Costalegre: A Novel Inspired by Peggy Guggenheim and Her Daughter
Description
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.
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About the Author
Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Touch and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, the chapbook Notes from Mexico, and the handbook Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book. Her writing and essays have been widely published in such outlets as BuzzFeed; The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Modern Loss. She is the founder of the learning collaborative The Cabins, and she also works as a product and cosmetic shade namer from her home in Connecticut.
Reviews
Maum's coming-of-age novel among some of Europe's elite is heartbreaking in its evocation of a teenage girl whose mother collects artists to save but who ignores the daughter struggling not to drown. Maum captures the language and the intense flux of adolescent lability. She does it so well that readers may feel they've intruded on something private.
With both humor and criticality, Maum's coming-of-age novel probes the hypocrisy of the art world, the challenges of being a child of artists, and the dangers of not being loved.
Delightful . . . In Lara, Maum has given a little-considered daughter a more hopeful future.--Mona Simpson
This story of a daughter searching for connection all around her has a sharp cutting edge, a world which changes its mood in an instant; bleak as the dregs of a wine-soaked dinner, then bullish as a house of hapless surrealists attempting to boil an egg. Memorable and meaningful, Maum's work remains with me as a reminder of love in the agony of teenage years and art in the terror of war.--Amelia Gray, author of Isadora
A lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly toldby a narrator you won't be able to forget.
This is a fascinating, lively, and exquisitely crafted novel.
A brilliantly arch and haunting novel of privilege and deprivation.
