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Alena
In an inspired restaging of Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca, a young curator finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor.
At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring assistant curator from the Midwest meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. It’s been two years since the tragic death of the Nauk’s chief curator, Augustin’s childhood friend and muse, Alena. When Augustin offers the position to our heroine (who, like du Maurier’s original, remains nameless) she dives at the chance—and quickly finds herself well out of her depth.
The Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past—a past obsessively preserved by the museum’s business manager and the rest of the staff. Their devotion to the memory of the charismatic Alena threatens to stifle the new curator’s efforts to realize her own creative vision, and her every move mires her more deeply in artistic, erotic, and emotional entanglements. When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena’s death, her loyalty, integrity, and courage are put to the test, and shattering secrets surface.
Stirring and provocative, Alena is the result of a delicious visitation of one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century on a brilliant and inventive novelist of the twenty-first.
At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring assistant curator from the Midwest meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. It’s been two years since the tragic death of the Nauk’s chief curator, Augustin’s childhood friend and muse, Alena. When Augustin offers the position to our heroine (who, like du Maurier’s original, remains nameless) she dives at the chance—and quickly finds herself well out of her depth.
The Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past—a past obsessively preserved by the museum’s business manager and the rest of the staff. Their devotion to the memory of the charismatic Alena threatens to stifle the new curator’s efforts to realize her own creative vision, and her every move mires her more deeply in artistic, erotic, and emotional entanglements. When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena’s death, her loyalty, integrity, and courage are put to the test, and shattering secrets surface.
Stirring and provocative, Alena is the result of a delicious visitation of one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century on a brilliant and inventive novelist of the twenty-first.
320 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2014
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September 5, 2017
”Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again".
”Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again.”
If you feel the electricity of a déjà vu moment from reading those lines, it is because you have just heard an echo that has been sent down the cavernous halls of a deep passage, and the words, in the course of travelling back to you, have been elongated into something slightly different.
This book was written as a homage to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, a book considered by many to be a masterpiece. The characters from Rebecca are here, still recognizable, but erased, smudged, spackled, and redrawn. The main character, nameless as she is in the du Maurier book, is an art museum curator at the beginning of her career. She, by a stroke of luck, gets a chance to go to the Venice Biennale, an Italian celebration of contemporary art that is scheduled every two years. She meets Bernard Augustin, a wealthy patron of the arts who owns a cutting edge museum on Cape Cod called The Nauk.
”Bernard Augustin crouched on the floor beside me in a mist-gray suit with a pale orange pocket square and a cravat. His pant legs were hiked up, and I could see his socks--oyster-gray silk, calf length. I’d never seen such beautiful socks in my life.”
One never knows when one will be leaning over an attractive young woman in such a way that reveals your socks. Always wear high quality socks or in the case of myself, today at least, interesting socks. They are of the Vitruvian Man by Da Vinci, and yes, in the proper circles they have created their own fair share of envy.
Yes, Bernard is Maximilian de Winter, and he has the same Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde aspect to his personality. One moment he is the most charming man on the planet, and the next he is the stormy, moody, distant, unreadable man that becomes impossible to predict.
On what seems like a whim, he offers this young lady, currently employed as the go-fetch girl for her sick/hungover overbearing boss, an appointment of a lifetime. It has been two years since Alena has died, and Bernard, encouraged by his distance from Nauquasset and by the refreshing gleam in this girl’s eyes, wants to recapture some of his lost passion for art by bringing her back to Cape Cod to reopen his museum.
He throws her to the crows. Well, one really.
”She was large, tall and overweight, wearing a black, low-cut, calf-length dress. Her hair, an unnatural, glassy, pink-streaked black, made her pale face look even paler than it was, pale as a fish belly, or a scrim of frost. How did she manage that, living here? Her lips and fingernails were painted crimson, and her lobeless ears were studded up and down with holes, most of them empty except for the two long curtains of red stones and gold filigree that rippled and swung whenever she moved her head. A gold chain hung around her neck, disappearing down the top of her dress to lodge invisibly between her breasts, which looked hard and potentially dangerous, like a pair of torpedoes.
Always in black, always gliding about, and always squawking about Alena, Agnes is a colossally unhappy person, the punk rock version of Mrs. Danvers. She was the heels on Alena’s shoes. She was the strap on Alena’s bras. She was the zipper on Alena’s dress. Now and forever she would have to hold together the image of Alena by being the chronicler of her existence.
”She was talking about Venice. Every year it gets duller, Aggie, she said. The art world, more shiny and obvious. Oh, the artists are all so clever--they’d fuck with their brains if they could! She liked to say that--they’d fuck with their brains--it made her laugh. She’d had enough of the mind, it was the body that interested her. The art she loved--the artists she loved--were the artists of the body. Marina Abramovic, Catherine Opie, Carolee Schneemann. Art should be felt in the gut, she said. Art should scare you. It should take your breath--literally--away.”
Rebecca was beautiful, but Alena was reliant for her beauty on the intangibles that do not show up in the deceptive eye of a camera.
”She wasn’t beautiful. Her face was asymmetrical, as though she comprised two slightly different versions of herself, and her nose was sharp and bumpy, like a shard of rock. But there was something about her. Her black eyes glowed and her white neck stretched, lifting her pearly breasts slightly out of her black spangled dress. She moved with the self-conscious elasticity of a dancer, and her sharp mobile face drew the eye, as though she were a burning candle and the rest of the world were moths.”
Jack Favell, the disreputable cousin of Rebecca so deftly played by George Sanders in the movie, is reincarnated in this book as Morgan McManus, a performance artist obsessed with war and amputated body parts. He was in the first Gulf War, wounded in combat, and came back missing an arm and a leg. He has manufactured a closet full of artful prosthetics that he wears as if they are accessories rather than necessities.
”The arm itself was carved--or, more likely fabricated to look carved--in the manner of a totem pole, with strange squat figures in raspberry pink and turquoise stacked on top of one another. These figures had big staring eyes and peculiar limbs that, looking closer, I saw were depictions of the very limbs McManus was wearing--self-referential self-portraits, then, in a primitivist style, of a new race of prosthetic men. Each figure had a fat red quill slashed across the middle that I took at first to be a knife. But then it came to me that it wasn’t a knife at all but an erect phallus--a priapic animus--a defiant symbol of potency engraved into the inanimate limb.”
When something (I can’t tell you.) washes up on shore that has the police questioning the previous held assumptions of Alena’s death, McManus, just like his doppelganger in Rebecca, casts aspersions that force the investigator to make further enquiries of Mr. Bernard Augustin.
Our young heroine has been thrust into a situation that not only has nothing to do with her, but is almost impossible for her to fathom. She misses the Bernard that she met in Venice and is starting to doubt that the debonair and endearing Bernard ever existed.
