Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

A Novel

By: Francine Prose

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Rosalind Ashford, Geoffrey Cantor, Nicola Barber, Suzanne Toren, Maggi-Meg Reed

Length: 18 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

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: It is a city of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche 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 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 in love and finds success as a race car driver. Gabor builds his reputation with vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant '20s give way to darker times, Lou experiences another metamorphosis that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more sinister: Collaboration with the Nazis.

Told in a kaleidoscope of voices, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 evokes this incandescent city with brio, humor, and intimacy. A brilliant work of fiction and a mesmerizing listen, it is Francine Prose's finest novel yet.

©2014 Francine Prose (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers

A Masterpiece

Francine Prose weaves an elaborate tapestry of time and history to patch together the quiltwork of her characters' intersecting lives in this brilliantly penned novel. Her truly first-rate storytelling is matched by an equally skilled cast of narrators who bring such life to the characters of Prose's tale.

Beautifully Written, Wonderfully Performed

What made the experience of listening to Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 the most enjoyable?

I don't like first-person narration, and I don't like books that change point of view in each chapter. This book had both, and I loved it! The weaving of the different perspectives built the story in a totally engrossing way.

What does the narrators bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Having different readers for the different voices worked really well. It was almost like a radio play.

Any additional comments?

What really makes this book, above all, is the lucid, playful and articulate writing. It is a pleasure to listen to.

What I wouldn't give to be sitting at a banquette

What I wouldn't give to be sitting at one of the banquettes at The Chameleon Club!

The dancing! The orchestra! The girls? It is all brought so vividly rendered, I could smell the cigarettes and taste the watered-down gin. Prose's exploration of the nature of evil is smart and compelling canted against a terrific narrative.

This tour de force by Francine Prose is rooted in the 1932 Brassai photograph “Lesbian Couple at Le Monocle.” Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 is a fictionalized account of the life of one of the subjects of that photograph, Violette Morris - an Olympic hopeful, professional race car driver, and Nazi collaborator. In the book, she is Lou Villars, a French cross dressing lesbian whose choice of increasingly toxic lovers contributes to her fragile sense of self, smoldering resentment, and dangerous unhappiness. Yet the sources of her disappointment are many from her parents to her own country. Prose uses this tangle of complicated emotions to explore the more intellectual questions that surround the nature of evil. All while taking the reader through the nocturnal streets of Brassai’s pre-war Paris, the egos of writers and artists, the heady days lived by lovers and scoundrels flung towards another world war. What does disappointment and adversity churn into? Are some people bound to become evil or good? Prose doesn’t rely on black and white answers; she revels in the shades of gray. She keeps the narrative lively and compelling, torqued between what the characters can control and what they cannot - another fascinating place for a reader to be, that gray, in-between place. Readers may take issue with the fact that Lou’s story is told in everyone else’s voice but her own. I think Prose found just the right pitch to tell Lou’s story. A central character who ultimately takes some sense of pleasure in evil can become too heavy and the lines of inquiry that run from such a character, too clichéd. Not here. Having Lou’s life filled in by such a diverse cast lights the narrative on fire; it feels kaleidoscopic. Finally, I can’t remember the last time I so thoroughly enjoyed an ending. Ironic, and odd, and deeply satisfying.

The only negative part of the experience was the fake, French accents. Listening to the baroness made me cringe.

OMG but I loved it

Truth is certainly stranger than fiction. I was 6 hours in before I said to myself, my God! This is too effed-up not to be a true story. So I googled Lou Villars and it turned out that it's mostly true. The character Lou Villars is based on real-life character Violette Morris, the cross-dressing lesbian, once-celebrated French athlete and race car driver who turned into turned into a spy and torturer for the Nazis. The story was so bizarre that, once I figured out it was true, I couldn't put it down. Also, it has a great cast of readers who do such credit to their characters. This just makes it harder to put the book away at night!

This book is not for prudes or intolerant people. Although the sex is not that explicit (well,sometimes it's pretty rowdy), there are cross-dressers, homosexuals, and very sensual cabaret acts at The Chameleon Club.

This is undoubtedly Francine Prose's best novel yet, and is beautifully written. You'll have to decide for yourself how much is true - I decided to believe it was almost all true.

An unmitigated disaster

What made the experience of listening to Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 the most enjoyable?

Absolutely nothing. I stopped listening after the third "'er 'usband in Paree". Why on earth choose such a pot pourri of lousy accents? Gabor doesn't even attempt an accent, while the women mostly sound like bad imitations of Yvonne Arnaud on an off night (look her up).

What was one of the most memorable moments of Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932?

When I stopped listening

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of the narrators?

Juliet Stevenson

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

"This film can't be any worse than the audio version"

Any additional comments?

Francine prose is a magnificent writer, and she has come up with an intriguing subject. She deserves better than this. I'm off to buy the hard cover. My ratings for "overall" and "story" are based on what I hope the book will be.

Great story by great narrators

What made the experience of listening to Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 the most enjoyable?

Great story by great narrators

Who was your favorite character and why?

all of characters are great

Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

not sure

If you could rename Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, what would you call it?

I wouldn't rename it.

Any additional comments?

One of the best historical books and the best narration! Multiple accounts and different accents making the story absolutely real. Bravo!!!

Interesting Historical Fiction

An interesting but over-long narrative, told by multiple characters, set in Paris between the World Wars. This is not "lite" listening, but it is ultimately rewarding.

EVOCATIVE STORYTELLING AT ITS BEST!

Any additional comments?

The audiobook format is particularly suited to story lines with multiple points of view. We know immediately whose perspective we're hearing, and, in the case of multi-narrator presentations like this one, we get a full sense of different characters' personalities without the confusion that reading written text sometimes creates. This audiobook delivers on so many fronts: a terrific story that is multi-layered and fascinating, and narration that evokes all the smoky, sexy ambiance of Paris plus the tension of pre- to post-war Europe. Accents were spot on, especially the women's, and we needed them to flesh out these diverse and complex characters. Terrific writing from an acclaimed author who doesn't disappoint, and terrific narration and storytelling by an accomplished cast of voice actors.

Disappointed

I kept listening, waiting for the different narrators to pick up the pace and nit make it such a documentary. Then to have that bizarre ending, really just made me feel I wasted 18 hours of my December. Very disappointing!

Superb!

Any additional comments?

It has been a very long time since I read such a well-written, and well-narrated [or performed] book. I found it riveting from the beginning. The story is a fictionalized retelling, through the voices of several contemporaries, of the life of an extraordinary woman. Google "Violette Morris" if you want to know more]. The technique of giving each person a different narrator, each with a voice sufficiently distinctive that you can easily tell them apart, is used to excellent effect here [I wish someone would arrange for Susan Howatch's "historical" novels to be redone this way]. The main protagonist herself, called Lou Villar in the book, does not give her own viewpoint, but we see her through the eyes of those who are close to her, although, in the end, she remains something of a mystery. Some of the characters are composites ["Lionel Main" seems based on Henry Miller with a touch, maybe, of Hemingway] and others are basically only renamed [check out the photos of Brassai on Google], and yet others are probably fictional. The title is a paraphrasing of the title of a real photograph.Some of the history covered was familiar to me, but most was not. Some commenters think the book is a bit prolix and long; I do not, because describing how a woman like Lou Villar [or, if you will, Morris] became what she became is not something one can do briefly. Francine Prose should be very happy with this audio rendition, which really brings her wonderful book to life. If I have any criticism, I would have liked a note at the end informing listeners who performed which characters.