Scan barcode
dsbressette's review against another edition
3.0
This was an unusual format for historical fiction. The writing is engaging, but the author’s choice to jump around in time made it hard to follow at times.
balletbookworm's review against another edition
3.0
There's an interesting novel in here, one about grief and loss and art, but it's bogged down by the style. The novel begins on the day that Isadora's children drown in a car accident in the Seine and spans the next 18 months or so told by a rotating cast of 4 characters - Paris Singer, Isadora's lover and father of her younger child, Elizabeth, Isadora's sister, Max, Elizabeth's lover (? Maybe) and a teacher at the Duncan school in Darmstadt, and Isadora herself. Now, the major snag here is that Isadora narrates in the first person and everyone else in a close third person POV, with some letters mixed in, and that makes it hell to read. Also, while some of Paris's sections were interesting absolutely none of Max's sections were worth reading, IMO. Isadora's sections are the strongest, and most beautiful, with Elizabeth's a perfect contrast as the sister always in the shadow. If I could take a knife, and snip out only these two narrators (and magically make Isadora's a close third POV) this would be a marvelous novel.
allissa125's review against another edition
1.0
I chose this book as a former dance mom thinking it would be interesting to learn mor about Isadora’s life…. This was a depressing listen though… and if it hadn’t have been for the fact that I was working while I listened, I’d have quit.
Death is a tragedy… death of one’s children is an unimaginable tragedy… so the depressing elements of this book were understandable I suppose… I found it dragged slowly through everyone’s grief. Characters were whiney. There seemed to be no storyline. I caught myself missing parts because I was zoning out.
Death is a tragedy… death of one’s children is an unimaginable tragedy… so the depressing elements of this book were understandable I suppose… I found it dragged slowly through everyone’s grief. Characters were whiney. There seemed to be no storyline. I caught myself missing parts because I was zoning out.
nfoutty's review against another edition
4.0
Originally written for my newsletter The Cardigan Dispatch, tinyurl.com/cardigandispatch
TLDR: Isadora is a beautiful and complex novel, but one that seems like a love-it-or-hate-it situation. I loved it, but one has to enter this reading with the understanding that this won’t be anything resembling a biography.
I learned about Isadora by Amelia Gray on an episode of Call Your Girlfriend, and I knew it had to get on my list. A famous dancer, an award-winning absurdist author, and a 400-page novel? Some of my favorite things right there.
Isadora is not a biography: it’s a work of fiction based on the life of Isadora Duncan, the “mother of modern dance.” Duncan lead an extraordinary life—she was born in Oakland, rose to fame in Europe, mingled with the most famous artists of her day, had a series of lovers, saw the death of her two young children in a tragic accident, and ultimately died at age 50 when her dramatic scarf got caught in a tire. Gray sticks closely to the timeline of Isadora’s life, but expands out some of the sensational (read: false) things the dancer said in her autobiography.
It’s not what you expect when you think of a historical fiction novel—Gray’s style is (post?)modern in a way that borders on inaccessible. Isadora is a complex book, with shifting narrators and perplexing chapter titles. Gray shows us not only the tortured artist, but also those around her: Paris, the grieving father; Elizabeth, the sister who attempts to keep Isadora under control; Max, the jealous brother-in-law; and a colorful cast of characters from the sisters’ travels around Europe.
Isadora is bodily, but not in a dance-y way; there is lots of sexual energy and thoughts about the physical world, in addition to all sorts of unglamourous bodily functions. Gray focuses more on the psychology of Isadora as opposed to the dancing, perhaps because there is only one video of Isadora’s dancing left, although her choreography survives (this piece entitled “Mother” and choreographed after her children’s death is especially powerful). The novel is full of references to Greek tradition, which is unsurprising given Isadora’s love of Greek figures, which inspired much of her work. Grieving mother Clytemnestra and abandoned woman Euridice are the centers of this focus.
Beyond a few on-the-nose moments, including some of the Clytemnestra writing and a moment where Isadora sees the ghost of Percy Shelley underwater, Isadora is a beautiful novel that I’d highly recommend for a rather dark but gorgeous read.
TLDR: Isadora is a beautiful and complex novel, but one that seems like a love-it-or-hate-it situation. I loved it, but one has to enter this reading with the understanding that this won’t be anything resembling a biography.