”I must have known then, dimly, or suspected; not what he had done exactly, which no one could have guessed, but that he had done something. Like a swimmer caught in a current, I flailed in the tide of my dawning knowledge, unwilling to acknowledge or even consider the implacable, indelible truth.”
I was worried about the concept of this book, but it is so charmingly conceived that I soon relaxed and let myself be carried away by a brilliant plot once again. I found myself smiling whenever I would discover how Pastan had altered a character or had skewed a bit of plotting. If you haven’t read Rebecca, use this book as an excuse to read it and then read this book. The experience of one will be enhanced by the other.
My daughter, who is artistic, couldn’t help touching the cover of this book. The blobs of paint on the cover do look so realistic that your fingers expect to be met by the texture of paint. I’m curious to see if they will increase that illusion with adding ridges to the dust jacket. This book is scheduled for release on January 23rd, 2014, so those who wish to take my suggestion and read Rebecca before reading Alena have time to make that happen.
I think it was Rolling Blob or Standing Still Stoned Magazine that said my review of Rebecca “kicked ass”. Click to read the Rebecca Review
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July 25, 2020
This book, an homage to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, follows an arc that's very similar to the original story.
At the beginning of "Alena" the unnamed narrator, a young woman working as a curatorial assistant at the Midwestern Museum of Art, is attending the Venice Biennale (contemporary art show) with her demanding employer.
Venice Biennale
The narrator catches the eye of a refined, fiftyish, gay gentleman named Bernard Augustin.....
.....who runs a private museum called Nauquasset (The Nauk) on the Cape Cod coast.
Bernard is impressed with the narrator's 'artistic eye' and - just as the young woman is about to be spirited home by her ailing boss - offers her the position of curator of The Nauk.
Bernard then takes the narrator on a whirlwind tour of art capitals in western Europe before whisking her back to Massachusetts, where she's installed in a damp little house on Cape Cod.
The next day the young woman reports to her elegant office in The Nauk where she's introduced to her museum colleagues, all of whom act disdainful (or worse). In fact Agnes - the formidable, garish, black-clad general manager of the museum - is outright hostile.
We learn that Agnes was very close to the museum's previous curator Alena - a striking, raven-haired Russian woman - who disappeared two years ago. It's presumed that Alena, whose body was never found, drowned during a night swim in the ocean.
Though Alena is long gone, her assertive, colorful, larger than life aura still seems to permeate The Nauk. The narrator, by contrast, is self-conscious and retiring - almost afraid to ask Agnes a question, request desk supplies, personalize her office, etc.
Moreover Bernard, instead of helping the curator settle in, leaves town for museum business.
The Nauk, which has been shut since Alena vanished, is set to re-open. For her first big job the new curator is tasked with organizing a show for The Nauk's inauguration on Labor Day weekend, which is only a couple of months away. The Nauk employees assert that Alena promised the next show to Morgan McManus, a Gulf War vet who lost an arm and a leg. Morgan's 'body art' consists of raw images of bombed and mutilated corpses, casts of dismembered limbs, pictures of splattered brains, and so on.
The narrator is disturbed by Morgan's images and - despite pressure from Agnes and others - offers the opening show to a local African-American artist named Celia Cowry, who makes delicate ceramic shell sculptures.
Unfortunately, the curator fails to consult Bernard before booking Celia, which causes a mild kerfuffle. In addition Celia turns out to be a difficult, demanding woman....and The Nauk staff are a bit obstructive. Still, with a lot of hard work the show goes on.
During all this the narrator starts a low key affair with the local Police Chief, Chris Passoa, who investigated Alena's disappearance.
And.....(dramatic drum roll).....a new clue shows up that suggests Alena was murdered! Chief Passoa's renewed investigation leads to the book's climax, where we learn more about Alena's personality, art obsessions, and death. For me, Alena's story is too convoluted, and her demise too contrived.
I have mixed feelings about this book. I did enjoy the narrator's observations about art history, art appreciation, different kinds of art, the relationship of art to politics and race, and so on. For me this was interesting and educational.
On the downside, the book lacks the air of menace and danger that pervades "Rebecca", where the heroine's life seems to be in danger.
Scene from Rebecca
Instead, The Nauk's curator has to deal with employees who snicker behind her back, give her snide looks, and (maybe) perpetrate some minor vandalism. Moreover, the narrator brings some of the grief down on herself. She wears a wrinkled travel outfit on her first day of work and has only one dress (a little black number) for all formal occasions. It doesn't seem to occur to the young woman to have her clothing, books, and other possessions sent from the Midwest.....nor does she do much shopping. In consequence the narrator presents a dowdyish picture in comparison to glamorous Alena.
The young woman is also unrealistically timid. Unlike the main character in Rebecca, the curator is an independent gal with some experience of the world - having attended graduate school in New York City and worked in a museum. I kept thinking she should be able stand up for herself.
Overall, the story is okay, though I'm not sure why an author would want to rewrite a classic. Nevertheless, people who haven't read "Rebecca" can enjoy this book as a compelling original story. And readers familiar with "Rebecca" might get a kick out of making comparisons.
You can follow my reviews at http://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot.com/
December 23, 2023
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I'm honestly shocked that this has such low ratings because it fulfilled the scandalous dark academia void left by Donna Tartt's SECRET HISTORY. It's a Rebecca retelling, set in a pretentious New England art gallery, with a naive ingenue who wants art that is beautiful and makes her feel things, and his horrified by the darker avant-garde tastes of her predecessor and the people she associated with.
ALENA is a decent retelling, I thought, as long as you give it proper leeway and don't expect it to be a cut and dry reenactment. I actually thought the commentary on art was even more interesting than the thriller elements. Pastan perfectly captures the snobberies of the artist, questioning when the metaphorical becomes nonsensical or just purely self-indulgent. So much of art is up to interpretation, and I thought this was a fascinating examination of the boundaries of art, and when and how beauty becomes ugliness (and vice-versa).
This is like a cross between THE SECRET HISTORY and Kathe Koja's SKIN. And since neither of those books are for everyone, I guess I can see why this book was panned by critics. The core message is ugly and it's not a particularly happy book, but the way it was told was beautiful, and I liked the unnamed narrator, too, and how desperately she wanted the world to be beautiful, and how sad she was to see her vision of her perfection shattered in the faces of the people whose respect she craved. Sometimes art is cruel.
5 stars
December 4, 2013
"Last night I dreamt of Nauquasset again."
Wait, what?
To be completely fair to Rachel Pastan, I don't know how else she was supposed to open a novel that's an updated version/homage/restaging of Daphne du Maurier's (masterpiece) Rebecca. I mean, you have to do the line, right?
