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The Vexations
- Narrated by: Marisa Calin
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's Summary
A kaleidoscopic debut novel about love, family, genius, and the madness of art, circling the life of eccentric composer Erik Satie and La Belle Époque Paris, from a writer who is "wildly entertaining" (San Francisco Chronicle), "startlingly ingenious" (Boston Globe), and "impressively sharp" (New York Times Book Review).
Erik Satie begins life with every possible advantage. But after the dual blows of his mother's early death and his father's breakdown upend his childhood, Erik and his younger siblings - Louise and Conrad - are scattered. Later, as an ambitious young composer, Erik flings himself into the Parisian art scene, aiming for greatness but achieving only notoriety.
As the years, then decades, pass, he alienates those in his circle as often as he inspires them, lashing out at friends and lovers like Claude Debussy and Suzanne Valadon. Only Louise and Conrad are steadfast allies. Together they strive to maintain their faith in their brother's talent and hold fast the badly frayed threads of family. But in a journey that will take her from Normandy to Paris to Argentina, Louise is rocked by a severe loss that ultimately forces her into a reckoning with how Erik - obsessed with his art and hungry for fame - will never be the brother she's wished for.
With her buoyant, vivid reimagination of an iconic artist's eventful life, Caitlin Horrocks has written a captivating and ceaselessly entertaining novel about the tenacious bonds of family and the costs of greatness, both to ourselves and to those we love.
Critic Reviews
"I've loved Caitlin Horrocks's work for a long time, so I am not surprised - though I am overjoyed - to find that she has written a gorgeous, sensitive, deeply immersive novel in The Vexations. You'll never hear the music of Erik Satie again without diving back into the layers of genius, torment, eccentricity, abandonment, and profound sadness that Horrocks so masterfully evokes in this beautiful book." (Lauren Groff, National Book Award finalist and New York Times best-selling author of Fates and Furies and Florida)
"Horrocks paints an atmospheric portrait of bohemian Paris and a poignant one of Satie and his avant-garde circle, who 'lived in the yet: not now, but soon' when their art would be recognized...Finely written and deeply empathetic, a powerful portrait of artistic commitment and emotional frustration." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Horrocks shines while envisioning Erik scoring a silent film, debuting a masterpiece, or being released from jail (where he was held for defaming a reviewer) so he can complete a commission. Horrocks's description of Satie's music is also apt for her noteworthy novel: slow, spare, and at its best finely filigreed." (Publishers Weekly)
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What listeners say about The Vexations
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Emily
- 10-25-19
Beautifully written!
I loved how expansive and detailed this story is - huge character arcs told in small, complex scenes. The writing is beautiful and playful and such a pleasure to read. Highly recommend!
1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- JD
- 12-09-20
the not so belle epoque
This is a thoroughly depressing book. It is hard to portray the creative furnace that was the Belle Epoque in Paris in an overwhelmingly negative light, but the author has managed to do so. It turns out our favorite artistic heroes were self loathing, self pitying, and unenlightened, or else cruel and unenlightened. The thrust of the work is the interminable spooling out of their sad, even hopeless lives. Where are the art, creative energy, and joy that defined the era? Alas, at the wayside.
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Story
Paris, 1941: Going against her mother’s orders, spirited Maggie devotes herself to the Resistance. Her life is a whirlwind of forged passports and secret midnight runs, helping Jews escape. Much to her high-society mother’s disapproval, she has fallen in love with Emil, a Jewish Resistance fighter who is wanted by the Nazis.
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Very different type of story.
- By paula wright on 05-10-20
By: Clara Benson
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The War Nurses: A Moving Wartime Romance Saga Full of Heart
- The War Nurses Series
- By: Lizzie Page
- Narrated by: Marian Hussey
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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You will love every moment of this absolutely brilliant wartime saga, perfect for fans of Diney Costeloe, Soraya M. Lane, and Nadine Dorries. As war takes its toll, the love and care of two brave young nurses become everything to the wounded soldiers they tend... 1914. Two plucky young nurses pledge to help the war effort: Mairi, a wholesome idealist hoping to leave behind her past and Elsie, a glamorous single mother with a weakness for handsome soldiers. Despite their differences, the pair become firm friends.
