Villa E

I found this historical fiction - fictionalized? - novel mesmerizing. Being inside the minds of two different, aged and aging artists, Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, here named Le Grand, as they individually trek back to the South of France location where both took ownership, real and stolen, of a villa designed and built by Eileen pre-World War II. It's atmospheric and compelling, poetic and lyrical, and disturbing, about art and artists, about men and their power, their presumptions and assumptions, about gender, love, relationships, genius and jealousy, about the hunger to create that is never assuaged. There is philosophy and art and thousand-year-old caves and paintings and decades-old love affairs and disturbing and offensive and illegal behavior and I will remember these artists, as rendered by Alison, for a long time. I did wonder why Eileen is identified by her real name and Le Corbusier is given a pseudonym, and I'd love to know the reason why. I do not think one has to have any advance knowledge of who either was to fall into this book. It presupposes an intelligence on the part of the reader, which I loved, to follow along (and it's easy) as we switch between one artist and the other, as we moved from one artistic mind to the other, one female, one male, and of their time and place, although Eileen is more of her time, of the way women's achievements were treated than is Le Grand. There is an interesting repetition that is carried through the book - of the colors of the ocean, sky, the plants, and more, which served, for me at least, to intensify the strange and winding bond between Eileen and Le Grand, even all these years later after what he'd done to her first venture into architecture, the villa she designed and named Time.

Thanks to W.W. Norton & Company and Netgalley for the arc.