But "Manderley" is vaguely poetic, mysterious, slightly sinister, and rolls easily off the tongue. "Nauquasset" sounds kind of like the noise you make when hocking a particularly stubborn loogie, and that comparison pretty well sums up the difference between the two novels. (Credit where credit is due, however: Pastan, by writing an updated version of one of the best novels of all time, has some iron-clad balls for even attempting this feat, and an extra star has been given to the rating in appreciation of her bravery)
I usually ignore offers to read and review Advanced Readers' Copies, but this one I couldn't resist. Like I said, Rebecca is one of my favorite books, and the publishers of this one made sure to include the quote where John Irving called it "simultaneously creepy and entrancing." Good enough for me, I figured. Let's dive in. (reviewer's note: as the copy I read was an ARC, all quotes in this review may be slightly different in the final published version)
Once again, our narrator is a naive young girl (nameless) who goes to Europe with an older employer (in this case, the Venice Biennale and the head curator of the Midwestern art museum where our heroine works) and meets a sophisticated but mysterious older gentlemen who sweeps her off her feet but clearly Has Some Issues. Instead of a marriage proposal, however, the man (here named Bernard Augustin) offers her a job as the curator of a small contemporary art museum in New England. (In the novel's only really innovative diversion from the original text, Bernard is openly gay - a fact that, ultimately, doesn't make much difference in the story, because the romance between du Maurier's narrator and Maxim de Winter was always Rebecca's weakest element) At the museum - the, ugh, "Nauk" - the staff is still loyal to the memory of the last curator, a woman named Alena who...wait for it...drowned mysteriously.
Here's where we run into problems: anyone who has read Rebecca knows every twist in this story before they even start. Alena is , her death and...well, that's actually the extent of the twists. Pastan took some plot points out of the original novel and substituted her own - they include the narrator trying to secure an artist's work for the Nauk's reopening, and having a pointless affair with a cop. No disastrous costume ball here, folks. In fact, with the central mystery of who Alena really was and how she died effectively removed by my knowledge of the plot of Rebecca, I was left with a slightly plodding story of a girl trying to do a job that she is almost hilariously unqualified to do. I found myself wondering, why doesn't she just quit? She's clearly miserable, and it's not like there aren't other opportunities for her. In Rebecca, the narrator was well and truly trapped in her circumstances - she couldn't exactly sit down to breakfast with Maxim and say, "This place is fucking creepy and I think your housekeeper is trying to kill me, so we should get divorced." But Alena takes place in modern day, and the social mores that constrained du Maurier's narrator don't exist in this setting. (speaking of the housekeeper, Pastan splits Mrs. Danvers into two characters: the museum's bookkeeper and her niece, and I have no idea why this happened, especially because the niece could have easily been replaced by a coat rack and no one would have noticed)
Pastan makes a last attempt to do something interesting with her version when she reveals the circumstances of Alena's death, and tries to up the ante by turning the death into and it's like the writers on CSI were sitting around at 2 am thinking, "What's the dumbest way someone can get murdered?" and this is what they came up with. .
The final nail in the coffin here is the writing itself, which is so crammed full of what my writing professor called "purple prose" that I could flip to any random page and find a gem like this: "I'd thirsted for information about Alena the way a plowed field thirsts for rain, and now the first drops were scattering from the darkened skies."
Somewhere in here is a really good story about contemporary art and what it means to the people who work in that world, and how to be an artist in the modern day. But ultimately, Alena becomes the literary personification of the second Mrs. de Winter: Alena can't manage to escape the shadow of its vastly superior and more capable predecessor. It's unfair to Alena, of course, to keep comparing it to Rebecca - Rebecca was beautiful, compelling, and fucking crazy. Alena can't possibly measure up, but deserves credit just for trying.
Wait, what?
To be completely fair to Rachel Pastan, I don't know how else she was supposed to open a novel that's an updated version/homage/restaging of Daphne du Maurier's (masterpiece) Rebecca. I mean, you have to do the line, right?
But "Manderley" is vaguely poetic, mysterious, slightly sinister, and rolls easily off the tongue. "Nauquasset" sounds kind of like the noise you make when hocking a particularly stubborn loogie, and that comparison pretty well sums up the difference between the two novels. (Credit where credit is due, however: Pastan, by writing an updated version of one of the best novels of all time, has some iron-clad balls for even attempting this feat, and an extra star has been given to the rating in appreciation of her bravery)
I usually ignore offers to read and review Advanced Readers' Copies, but this one I couldn't resist. Like I said, Rebecca is one of my favorite books, and the publishers of this one made sure to include the quote where John Irving called it "simultaneously creepy and entrancing." Good enough for me, I figured. Let's dive in. (reviewer's note: as the copy I read was an ARC, all quotes in this review may be slightly different in the final published version)
Once again, our narrator is a naive young girl (nameless) who goes to Europe with an older employer (in this case, the Venice Biennale and the head curator of the Midwestern art museum where our heroine works) and meets a sophisticated but mysterious older gentlemen who sweeps her off her feet but clearly Has Some Issues. Instead of a marriage proposal, however, the man (here named Bernard Augustin) offers her a job as the curator of a small contemporary art museum in New England. (In the novel's only really innovative diversion from the original text, Bernard is openly gay - a fact that, ultimately, doesn't make much difference in the story, because the romance between du Maurier's narrator and Maxim de Winter was always Rebecca's weakest element) At the museum - the, ugh, "Nauk" - the staff is still loyal to the memory of the last curator, a woman named Alena who...wait for it...drowned mysteriously.
Here's where we run into problems: anyone who has read Rebecca knows every twist in this story before they even start. Alena is , her death and...well, that's actually the extent of the twists. Pastan took some plot points out of the original novel and substituted her own - they include the narrator trying to secure an artist's work for the Nauk's reopening, and having a pointless affair with a cop. No disastrous costume ball here, folks. In fact, with the central mystery of who Alena really was and how she died effectively removed by my knowledge of the plot of Rebecca, I was left with a slightly plodding story of a girl trying to do a job that she is almost hilariously unqualified to do. I found myself wondering, why doesn't she just quit? She's clearly miserable, and it's not like there aren't other opportunities for her. In Rebecca, the narrator was well and truly trapped in her circumstances - she couldn't exactly sit down to breakfast with Maxim and say, "This place is fucking creepy and I think your housekeeper is trying to kill me, so we should get divorced." But Alena takes place in modern day, and the social mores that constrained du Maurier's narrator don't exist in this setting. (speaking of the housekeeper, Pastan splits Mrs. Danvers into two characters: the museum's bookkeeper and her niece, and I have no idea why this happened, especially because the niece could have easily been replaced by a coat rack and no one would have noticed)
Pastan makes a last attempt to do something interesting with her version when she reveals the circumstances of Alena's death, and tries to up the ante by turning the death into and it's like the writers on CSI were sitting around at 2 am thinking, "What's the dumbest way someone can get murdered?" and this is what they came up with. .
The final nail in the coffin here is the writing itself, which is so crammed full of what my writing professor called "purple prose" that I could flip to any random page and find a gem like this: "I'd thirsted for information about Alena the way a plowed field thirsts for rain, and now the first drops were scattering from the darkened skies."
