Sad to say I must DNF at 20%. The writing isn’t grabbing me, nor is the first person narrator, the setting, the other characters, or the plot. That’s pretty much everything, so….

I found this book really atmospheric, sultry and sexy and warm, like gulping room temperature water on a hot day. I enjoyed a lot about this one, a story set in Greece in the late 1990s, about sculptures and curators and museums, who gets to own art and what measures rich men will take in order to get it. I found myself wanting for a deeper queer storyline, for something to happen on page, but I can appreciate a homoerotic vibe, the confusing questions of desiring another person´s confidence, the way they move, and perhaps something else. This book I think is best read on the beach, not because it´s easy or simple (the prose is generally gorgeous, the writing careful) but because it feels like a fever dream, a hot longing.

Elizabeth is an art historian who has been sent to Greece to search for a rare sculpture and bring it home. But the Greek Isles lure her in and distract her with the beauty, lusciousness, and the fascinating locals. Elizabeth must grapple with more than art and history - she must face her own past and present.

A tense, disorienting, and compelling read. The writing is beautiful and the novel explores important questions about art, culture, and ownership.

The author portrays Elizabeth with tenderness and care and makes it easy to emphasize with her, or at the very least, be captivated by her. Elizabeth is seemingly a mess and emanates an air of fragility while also being great at her job. There were parts of the story that felt a bit vague but it only added to the sense of Elizabeth’s distress and commitment to acquiring the sculpture.

Thank you to Atria and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

I love a slightly insufferable female main character that slowly loses her mind throughout the story then at the end gets a little bit of redemption with a side of homoerotic female friendships along the way. This book serves that purpose and the setting is gorgeous.

I felt sooo pretentious reading this I loved it. The true definition of Literary Fiction. I love a novel where I feel like I’m learning things and this was a really fascinating exploration of the ethics of the antiquities business and the dark history of museums. I also love a book about obsession between women, especially when that obsession is kinda gay, so I obviously loved the relationship between Elizabeth and Theo. So sexy and messy. This was so beautifully written I honestly can’t believe it’s a debut. Loved it.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!

A beautifully written book that feels easy yet exciting at the same time. The detail of the island makes you feel like you are there and development of the characters don't feel forced or contrived. Really enjoyed this read and would probably read it again.

this felt like an unhinged pretentious fever dream, in the best possible way. 💛

the vibes reminded me a lot of some of my very favorite books: the secret history by donna tartt, american psycho by bret easton ellis, the bell jar by sylvia plath, and animals by emma jane unsworth. the writing style of this novel is not going to be for everybody, but there are many beautiful quotes throughout.

I will definitely try getting my hands on a physical copy of this book for future rereads, because I feel like this story could mean different things for you at different points of life and I am sure that there was lots of symbolism that I missed upon my first read.

beautiful. messy. real.

thank you, net galley, for allowing me to read a digital copy in exchange for my honest review.

