[William J. Kennedy] The flaming corsage.

Autor: William J. Kennedy
Tytuł: The flaming corsage
ISBN: 9780140242706
Wydawca: Penguin
Przybliżona ilość stron: 224
Oprawa: Paperback
Przybliżone wymiary i waga: 1.4 cm x 19.5 cm x 0.18 kg x 12.7 cm

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The Flaming Corsage opens in a Manhattan hotel room, two women and a man present. Into the room bursts a second man, who transforms the scene into what the tabloids come to call The Love Nest Killings of 1908. The mystery of that carnage will not come fully unraveled until destiny enwraps the novel’s principal and most memorable characters, Katrina Taylor and Edward Daugherty. He is a first-generation Irish American who will break out beyond Albany as a playwright. She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful and seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Theirs is a passionate attachment from the first, simple and unrestrained on Edward’s part, more indecisive for Katrina, who, remembering her poet Baudelaire, regards love as apposite to death, the divine elixir that gives us the heart to follow the endless night. But when the great stalker strikes close to her family in the central event of the novel, a cataclysmic hotel fire, the marriage changes into something else altogether. With virtuosic skill, Kennedy moves The Flaming Corsage back and forward in time from 1884 to 1912, following the fates of Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs. These others range from their socially opposed families to Katrina’s lover, Francis Phelan; Edward’s flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa Spencer; the rashly extroverted physician Giles Fitzroy and his wife, Felicity; and Edward’s unnerving friend, the cynical journalist Thomas Maginn.

Robert Spillman

The Flaming Corsage, the sixth in Kennedy’s ambitious Albany Cycle of novels (which includes Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed), is set in turn-of-the-century Albany, New York, where lower class Irish immigrants carved out space among the long-established British. Edward Dougherty, some kind of new being with no known habitat, is the son of an Irish foundry worker, but is given an education by Lyman Fitzgibbon, a wealthy landowner whom Edward’s father had once saved from an angry rural mob.

Edward, who feels like an alien in both worlds, uses his education to make himself into a writer, first as a reporter, then as a novelist and successful playwright, chronicling his own life and that of laboring Irish immigrants. When he falls in love with Lyman’s granddaughter Katrina Taylor, a luminous death-obsessed modern woman who devours the poetry of Baudelaire, both families disapprove. The Doughertys think it traitorous to marry the daughter of a man who had busted Irish unions, while the Taylors believe that Edward, for all his refinement and education, is far below Katrina’s station.

Also working against the couple is Edward’s alter-ego, a whoremongering reporter named Maginn who revels in telling his old friend Edward that he will always be a mudhole mick from the North End. After Edward’s social and artistic successes, Maginn jealously conspires to pull him back into the mud. Katrina and Edward marry nevertheless and struggle against the grain of their doomed union.

This is an old story, yet one that really sings, thanks to Kennedy’s passionately poetic prose, his precise and judicious use of historical detail, and his steeping the story with the weight of the grim history of the Irish. The characters are sharply drawn and the philosophical questions raised are complex and intriguing. The Flaming Corsage is a powerful, compact and timeless novel by an accomplished artist writing at his best. — Salon