Somewhere in here is a really good story about contemporary art and what it means to the people who work in that world, and how to be an artist in the modern day. But ultimately, Alena becomes the literary personification of the second Mrs. de Winter: Alena can't manage to escape the shadow of its vastly superior and more capable predecessor. It's unfair to Alena, of course, to keep comparing it to Rebecca - Rebecca was beautiful, compelling, and fucking crazy. Alena can't possibly measure up, but deserves credit just for trying.
January 12, 2014
I say "Brava!" to the author for tackling a revisitation to the beloved classic Rebecca. Parallels are there, to be sure, but Rachel Pastan has certainly made this story her own. Bursting with color, the prose is lovely. Although the sense of dread is still there, it is not quite as imposing.
The author borrows freely from the animal kingdom in her characterizations. 'A blonde oppossum-nosed woman', 'a man with a bright terrier face', an artist 'with a scorpion nature', 'a tall red headed ostrich of a woman', eel-like fingers, possessive talons. In the art world, things are a little different. The showings are more an event at which to be seen than they are for the art being displayed. Air kissing, name dropping, 'hair every color of artificial', women 'held together by cosmetics and control top panty hose'. Love the myriad meanings of a 'sketchy diagram'.
One can pretty much match the characters here with those in Rebecca, but the variations on the theme are more than enough to let this novel stand on its own.
This was a First-reads giveaway, thank you. Loved it. Worthy of a second reading as well as inspiration to reread Rebecca. I was pretty much a kid the first go around, and I suspect it will be more appreciated now.
The author borrows freely from the animal kingdom in her characterizations. 'A blonde oppossum-nosed woman', 'a man with a bright terrier face', an artist 'with a scorpion nature', 'a tall red headed ostrich of a woman', eel-like fingers, possessive talons. In the art world, things are a little different. The showings are more an event at which to be seen than they are for the art being displayed. Air kissing, name dropping, 'hair every color of artificial', women 'held together by cosmetics and control top panty hose'. Love the myriad meanings of a 'sketchy diagram'.
One can pretty much match the characters here with those in Rebecca, but the variations on the theme are more than enough to let this novel stand on its own.
This was a First-reads giveaway, thank you. Loved it. Worthy of a second reading as well as inspiration to reread Rebecca. I was pretty much a kid the first go around, and I suspect it will be more appreciated now.
January 30, 2014
Well I thought I would either love or hate this book, no middle ground, and I was wrong. I usually dislike current books made from classic and dislike when publishers trying to push a book will make those comparisons. In this case though, it is definitely the author who herself made the comparison with ""Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again." No other way to take that. Rebecca it is.
Modern day, Cape Cod, Alena a curator at a private, small museum disappears. No one seems to know what happened to her. Our nameless heroine, so to speak takes the same position two years later after Alena had disappeared. Right from the get go everyone has something to say about Alena, compare to Alena, from office decorating to art work. So it goes.
Unfortunately this book had none of the Gothic feeling of the original nor even the suspense. It was, however, a good read on its own merits. If one loves art, the art history is very interesting, the personal relationships and the secrets people keep. So while it failed in some levels, it suceeded in others. A good read and would have been better without the high expectations of the comparison to a classic.
Modern day, Cape Cod, Alena a curator at a private, small museum disappears. No one seems to know what happened to her. Our nameless heroine, so to speak takes the same position two years later after Alena had disappeared. Right from the get go everyone has something to say about Alena, compare to Alena, from office decorating to art work. So it goes.
Unfortunately this book had none of the Gothic feeling of the original nor even the suspense. It was, however, a good read on its own merits. If one loves art, the art history is very interesting, the personal relationships and the secrets people keep. So while it failed in some levels, it suceeded in others. A good read and would have been better without the high expectations of the comparison to a classic.
April 21, 2021
“Must every action—every word and thought—recall Alena? Swimming, currents, beaches, exhibitions, artists, parties. How long until my bodily presence had half the substance her absence did?”
An unnamed young art historian is unexpectedly hired as the curator of a small museum, after meeting the charismatic owner in Venice. As she tries to settle into her new position, she feels the haunting presence of the former curator, Alena. She must contend with Agnes, Alena’s close friend and colleague, who constantly reminds her she is not quite up to Alena’s cutting-edge standards. The storyline follows the mystery of what happened to Alena. She is presumed to have died while night-swimming off the coast of Cape Cod.
This book is a retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. It has a similar gothic tone, but not quite as sinister. I particularly liked the way this story follows some of the main themes of Rebecca but does not adhere too rigorously, allowing it to stand on its own even if the reader is not familiar with its predecessor. Alena’s character is well done. Told in flashback, we get a feel for her artistic temperament and reckless lifestyle. The writing is full of metaphors, perhaps a few too many.
Our protagonist finds it is hard to live up to the ghost of near perfection. It is also difficult for a book to be compared to a classic. This novel does not quite get there, but I found it intriguing and entertaining. It will appeal to those that enjoy books that feature art, artists, and the sea.
An unnamed young art historian is unexpectedly hired as the curator of a small museum, after meeting the charismatic owner in Venice. As she tries to settle into her new position, she feels the haunting presence of the former curator, Alena. She must contend with Agnes, Alena’s close friend and colleague, who constantly reminds her she is not quite up to Alena’s cutting-edge standards. The storyline follows the mystery of what happened to Alena. She is presumed to have died while night-swimming off the coast of Cape Cod.
This book is a retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. It has a similar gothic tone, but not quite as sinister. I particularly liked the way this story follows some of the main themes of Rebecca but does not adhere too rigorously, allowing it to stand on its own even if the reader is not familiar with its predecessor. Alena’s character is well done. Told in flashback, we get a feel for her artistic temperament and reckless lifestyle. The writing is full of metaphors, perhaps a few too many.
Our protagonist finds it is hard to live up to the ghost of near perfection. It is also difficult for a book to be compared to a classic. This novel does not quite get there, but I found it intriguing and entertaining. It will appeal to those that enjoy books that feature art, artists, and the sea.
August 27, 2014
In an inspired restaging of Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca, a young curator finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor.
Rachel Pastan invokes an exquisite, enigmatic storyline along with characters so surely reminiscent of those remembered by all lovers of the Du Maurier original. I felt a literary homecoming when I read the first line:
"Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again"
I shivered in memory of Mrs Danvers as the author introduces Agnes, felt the naivety of the nameless narrator and was a little dazzled by the attractive Bernard. This superb adaptation is a must read for all those who loved Rebecca and a brilliant new story for the uninitiated. Daphne du Maurier would be pleased. 4.5★ novel.
February 21, 2014
ALENA is a reinvention or homage to du Maurier’s REBECCA, which was a restaging of Charlotte Brontë’s JANE EYRE. However, I never read REBECCA. I think that it was the reason I enjoyed ALENA more than readers who hold REBECCA in such high esteem. But, how many readers of JANE EYRE were negatively critical of REBECCA, if they read Brontë’s book first? I mention these considerations, as it may be a factor in a reader’s potential engagement with ALENA.