I read C. Michelle Lindley’s novel of cultural appropriation, “The Nude,” with admiration tempered with irritation. Admiration because the writing is superb – “each new vantage point conjured more questions, more ways of seeing,” the protagonist says of a sculpture discovered off a Greek island – and the story of a U.S. museum negotiating to acquire the statue is compelling even if you’re not fascinated by the preservation and curation of artworks of antiquity. Irritation because the novel is so consciously literary in the way of a much-touted movie I saw recently, “Anatomy of a Fall,” which I had been looking forward to and mostly enjoyed but was put off to no small degree by how it was so very, very French, which is to say very consciously literary.
Together, the movie and Lindley’s book put me in mind of another novel also set on a Greek island, John Fowles’ “The Magus,” in which the narrator is taken enough with metaphorical descriptions of behavior in French literary novels that he takes them for prescriptions for actual behavior, a sort of opposite reaction of my own to very literary novels, about which I’m more of the mind of an old literature professor friend of mine who noted about them that there’s so much interiorizing going on that a character can take 10 minutes deciding which way to turn a doorknob.
Certainly Lindley’s novel provides ample occasions for interiorizing for her protagonist, museum assistant curator Elizabeth Clarke, who is still traumatized years later by the childhood death of her younger sister, Margaret, though the reader won’t learn the exact details of what happened until the very end of the novel.
More than enough it was, though, the childhood episode, in addition to a marriage that didn’t work out – one of its memorable moments: Elizabeth beheading a rattlesnake in the garage while her husband beats a retreat – to make for a possible contributing factor to the debilitating migraines Elizabeth suffers, as well as occasional bouts of blindness which a doctor characterizes as hysterical.
Also perhaps a contributing factor, the childhood trauma, for her to be given to a succession of ill-advised sexual liaisons – “I’d cheated on every partner I’d ever been with,” she says – including one that leaves her with a condom trapped inside her (the “exited contraceptive,” a doctor calls it after she’s able to extract it) and an unwise affair with a colleague, Madison, which she acknowledges was a bad call and which, she realizes, if she continues with it, would make her a “self-imploding cliche.”
Especially ill-advised, the affair, given that both she and Madison are up for promotion to the museum curator's job, something that provides an extra incentive for Elizabeth to successfully pull off the statue acquisition at the island, where no sooner than she arrives she comes under the influence of her translator, Niko, and his glamorous photographer wife, Theo, who straightaway introduce her to the island’s active nightlife, from which she awakens one morning with a mysterious scratch on her neck and a split lip.
Still more mysterious, though, are strange things that start happening with the statue, whose head she and Niko find taped over one day and from whose mouth Elizabeth extracts a winged insect. Reminiscent it is, the insect, of an earlier incident at her museum in which she detected some movement behind an oil painting canvas and it turned out to be a swarm of maggots.
Disturbing images, to be sure, snakes and maggots and used condoms, but of a piece with an overall air of portentousness or menace about the novel, in which Theo regularly disconcerts Elizabeth with some of what she tells her. For instance, Theo tells Elizabeth of a nun she once encountered who’d drenched herself in alcohol and planned to set herself on fire and wanted Theo to capture the moment of her self-immolation on camera. Or even more unsettling, given that they’re both on an airplane at the time, Theo tells Elizabeth that it takes a crippled plane two minutes to fall to the ground and invites her to imagine what it must be like for the passengers during those two minutes.
More than simply a kind of intellectual thriller, though, Lindley’s novel is a probing examination of cultural appropriation, with the issue pointedly arising at a lecture Elizabeth gives, where she tries to defend museum acquisitions of antiquities wherever they’re discovered in response to a student’s question of why antiquities don’t belong to the land where they’re found. A particular challenge it is for Elizabeth, mounting the defense, given that, as she acknowledges to herself, she was trying to explain something that she couldn’t fully understand herself.
“Could I see the other side’s points?” she says later. “About objects belonging to their own heritage? Intellectually, of course. But pragmatically, no.” Bottom line for her, she acknowledges, amid the artistic aura surrounding artifact acquisition: it’s a business, plain and simple. “Much as I’d wanted to believe in ethics,” she says, “ethics were not reality, and, in reality, curation was a business. And in business, money won.”
So both a serious look at acquisition of cultural artifacts and something of a page-turner, Lindley’s novel, which for all my reservations – its excessive interiorization did sometimes make it a chore for me to keep reading and some of Elizabeth’s ill-advised sexual activity did make me cringe at times – I'm still inclined to award it five stars for easily being the most well-written and absorbing novel I’ve read in some time.

The premise was everything I could want in a book and yet this was a big DNF. The writing style was so dull, nothing about this was gripping, it felt like reading a grocery list. Big yikes.

ARC provided by NetGalley.

I loved the setting and the main character's assignment to go to Greece. The author wrote the characters well, and the story flowed easily. Art and history don't interest me, but Lindley's character made me eager to visit museums and delve into the research behind new discoveries. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.