I learned about Isadora by Amelia Gray on an episode of Call Your Girlfriend, and I knew it had to get on my list. A famous dancer, an award-winning absurdist author, and a 400-page novel? Some of my favorite things right there.
Isadora is not a biography: it’s a work of fiction based on the life of Isadora Duncan, the “mother of modern dance.” Duncan lead an extraordinary life—she was born in Oakland, rose to fame in Europe, mingled with the most famous artists of her day, had a series of lovers, saw the death of her two young children in a tragic accident, and ultimately died at age 50 when her dramatic scarf got caught in a tire. Gray sticks closely to the timeline of Isadora’s life, but expands out some of the sensational (read: false) things the dancer said in her autobiography.
It’s not what you expect when you think of a historical fiction novel—Gray’s style is (post?)modern in a way that borders on inaccessible. Isadora is a complex book, with shifting narrators and perplexing chapter titles. Gray shows us not only the tortured artist, but also those around her: Paris, the grieving father; Elizabeth, the sister who attempts to keep Isadora under control; Max, the jealous brother-in-law; and a colorful cast of characters from the sisters’ travels around Europe.
Isadora is bodily, but not in a dance-y way; there is lots of sexual energy and thoughts about the physical world, in addition to all sorts of unglamourous bodily functions. Gray focuses more on the psychology of Isadora as opposed to the dancing, perhaps because there is only one video of Isadora’s dancing left, although her choreography survives (this piece entitled “Mother” and choreographed after her children’s death is especially powerful). The novel is full of references to Greek tradition, which is unsurprising given Isadora’s love of Greek figures, which inspired much of her work. Grieving mother Clytemnestra and abandoned woman Euridice are the centers of this focus.
Beyond a few on-the-nose moments, including some of the Clytemnestra writing and a moment where Isadora sees the ghost of Percy Shelley underwater, Isadora is a beautiful novel that I’d highly recommend for a rather dark but gorgeous read.
jennyshank's review against another edition
4.0
https://www.dallasnews.com/arts/books/2017/06/08/novelist-amelia-gray-drawn-absolute-beat-drum-kind-weirdo
Why novelist Amelia Gray was drawn to 'an absolute, beat-of-her-own-drum kind of weirdo'
by Jenny Shank, Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News, June 9, 2017
Amelia Gray, at only 34, is an acclaimed writer of distilled, potent fiction, with three short-story collections and now two novels to her credit.
Her new novel, Isadora (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), finds Gray stretching out her prose and lingering in the fascinating story of Isadora Duncan, a San Francisco-born dancer who rose to fame in the early 1900s for her naturalistic technique, inspired by Greek sculpture.
Duncan led a turbulent life, and Gray begins Duncan's story with its darkest hour: the moment in 1913 when Duncan's two children drown in the Seine in Paris when the car they were riding in lurched out of control. After the deaths of her children, Duncan stopped performing for some time and traveled. Through incisive and richly layered scenes, Gray explores this period in Duncan's life and the atmosphere in Europe just before the outbreak of the first World War.
Gray, who earned her MFA in creative writing at Texas State University-San Marcos, spoke over the phone from her home in Los Angeles before her appearance June 15 at The Wild Detectives in Dallas.
How did you first become interested in Isadora Duncan?
I was writing about "it girls" for a magazine article. I could pick any woman in history who went against convention. The more I learned about Isadora Duncan — as somebody who is not really knowledgeable in dance, and not that knowledgeable in pre-war Europe — I was surprised to find a strong interest in myself in her work and her life. She was a total character. She was an absolute, beat-of-her-own-drum kind of weirdo.
Isadora is the first book of historical fiction you've published. How did you confine your language to the time period Duncan lived in?
There were many instances of me using a word and then checking the etymology to make sure it existed.
Did that add an extra layer of difficulty to the writing?
Yes. I don't mind how Downton Abbey, for example, took some modern phrases and weaved them in. That show helped me become a little less stressed about etymology, although I did try to get everything right. The really challenging aspect was that the idea of the Freudian novel wasn't around yet. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write a book that predated the idea of ego. Pre the idea of the parental influence or the Oedipus complex situation.
Those two theories could go to town with Duncan's life.
Hell yeah. The clearest interpretation would be that her mother, who lived this very wild life of her own, planted the seeds for Isadora. But I've always preferred narratives that have the character stand alone. I think it opened it up a bit, to be able to put aside the mom stuff and instead look at ideas of luck, God, or grief and not have it be so egocentric.