The Midwestern narrator, a young and naïve aspiring art curator with a natural eye for beauty, is offered a job by Bernard Augustin, the dapper, moody, wealthy, and gay founder/owner of an art museum on Cape Cod called the Nauk. They first meet at the Venice Biennale, and aligned over the exquisite art that he shows her in this ancient City of Masks and canals, and then the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. (Interesting that the climax of Rebecca, according to my research, occurs at a masked ball. There is no masked ball in ALENA, but it is in the City of Masks that the story takes off).
The Nauk museum sits on a sand dune, and has a gothic demeanor that progressively translates into a menacing presence. The museum has been closed for two years, since the mysterious death of the now enshrined Alena. Her death is manifested on the tragic face of Augustin, who rarely speaks of her. Our unnamed narrator will plan the first show since Alena’s death.
The prose is sensuous and narcotic, faintly erotic, and glimmers, like flashes in a fog, with vestiges of relics and ghosts. The emerging theme is how the absence/death of one person (Alena) can create a phantom ubiquity that vibrates more than the living and sentient. Even the fact of “unnamed narrator” gives Alena more substance than the woman who stepped in to her position! It implies the narrator as the ghost, rather than Alena. Or, at least, Alena’s paler shadow. The narrator is in the void, vacated by Alena, who lingers.
ALENA is also a scathing portrait of the self-serious and often pretentious contemporary art world, and paints a searing portrait of the elitist, provincial, and mysterious town of Nauquasset. Themes of dismemberment as a powerful reminder of the dead—or how the inanimate can come alive with its disconnected pieces—an earring, a boot, a stocking--—gives the novel an extra sinister touch. It is also braided into the worship of body artists, performance art, and others of the cultural vanguard. As the narrator describes herself:
“This was the knack, the disembodied voice that lived like a twin inside me…and at the same time isolated me, the subtle sentences a kind of sticky silk, cocooning me in a chrysalis of my own making.” And this thought arose before she appropriated Alena’s job at the Nauk.
The author’s sense of place is tremendously specific and ethereal at the same time, as is the eponymous Alena, the woman whose ghost inhabits every pore of the story. Perhaps another reason that I adore this book was locale. I spent many summers on Cape Cod (Massachusetts was where I was raised) and felt intimately familiar with Pastan’s luminous descriptions of the Cape—
“…curled out from the mainland like a beckoning arm,” and “the hushed, monotonous sucking like the indrawn breath of a beast, and then the distending roar of the wave building, breaking, shattering against the sand.”
And, to excite me further, Pastan illuminated Venice with a lush, sensory allure. I spent a week in Venice last year, and when Pastan conveyed this magical city in her lyrical, poetic prose, I was overcome with emotion. I knew the story of Saint Mark’s burial in Alexandria and how he was smuggled to Venice. I trembled to hear it again in this novel, and intimately followed the lunettes on the basilica illustrating the story in images:
“…dark domes, white Istrian stone, and figures in gold and green and blue…”
Art and death are fused together, personified into the perpetual specter of Alena, haunting Augustin, the Nauk, and the narrator.
“Alena…I began to understand that he never stopped thinking of her. She was the shadow in which he was always walking. Maybe he didn’t want to be free.”
The Midwestern narrator, a young and naïve aspiring art curator with a natural eye for beauty, is offered a job by Bernard Augustin, the dapper, moody, wealthy, and gay founder/owner of an art museum on Cape Cod called the Nauk. They first meet at the Venice Biennale, and aligned over the exquisite art that he shows her in this ancient City of Masks and canals, and then the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. (Interesting that the climax of Rebecca, according to my research, occurs at a masked ball. There is no masked ball in ALENA, but it is in the City of Masks that the story takes off).
The Nauk museum sits on a sand dune, and has a gothic demeanor that progressively translates into a menacing presence. The museum has been closed for two years, since the mysterious death of the now enshrined Alena. Her death is manifested on the tragic face of Augustin, who rarely speaks of her. Our unnamed narrator will plan the first show since Alena’s death.
The prose is sensuous and narcotic, faintly erotic, and glimmers, like flashes in a fog, with vestiges of relics and ghosts. The emerging theme is how the absence/death of one person (Alena) can create a phantom ubiquity that vibrates more than the living and sentient. Even the fact of “unnamed narrator” gives Alena more substance than the woman who stepped in to her position! It implies the narrator as the ghost, rather than Alena. Or, at least, Alena’s paler shadow. The narrator is in the void, vacated by Alena, who lingers.
ALENA is also a scathing portrait of the self-serious and often pretentious contemporary art world, and paints a searing portrait of the elitist, provincial, and mysterious town of Nauquasset. Themes of dismemberment as a powerful reminder of the dead—or how the inanimate can come alive with its disconnected pieces—an earring, a boot, a stocking--—gives the novel an extra sinister touch. It is also braided into the worship of body artists, performance art, and others of the cultural vanguard. As the narrator describes herself:
“This was the knack, the disembodied voice that lived like a twin inside me…and at the same time isolated me, the subtle sentences a kind of sticky silk, cocooning me in a chrysalis of my own making.” And this thought arose before she appropriated Alena’s job at the Nauk.
The author’s sense of place is tremendously specific and ethereal at the same time, as is the eponymous Alena, the woman whose ghost inhabits every pore of the story. Perhaps another reason that I adore this book was locale. I spent many summers on Cape Cod (Massachusetts was where I was raised) and felt intimately familiar with Pastan’s luminous descriptions of the Cape—
“…curled out from the mainland like a beckoning arm,” and “the hushed, monotonous sucking like the indrawn breath of a beast, and then the distending roar of the wave building, breaking, shattering against the sand.”
And, to excite me further, Pastan illuminated Venice with a lush, sensory allure. I spent a week in Venice last year, and when Pastan conveyed this magical city in her lyrical, poetic prose, I was overcome with emotion. I knew the story of Saint Mark’s burial in Alexandria and how he was smuggled to Venice. I trembled to hear it again in this novel, and intimately followed the lunettes on the basilica illustrating the story in images:
“…dark domes, white Istrian stone, and figures in gold and green and blue…”
Art and death are fused together, personified into the perpetual specter of Alena, haunting Augustin, the Nauk, and the narrator.
“Alena…I began to understand that he never stopped thinking of her. She was the shadow in which he was always walking. Maybe he didn’t want to be free.”
June 6, 2016
A Pointless Tribute
"Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again." With her first sentence, Rachel Pastan pins her colors to the mast: this novel will be a tribute to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, starting with this echo of her famous opening: "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again." It doesn't quite have the ring, does it? Reading the next four or five pages of lush prose, I began to feel slightly nauseous. I put it down to a sense of déjà vu, the half-remembered echoes of du Maurier's Cornwall clashing with the very different atmosphere of Pastan's Cape Cod. So I broke off in order to read Rebecca again, to get a clearer idea of what Pastan was working with.