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I really really wanted to like this book...
- By Teresa M. Thornborough on 09-26-19
By: Lizzie Page
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The Fire Blossom
- The Fire Blossom Saga, Book 1
- By: Sarah Lark, Kate Northrop - translator
- Narrated by: Katherine Littrell
- Length: 22 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s 1837, and immigrating to a small New Zealand fishing village is an opportunity for Ida Lange’s family to build a better future. Yet for Ida, raised in a strict, religious, tight-knit German community, so much is still forbidden to a woman. Yearning for the poor day laborer she shared books with as a child, Ida is now trapped in a dire marriage to a man of her father’s choosing.
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R rated by my opinion
- By Kythemom on 03-25-20
By: Sarah Lark, and others
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The Hotel Neversink
- By: Adam O'Fallon Price
- Narrated by: Steven Jay Cohen
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Thirty-one years after workers first broke ground, the magnificent Hotel Neversink in the Catskills finally opens to the public. Then a young boy disappears. This mysterious vanishing - and the ones that follow - will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch whose purchase of the hotel in 1931 set a haunting legacy into motion.
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A Depressing Book, Depressingly Read
- By Bob P. on 05-29-21
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Rodgers
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore's Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the older son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet, clumsy Ezra, Pearl's favorite, who never stops yearning for the perfect family that could never be his own. Now Pearl and her three grown children have gathered....
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Classic Anne Tyler
- By Eve Harris on 09-14-21
By: Anne Tyler
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City of Girls
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance.
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A strong story
- By Anita Kristensen on 06-08-19
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All the Ways We Said Goodbye
- A Novel of the Ritz Paris
- By: Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White
- Narrated by: Helen Sadler, Nicola Barber, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The New York Times best-selling authors of The Glass Ocean and The Forgotten Room return with a glorious historical adventure that moves from the dark days of two World Wars to the turbulent years of the 1960s, in which three women with bruised hearts find refuge at Paris’ legendary Ritz hotel. The heiress...the Resistance fighter...the widow...three women whose fates are joined by one splendid hotel.
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Too Many Cooks in this Kitchen
- By Eve453 on 02-15-20
By: Beatriz Williams, and others
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In a Field of Blue
- A Novel
- By: Gemma Liviero
- Narrated by: Steve West, Sarah Naughton, Will M. Watt, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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England 1922. It’s been four years since Rudy’s brother Edgar went missing in war-torn France. Still deep in mourning and grappling with unanswered questions, Rudy and his mother struggle to move on. When the enigmatic Mariette arrives unexpectedly at the family’s manor claiming to be Edgar’s widow, and the mother of his child, Rudy urges her to stay, hoping she’ll shed light on the missing pieces.
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WWI French Gypsies
- By Commoncent$ on 05-16-20
By: Gemma Liviero
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The Photographer
- The Photographer's Saga, Book 1
- By: Petra Durst-Benning, Edwin Miles - translator
- Narrated by: Kathleen Gati
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1905, on her twenty-sixth birthday, Mimi Reventlow receives a marriage proposal from the vicar of her family’s church. But a future of housework, childcare, and servicing a parish doesn’t appeal to the restless and unconventional Mimi. She has ambitions of her own--to follow in the footsteps of her beloved uncle Josef and become a traveling photographer. Leaving behind all that has been mapped out for her, Mimi dares to pursue her passion and sets out alone to make her own mark. A visit to her ailing uncle in the idyllic mountain town of Laichingen, Germany, pauses Mimi’s journey.
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Half of a book
- By Capri K on 06-16-21
By: Petra Durst-Benning, and others
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The Parisian
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Fiona Button
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
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Overly ambitious
- By Turtle on 06-16-19
By: Isabella Hammad
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Call Me by Your Name
- A Novel
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Armie Hammer
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Call Me by Your Name first swept across the world in 2007. It is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
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Amazing.
- By Nico L. on 10-07-17
By: André Aciman
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Lady Oracle
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband - Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple identities. She decides to escape to an Italian hill town to take stock of her life. But first, she must organize her own death.
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Good story but I don't like the ending.
- By sandisue on 09-19-22
By: Margaret Atwood