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Product Description
Review
Absorbing, affecting, and agitating . . . this work is highly recommended.Library Journal [HC starred review] (Library Journal )
The strength of Averys novel lies in her depiction of a driven and accomplished artist and an impressionable waif who finds that her beauty no longer belongs to her.Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly )
Whats not to love about Ellis Averys romantic novel. Oprah.com (Oprah.com )
Plummer . . . captures [young Rafaelas] appealing energy. . . . Caruso narrates the artists part just as convincingly. . . . This is an excellent production of a fascinating story.AudioFile (AudioFile )
Breaks important ground for literature, and does so with exuberance, skill and grace.San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco Chronicle )
A wholly original and engrossing story, set in a fascinating time and place . . . and a display of exceptional talent.The Boston Globe (The Boston Globe )
A taut, elegant novel...[Averys] prose sings.More Magazine (More Magazine )
Both actors convincing performances match the voices of numerous internationals residing in Paris during the Jazz Age.Booklist (Booklist ) --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
The strength of Averys novel lies in her depiction of a driven and accomplished artist and an impressionable waif who finds that her beauty no longer belongs to her.Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly )
Whats not to love about Ellis Averys romantic novel. Oprah.com (Oprah.com )
Plummer . . . captures [young Rafaelas] appealing energy. . . . Caruso narrates the artists part just as convincingly. . . . This is an excellent production of a fascinating story.AudioFile (AudioFile )
Breaks important ground for literature, and does so with exuberance, skill and grace.San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco Chronicle )
A wholly original and engrossing story, set in a fascinating time and place . . . and a display of exceptional talent.The Boston Globe (The Boston Globe )
A taut, elegant novel...[Averys] prose sings.More Magazine (More Magazine )
Both actors convincing performances match the voices of numerous internationals residing in Paris during the Jazz Age.Booklist (Booklist ) --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
Book Description
A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the world wars.
Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.
Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide.
Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.1 out of 5 stars (47 customer reviews)
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Love and deception in 1920s Paris, Dec 1 2011
By Alan A. Elsner "Alan Elsner, author" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Last Nude (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
This book depicts the life of Russian-born artist Tamara de Lempicka through the eyes of one of her models, the lush and sensuous Rafaela Fano.I was unfamiliar with the life and works of de Lempicka and after reading this enjoyable novel, I did some reading. She comes across in the brief biographies I read as a rather nasty piece of work, and it is to the author's credit that she makes a great effort to explain, if not justify, some of her subject's more egregious acts. She also hewed pretty closely to the known facts -- while allowing her imagination free rein in the character of Rafaela, the narrator of the novel.
The author invents a convincing back story for Rafaela, half-Jewish, half Catholic, forced to leave her mother and step-father's New York home at age 15, running away from an arranged marriage in Sicily and finding herself in Paris trying to claw together a living by whatever means necessary.
Rafaela meets Tamara who is struck by her sensuality and finds her an irresistible subject. The two fall in lust and then in love -- but the naive Rafaela is no match for the complex and subtle Tamara who is playing a double and maybe a triple game.
The author displays considerable cleverness in introducing various real-live characters from the demi-monde of Paris in this "Moveable Feast" era, including a character half based on Hemingway and half on one of his characters from "The Sun Also Rises."
The depiction of the era and the main characters is first-rate and the book turns out to be an absorbing read. I even believed in Tamara's genius -- until I actually saw her pictures which are definitely not my cup of tea.
I'm giving this book four stars because I think the last section of the book, in which we jump forward many decades to Tamara's final days, is not up to the standard of the rest. There's something a little too facile at the way the artist looks back on her brief but tumultuous acquaintance with Rafaela and draws devastating conclusions about her life.
In the end, fictionalizing a real person is a hit-or-miss affair. This is perhaps a version of Tamara's life -- but is it real? How can we know? How can anyone know?
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliantly Written, But Dark Story, Nov 30 2011
By Reader from Washington, DC/New York "Reader" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Last Nude (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
I had mixed feelings about "The Last Nude." It is an absorbing story, in which the little we know about a real life affair between famous painter Tamara de Lempicka and her model, Rafaela, is expanded into an fascinating story about a love affair in Roaring Twenties Parisian art and literary circles.The novel touches on many themes -- unequal relationships in which one person holds too much power, the intrigue and drama of the art world, the nature of an artist's vocation, the effect of an artist's vocation on her family, friends and loved ones, the question of limits in exploiting others for the sake of one's art -- and more themes beyond that.
The characters, both primary and secondary, are well-developed, the plot grips you until the last page, the historical research is extensive and for the most part accurate. So why didn't I like this book? I normally love stories about writers and artists.
My problem -- you may not have this problem -- is that Tamara de Lempicka, the painter, is depicted as such a selfish jerk -- and this is apparently based on accurate historical research -- that I just didn't care what happened to her. That is a problem in a love story where Tamara is one of the two primary characters. Rafaela was wonderful -- sweet, courageous and struggling to hold her own against an older, more powerful and unscrupulous lover, as she tries to define who she herself is and what career she should follow.
Expect a fascinating but very dark story of love and betrayal.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reimagining the Nude, Jan 5 2012
By CO - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Last Nude (Hardcover)
For me as an art historian, THE LAST NUDE is as wonderful as it is rare. In telling the story of the fabulous 1920s painter Tamara de Lempicka and the model for her most famous paintings, the author, whom I know, pulls out the stops in ways so surprising that I wrote a review intended for NPR. Here's an excerpt: "I love how Ellis Avery's THE LAST NUDE bedevils the usual conventions of the great male artist and his model....In Avery's reimagining, in which painter and model are both female, and both beautiful, things heat up differently and the viewer--here, the reader--is deliciously caught up in the crossfire. The pleasures the author evokes in jewel-like prose are all so luscious that we, like de Lempicka's obsessed male collectors, can't decide what we want more: the artist, the model, or the paintings themselves."
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