That was a mistake. Pastan's opening remains faintly nauseating, not merely because it is overwritten, but because it has no organic purpose in the book. Du Maurier opens with a lush dreamscape because she has deliberately chosen a certain genre—the Gothic romance—as a container for the feminist polemic that forms her subtext. Pastan opens in lush romantic style for no better reason than slavish imitation of her model. And the imitation continues for at least three-quarters of the book. If you had the two volumes side by side (they are of similar length), you could almost turn to a page in one, and find the equivalent passage on the same page in the other. Page 15, that must be when she meets him for the first time; 60, this will be where he proposes; 95, she meets his sister; and so on to the big celebration that is the climax of both novels. Rebecca is, among other things, a mystery, and gradually-mounting suspense is an essential part of it. But when the imitation follows its model so closely, most of the suspense has gone for those that know the earlier book.
Both novels have a similar trajectory. In Rebecca, the nameless narrator comes as a young bride to the house of a rich older man, but is unable to escape the shadow of her brilliant predecessor, the Rebecca of the title, drowned under mysterious circumstances. The connection between the equally nameless heroine of Alena and her particular rich man, Bernard Augustin, is not the same, but the spirit of the dead Alena is equally present. To be fair, Pastan does take a slightly different direction at the end; the circumstances of Alena's death turn out to be more complex than Rebecca's, but by the same token less elemental, less shocking. And the author does have a cute twist up her sleeve for the final page—except that it gives no reason why the story should wrap around to the scene many years later with which the novel started.
There are three major differences between Alena and Rebecca. One is the choice of the Cape Cod setting. Here, when she is not trying too hard to pen purple prose, Pastan is rather successful; the salt-sharp air and occasional fogs come over with satisfying reality. The second is that she makes Bernard gay, so there is no question of a love-interest on his part. Nonetheless, our heroine finds a romantic attachment elsewhere, though this complicates things later on, and there is really no reason why she and Bernard should stay together when the story ends. Thirdly, the link between the two of them is that Bernard runs a private art gallery, and he engages our heroine (on a mere week's acquaintance) to take Alena's former position as curator.
The good thing about this is that it gives rise to a number of quite good scenes about art in general and the modern art world in particular, with emphasis on conceptual, performance, and body artists. Pastan knows her stuff, and there was a good novel to be written around it, if only she had not trapped herself in this particular form. For I could not believe the heroine's role in this for one moment. This is a girl who studied art history in a small college, worked as assistant in a minor museum in the Midwest, and who has never been to Europe, or even flown in a plane, until the book begins. Yes, she may have a good eye and be refreshingly free from cant, but the naive qualities that might intrigue a man making an impulsive choice of a wife simply do not cut it in the business of art. Being a curator, engaging artists, dealing with dealers and critics, all this requires a network of contacts that this sheltered young woman could not possibly possess. So even this—the one original thing that the book has going for it—fails totally on the grounds of plausibility. And without that, why bother?
"Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again." With her first sentence, Rachel Pastan pins her colors to the mast: this novel will be a tribute to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, starting with this echo of her famous opening: "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again." It doesn't quite have the ring, does it? Reading the next four or five pages of lush prose, I began to feel slightly nauseous. I put it down to a sense of déjà vu, the half-remembered echoes of du Maurier's Cornwall clashing with the very different atmosphere of Pastan's Cape Cod. So I broke off in order to read Rebecca again, to get a clearer idea of what Pastan was working with.
That was a mistake. Pastan's opening remains faintly nauseating, not merely because it is overwritten, but because it has no organic purpose in the book. Du Maurier opens with a lush dreamscape because she has deliberately chosen a certain genre—the Gothic romance—as a container for the feminist polemic that forms her subtext. Pastan opens in lush romantic style for no better reason than slavish imitation of her model. And the imitation continues for at least three-quarters of the book. If you had the two volumes side by side (they are of similar length), you could almost turn to a page in one, and find the equivalent passage on the same page in the other. Page 15, that must be when she meets him for the first time; 60, this will be where he proposes; 95, she meets his sister; and so on to the big celebration that is the climax of both novels. Rebecca is, among other things, a mystery, and gradually-mounting suspense is an essential part of it. But when the imitation follows its model so closely, most of the suspense has gone for those that know the earlier book.
Both novels have a similar trajectory. In Rebecca, the nameless narrator comes as a young bride to the house of a rich older man, but is unable to escape the shadow of her brilliant predecessor, the Rebecca of the title, drowned under mysterious circumstances. The connection between the equally nameless heroine of Alena and her particular rich man, Bernard Augustin, is not the same, but the spirit of the dead Alena is equally present. To be fair, Pastan does take a slightly different direction at the end; the circumstances of Alena's death turn out to be more complex than Rebecca's, but by the same token less elemental, less shocking. And the author does have a cute twist up her sleeve for the final page—except that it gives no reason why the story should wrap around to the scene many years later with which the novel started.
There are three major differences between Alena and Rebecca. One is the choice of the Cape Cod setting. Here, when she is not trying too hard to pen purple prose, Pastan is rather successful; the salt-sharp air and occasional fogs come over with satisfying reality. The second is that she makes Bernard gay, so there is no question of a love-interest on his part. Nonetheless, our heroine finds a romantic attachment elsewhere, though this complicates things later on, and there is really no reason why she and Bernard should stay together when the story ends. Thirdly, the link between the two of them is that Bernard runs a private art gallery, and he engages our heroine (on a mere week's acquaintance) to take Alena's former position as curator.
The good thing about this is that it gives rise to a number of quite good scenes about art in general and the modern art world in particular, with emphasis on conceptual, performance, and body artists. Pastan knows her stuff, and there was a good novel to be written around it, if only she had not trapped herself in this particular form. For I could not believe the heroine's role in this for one moment. This is a girl who studied art history in a small college, worked as assistant in a minor museum in the Midwest, and who has never been to Europe, or even flown in a plane, until the book begins. Yes, she may have a good eye and be refreshingly free from cant, but the naive qualities that might intrigue a man making an impulsive choice of a wife simply do not cut it in the business of art. Being a curator, engaging artists, dealing with dealers and critics, all this requires a network of contacts that this sheltered young woman could not possibly possess. So even this—the one original thing that the book has going for it—fails totally on the grounds of plausibility. And without that, why bother?
March 4, 2014
Alena is a novel about the art world and the people who inhabit it. It is said to be an homage to du Maurier's Rebecca. However, not having read Rebecca in no way took anything away from my love of this novel. This novel stands on its own and I loved it.
