
Very unique style. A single story line but told by six different characters. Very good character development. Interesting historical setting. Enjoyed it.
Stylistically fascinating
Changes viewpoints frequently , but finally all converge. A fresh tale set during Wold War Ii
This is a complicated and interesting book. The characters are memorable, and it avoids most of the WWII-era historical fiction cliches.