I did talk some about these ideas in terms of the Greeks. I wrote a little bit about Narcissus because everybody in the family reads to me as narcissistic types.
Was that how Isadora styled herself? She dressed in Greek robes.
She was obsessed with the Grecian ideal of beauty, which she saw as the true ideal. When she was a kid, she and one of her brothers would spend all day in art museums sketching the figures on Greek vases. She modeled a series of dances after these terra cotta Tanagra figures.
In Isadora, the process of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, motherhood and loss influence Duncan's choreography. Did you base that on your research, or was that something you intuited?
Well, I think you're totally right. A lot of my research is taken from Isadora's autobiography, My Life, which is largely considered to be fictional. I wonder if having children was really her plan, or once it happened — because there was no way around it in 1908 — if then she made the "eternal mother" kind of her brand, to talk about it in an icky modern way.
Your character Isadora thinks, "The artist never knows what she requires until the moment she requires it." Does this apply to your own writing?
Yeah, a little bit. That's the fun and prizes of being an artist. I'm thinking of her as a character, too. I'm fascinated by little stories I read about her, where she would require that a different chair be brought into the restaurant so that she could properly recline. She has this kind of power over her life and her surroundings that was really inspiring to me.
What are you working on now?
I'm writing on a new TV show called Maniac for Netflix. It's a half-hour comedy, which I've always really wanted to do. It's an excellent day job, and it takes up a lot of my time and brainpower. I'm doing that for another couple of weeks. After that, I'd really like to go into the woods and come out with some crazed manuscript.
Amelia Gray will discuss Isadora at 7:30 p.m. June 15 at Wild Detectives, 314 West Eighth St., Dallas.
Jenny Shank's first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.v
Why novelist Amelia Gray was drawn to 'an absolute, beat-of-her-own-drum kind of weirdo'
by Jenny Shank, Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News, June 9, 2017
Amelia Gray, at only 34, is an acclaimed writer of distilled, potent fiction, with three short-story collections and now two novels to her credit.
Her new novel, Isadora (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), finds Gray stretching out her prose and lingering in the fascinating story of Isadora Duncan, a San Francisco-born dancer who rose to fame in the early 1900s for her naturalistic technique, inspired by Greek sculpture.
Duncan led a turbulent life, and Gray begins Duncan's story with its darkest hour: the moment in 1913 when Duncan's two children drown in the Seine in Paris when the car they were riding in lurched out of control. After the deaths of her children, Duncan stopped performing for some time and traveled. Through incisive and richly layered scenes, Gray explores this period in Duncan's life and the atmosphere in Europe just before the outbreak of the first World War.
Gray, who earned her MFA in creative writing at Texas State University-San Marcos, spoke over the phone from her home in Los Angeles before her appearance June 15 at The Wild Detectives in Dallas.
How did you first become interested in Isadora Duncan?
I was writing about "it girls" for a magazine article. I could pick any woman in history who went against convention. The more I learned about Isadora Duncan — as somebody who is not really knowledgeable in dance, and not that knowledgeable in pre-war Europe — I was surprised to find a strong interest in myself in her work and her life. She was a total character. She was an absolute, beat-of-her-own-drum kind of weirdo.
Isadora is the first book of historical fiction you've published. How did you confine your language to the time period Duncan lived in?
There were many instances of me using a word and then checking the etymology to make sure it existed.
Did that add an extra layer of difficulty to the writing?
Yes. I don't mind how Downton Abbey, for example, took some modern phrases and weaved them in. That show helped me become a little less stressed about etymology, although I did try to get everything right. The really challenging aspect was that the idea of the Freudian novel wasn't around yet. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write a book that predated the idea of ego. Pre the idea of the parental influence or the Oedipus complex situation.
Those two theories could go to town with Duncan's life.
Hell yeah. The clearest interpretation would be that her mother, who lived this very wild life of her own, planted the seeds for Isadora. But I've always preferred narratives that have the character stand alone. I think it opened it up a bit, to be able to put aside the mom stuff and instead look at ideas of luck, God, or grief and not have it be so egocentric.
I did talk some about these ideas in terms of the Greeks. I wrote a little bit about Narcissus because everybody in the family reads to me as narcissistic types.
Was that how Isadora styled herself? She dressed in Greek robes.