The novel gets its name from the first curator of The Nauk, a private museum on the Cape in Massachusetts. For fifteen years, Alena held this position and gained a reputation of being bigger than life. She was headstrong, other-worldly, manipulative, dark, flirtatious, and intently involved in conceptual art, especially art that related to the human body. As time progressed her tastes became darker, leaning more and more towards the bloody, death-glorifying, and often gross renderings of the physical. As the novel opens, Alena has disappeared. She has been gone for two years and is presumed dead though her body has never been found. The prevailing belief is that she drowned by taking a swim in the ocean when the currents were too strong for her.
Bernard Augustin, Chair of the Board of the Nauk, goes to the Venice Biennale as he does every year. He is a well-known collector and figure in the art world. In Venice he hobnobs with the top tier art dealers, gallery owners and collectors. It is in Venice that he meets a young female curator from the midwest who is there with her controlling boss on her first visit abroad. (Interestingly, the name of this young curator is never provided in the book.) She meets Bernard by chance and is in awe of him and a bit in love as well despite the fact that he is gay. They hit it off intellectually and emotionally and on an impulse, Bernard offers her the position of curator at The Nauk. She accepts, not actually knowing what she is getting in to.
Once at the museum, the young curator is met with a staff that is still loyal to Alena and resentful of someone taking her place. Alena had promised the next show to a conceptual artist, a Gulf War veteran and multiple amputee who displays scenes of war with body parts and lots of blood. She, however, wants to decide on her own what the next show will be and she offers it to a ceramic artist who makes porcelain butterflies. The Nauk hasn't had a show in two years and Bernard tells her that the show must be up in two months, by Labor Day. There is a lot of angst between the employees and the curator, and between the curator and the ceramist.
The ambiance of the novel is gothic and eerie. There are a lot of strange characters and happenings that serve to upset and off put the curator each time she attempts to accomplish something. Bernard is not there most of the time to ease the way in for her as he travels to his homes in New York, Colorado and Europe or else he's attending art-related business far away.
The information about art is comprehensive. The author, Rachel Pastan, knows her conceptual art very well and her knowledge of art history is impressive. This book hooked me right away and I could not put it down. I resented anything that got in the way of my reading it; it was that good. So I present to you this review from a reader who has not read Rebecca but loves this novel as it stands on its own with no history or homage to any other piece of literature but solely to art.
The novel gets its name from the first curator of The Nauk, a private museum on the Cape in Massachusetts. For fifteen years, Alena held this position and gained a reputation of being bigger than life. She was headstrong, other-worldly, manipulative, dark, flirtatious, and intently involved in conceptual art, especially art that related to the human body. As time progressed her tastes became darker, leaning more and more towards the bloody, death-glorifying, and often gross renderings of the physical. As the novel opens, Alena has disappeared. She has been gone for two years and is presumed dead though her body has never been found. The prevailing belief is that she drowned by taking a swim in the ocean when the currents were too strong for her.
Bernard Augustin, Chair of the Board of the Nauk, goes to the Venice Biennale as he does every year. He is a well-known collector and figure in the art world. In Venice he hobnobs with the top tier art dealers, gallery owners and collectors. It is in Venice that he meets a young female curator from the midwest who is there with her controlling boss on her first visit abroad. (Interestingly, the name of this young curator is never provided in the book.) She meets Bernard by chance and is in awe of him and a bit in love as well despite the fact that he is gay. They hit it off intellectually and emotionally and on an impulse, Bernard offers her the position of curator at The Nauk. She accepts, not actually knowing what she is getting in to.
Once at the museum, the young curator is met with a staff that is still loyal to Alena and resentful of someone taking her place. Alena had promised the next show to a conceptual artist, a Gulf War veteran and multiple amputee who displays scenes of war with body parts and lots of blood. She, however, wants to decide on her own what the next show will be and she offers it to a ceramic artist who makes porcelain butterflies. The Nauk hasn't had a show in two years and Bernard tells her that the show must be up in two months, by Labor Day. There is a lot of angst between the employees and the curator, and between the curator and the ceramist.
The ambiance of the novel is gothic and eerie. There are a lot of strange characters and happenings that serve to upset and off put the curator each time she attempts to accomplish something. Bernard is not there most of the time to ease the way in for her as he travels to his homes in New York, Colorado and Europe or else he's attending art-related business far away.
The information about art is comprehensive. The author, Rachel Pastan, knows her conceptual art very well and her knowledge of art history is impressive. This book hooked me right away and I could not put it down. I resented anything that got in the way of my reading it; it was that good. So I present to you this review from a reader who has not read Rebecca but loves this novel as it stands on its own with no history or homage to any other piece of literature but solely to art.
February 20, 2014
Reimaging the well-known and much loved classic Rebecca is a dicey proposition, especially when the author sets up expectations from the very first line: “Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again.” The question is: does she succeed?
The answer is yes. And no. Rachel Pastan’s debut book, Alena, is actually less of a reimaging and more of a recasting of the du Maurier’s masterpiece. Think of Shakespeare production updates: Henry V with flak jackets and video screens, for example. In this case, the unnamed narrator – a naïve and insecure young curator – finds herself competing with the larger-than-life presence of the enigmatic Alena, who disappeared mysteriously.
The framework of Rebecca is all here with one far-reaching change: passion and longing are replaced by admiration and worship. On her first trip to Venice, our narrator meets Bernard – the gay, charismatic and exotic owner of a private avant garde Cape Cod Museum while in Venice, and accepts his invitation to become its curator. Quickly, she discovers that she is in way over her head and that the museum’s bookkeeper and her niece (the equivalents of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca) remain fiercely loyal to Alena’s memory.
But herein lies the problem. The gothic twists and yearning romance that made Rebecca so engrossing are missing in Alena. As a 21st century heroine, the narrator is not as constrained as the Rebecca narrator: she can simply walk away from her position, for which she seems woefully unqualified. The romantic bonds that tied the Rebecca narrator to Max de Winter are not as powerful in what is – in essence – an employer/employee situation.
The obvious question becomes: why not judge Alena on its own merits without the comparisons? Perhaps because the comparisons are so omnipresent for anyone who has read both books and very hard to shake. This book has its own merits and I wish that Ms. Pastan had untethered herself from Rebecca. The story shines as it explores the inner workings of the world of contemporary art exhibitions. Those who are steeped in this world (I am not one of them) will likely delight in the insights into real-world artists.
What elevates this book, though, is the lyrical and confident prose. Rachel Pastan is the daughter of one of my favorite contemporary poets, Linda Pastan, and she’s obviously inherited “the gift”. Filled with lush descriptions and more than a hint of the Gothic, Ms. Pastan writes beautifully and elegantly. I will definitely be in line for her next book. (3.75)
The answer is yes. And no. Rachel Pastan’s debut book, Alena, is actually less of a reimaging and more of a recasting of the du Maurier’s masterpiece. Think of Shakespeare production updates: Henry V with flak jackets and video screens, for example. In this case, the unnamed narrator – a naïve and insecure young curator – finds herself competing with the larger-than-life presence of the enigmatic Alena, who disappeared mysteriously.
