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About
In 1884, Famke Summerfugl is ousted from her convent in Denmark for... sensuousness and pulled from servitude by a second-rate painter named Albert Castle. Loving to be looked at, and able to stand perfectly still without shivering, Famke is the ideal artist's model. When Albert takes his eight-foot masterpiece and leaves his model behind, Famke sets out over the Atlantic, convinced that she is his muse. Following Mirabilis, her highly acclaimed debut, Susann Cokal blends pre-Raphaelite painting, American brothels, Utahan polygamists, a bit of cross-dressing, a dynamite-wielding labor movement, one California millionaire, and the invention of electrical stimulation (as treatment for consumption) into a comic novel that gallops across the American west.
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Reviews
"Cokals storytelling blends the morbid and the titillating with imaginative exuberance....the story of Famkes quest...brings to mind the question Martin Amis asked of Lolita: how was it possible to limit her adventures to this 300-page blue streak -- to something so embarrassingly funny, so unstoppably inspired, so impossibly racy?"
The New York Times Book Review
"Masterful. Cokal draws the reader in to a literate experience that's also a gripping tale in the tradition of great picaresque novels like Moll Flanders and Don Quixote."
Southwest Book Views