She was obsessed with the Grecian ideal of beauty, which she saw as the true ideal. When she was a kid, she and one of her brothers would spend all day in art museums sketching the figures on Greek vases. She modeled a series of dances after these terra cotta Tanagra figures.
In Isadora, the process of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, motherhood and loss influence Duncan's choreography. Did you base that on your research, or was that something you intuited?
Well, I think you're totally right. A lot of my research is taken from Isadora's autobiography, My Life, which is largely considered to be fictional. I wonder if having children was really her plan, or once it happened — because there was no way around it in 1908 — if then she made the "eternal mother" kind of her brand, to talk about it in an icky modern way.
Your character Isadora thinks, "The artist never knows what she requires until the moment she requires it." Does this apply to your own writing?
Yeah, a little bit. That's the fun and prizes of being an artist. I'm thinking of her as a character, too. I'm fascinated by little stories I read about her, where she would require that a different chair be brought into the restaurant so that she could properly recline. She has this kind of power over her life and her surroundings that was really inspiring to me.
What are you working on now?
I'm writing on a new TV show called Maniac for Netflix. It's a half-hour comedy, which I've always really wanted to do. It's an excellent day job, and it takes up a lot of my time and brainpower. I'm doing that for another couple of weeks. After that, I'd really like to go into the woods and come out with some crazed manuscript.
Amelia Gray will discuss Isadora at 7:30 p.m. June 15 at Wild Detectives, 314 West Eighth St., Dallas.
Jenny Shank's first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.v
mdsnyderjr's review against another edition
Feel like I’m underwater like the cover except my ears are under too and I’m struggling to understand what it is I’m actually reading. It’s like when you at a table with a bunch of people talking about something you just aren’t interested in so you try to tune them out but still catch bits and pieces of various pointless conversations. Perhaps that’s the point but I couldn’t take it anymore.
sayitagainjen's review against another edition
3.0
I'm honestly embarrassed by how long it took to read this book. Reading it was a chore, and yet when I had more than an hour to sit with it, the story bloomed. It’s as though, despite its length, it’s truly meant to be read and digested in one sitting. ISADORA exhumes the imagined life of Isadora Duncan, a woman often credited as the “Mother of Modern Dance,” in the year (or so) following the drowning of her children in the Seine. The narrative, if we can call it that, is a collage of third-person character vignettes, each orbiting a first-person narration of Isadora’s own experiences.
This pastiche of grief and anguish and art, dotted with no small amount of pettiness, offers a complex examination of what it means to war with being a woman and an artist under public scrutiny during the early 1900s. Isadora is at once a brazen, arrogant vision overwhelmed by the specter of her own brilliance and a vulnerable creature at odds with her reality and perceived destiny. When the book isn’t busy taking itself too seriously, it’s a master class in prose:
At a sentence, even paragraph level, the writing is beautiful and cutting. But strung together, the hodgepodge narrative is a ponderous mire of tedious people who so often seem to deserve whatever fate befalls them.
This pastiche of grief and anguish and art, dotted with no small amount of pettiness, offers a complex examination of what it means to war with being a woman and an artist under public scrutiny during the early 1900s. Isadora is at once a brazen, arrogant vision overwhelmed by the specter of her own brilliance and a vulnerable creature at odds with her reality and perceived destiny. When the book isn’t busy taking itself too seriously, it’s a master class in prose:
Men resent nothing more than their own comfort and hate the woman in their lives who offer it. They want safety from their wives and danger from other woman, without realizing that all woman risk mortal danger from strangers and live their lives holding that damage at arm's length, a cup that must never spill on the men they love, who meanwhile hate them for their feigned nature. This motherhood situation is even darker, as the mother grows in her body the architect of her own end; the child who doesn't kill her in childbirth will break her heart later on. Men have to manufacture this kind of danger, which comes so relentlessly to women.
At a sentence, even paragraph level, the writing is beautiful and cutting. But strung together, the hodgepodge narrative is a ponderous mire of tedious people who so often seem to deserve whatever fate befalls them.
abby_writes's review against another edition
4.0
Wow. This book asks a lot of the reader (I wouldn't recommend it to everyone), it took me longer than normal to complete. And I felt myself stretching literary analysis muscles that have lain dormant for a bit. It was intelligent, haunting, and lucid -- a strange interweaving of moments and memories and the dreams of an artist on the verge of revolution. Or was it war?