The framework of Rebecca is all here with one far-reaching change: passion and longing are replaced by admiration and worship. On her first trip to Venice, our narrator meets Bernard – the gay, charismatic and exotic owner of a private avant garde Cape Cod Museum while in Venice, and accepts his invitation to become its curator. Quickly, she discovers that she is in way over her head and that the museum’s bookkeeper and her niece (the equivalents of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca) remain fiercely loyal to Alena’s memory.
But herein lies the problem. The gothic twists and yearning romance that made Rebecca so engrossing are missing in Alena. As a 21st century heroine, the narrator is not as constrained as the Rebecca narrator: she can simply walk away from her position, for which she seems woefully unqualified. The romantic bonds that tied the Rebecca narrator to Max de Winter are not as powerful in what is – in essence – an employer/employee situation.
The obvious question becomes: why not judge Alena on its own merits without the comparisons? Perhaps because the comparisons are so omnipresent for anyone who has read both books and very hard to shake. This book has its own merits and I wish that Ms. Pastan had untethered herself from Rebecca. The story shines as it explores the inner workings of the world of contemporary art exhibitions. Those who are steeped in this world (I am not one of them) will likely delight in the insights into real-world artists.
What elevates this book, though, is the lyrical and confident prose. Rachel Pastan is the daughter of one of my favorite contemporary poets, Linda Pastan, and she’s obviously inherited “the gift”. Filled with lush descriptions and more than a hint of the Gothic, Ms. Pastan writes beautifully and elegantly. I will definitely be in line for her next book. (3.75)
February 13, 2014
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is the sentence with which Daphne du Maurier began her iconic novel Rebecca. For me, that is one of the three most memorable beginnings of all the books I have ever read. The other two?
"Call me Ishmael." (Moby Dick)
And, of course, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." (The Hobbit)
But those two are very different kinds of novels, and the beginning of Rebecca, I think, is the most memorable for me.
When I was a teenager, I was under the spell of du Maurier and her books. I read them over and over again, but none more often than Rebecca. Somewhere in there I also saw Alfred Hitchcock's movie which was a wonderfully faithful realization of the much-loved book. When I heard a review on NPR's "Fresh Air" a few days ago of Rachel Pastan's new book Alena and the reviewer mentioned that the book was an homage to Rebecca, of course I had to read it.
Pastan begins her book with a very conscious tip of the hat to du Maurier. "Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again," she writes. With that beginning, she reimagines du Maurier's novel in all of its essential details.
Instead of the innocent young ingenue rescued from a boring life as a traveling companion to a rich, older woman by the dashing Maxim de Winter, we get an innocent young curatorial assistant from the Midwest arriving for the first time at the Venice Biennale with her boss, a demanding middle-aged woman curator who seems determined not to allow her assistant to see any of the art in Venice. Enter wealthy museum director and art-world gadfly Bernard Augustin who has a small contemporary museum on Cape Cod. Our young narrator, who remains nameless just like the narrator in Rebecca, catches Augustin's eye and when her boss insists on leaving the Biennale early, cutting short her assistant's chance to experience the art of Europe, he offers the young woman a job as a curator at his museum and invites her to stay in Europe and travel with him.
Of course, she accepts. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a story.
In a twist on the original novel, there is no romantic relationship between the young woman and Augustin. He is, in fact, gay, but theirs is a relationship founded firmly on their love of art.
On returning to Cape Cod and the museum called the Nauk, we learn that the museum has been closed for two years ever since its former curator, Alena, disappeared. It is believed that she went swimming in the surf one night, as she was wont to do, and that she drowned. She never returned and has never been heard from again. Her body was never found, but her spirit - her ghost - haunts the Nauk and all the people associated with it.
Soon it haunts the new curator as well, as she is constantly compared (unfavorably) to Alena. Alena was knowledgable, sophisticated, and daring in her choices for the museum. How can a novice possibly live up to that?
The malevolent Mrs. Danvers role is taken here by the museum's business manager, Agnes, a childhood friend of Alena's who was completely devoted to her and who doesn't think much of the new curator. All the other members of the cast that we remember from Rebecca are represented in different guises as well. They are mostly snobbish and unpleasant people except for the dishy local police chief who soon discovers a mutual attraction for our young narrator.
All in all, this is a patient and fairly faithful rendering of the old story that I knew so well, and much of the writing was really good, I thought. Sometimes though it wanders off into the esoteric, self-referential language of the art world. Maybe this was meant as a deliberate skewering of a group of people who perhaps take themselves far too seriously, but at times it became just a little too campy for my taste.
Still, it was a fun read, and if it does not quite rise to the level of du Maurier, it is a worthy effort, even if I won't necessarily be adding "Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again" to my list of most memorable beginnings to novels.
"Call me Ishmael." (Moby Dick)
And, of course, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." (The Hobbit)
But those two are very different kinds of novels, and the beginning of Rebecca, I think, is the most memorable for me.
When I was a teenager, I was under the spell of du Maurier and her books. I read them over and over again, but none more often than Rebecca. Somewhere in there I also saw Alfred Hitchcock's movie which was a wonderfully faithful realization of the much-loved book. When I heard a review on NPR's "Fresh Air" a few days ago of Rachel Pastan's new book Alena and the reviewer mentioned that the book was an homage to Rebecca, of course I had to read it.
Pastan begins her book with a very conscious tip of the hat to du Maurier. "Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again," she writes. With that beginning, she reimagines du Maurier's novel in all of its essential details.
Instead of the innocent young ingenue rescued from a boring life as a traveling companion to a rich, older woman by the dashing Maxim de Winter, we get an innocent young curatorial assistant from the Midwest arriving for the first time at the Venice Biennale with her boss, a demanding middle-aged woman curator who seems determined not to allow her assistant to see any of the art in Venice. Enter wealthy museum director and art-world gadfly Bernard Augustin who has a small contemporary museum on Cape Cod. Our young narrator, who remains nameless just like the narrator in Rebecca, catches Augustin's eye and when her boss insists on leaving the Biennale early, cutting short her assistant's chance to experience the art of Europe, he offers the young woman a job as a curator at his museum and invites her to stay in Europe and travel with him.
Of course, she accepts. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a story.
In a twist on the original novel, there is no romantic relationship between the young woman and Augustin. He is, in fact, gay, but theirs is a relationship founded firmly on their love of art.
On returning to Cape Cod and the museum called the Nauk, we learn that the museum has been closed for two years ever since its former curator, Alena, disappeared. It is believed that she went swimming in the surf one night, as she was wont to do, and that she drowned. She never returned and has never been heard from again. Her body was never found, but her spirit - her ghost - haunts the Nauk and all the people associated with it.
Soon it haunts the new curator as well, as she is constantly compared (unfavorably) to Alena. Alena was knowledgable, sophisticated, and daring in her choices for the museum. How can a novice possibly live up to that?
The malevolent Mrs. Danvers role is taken here by the museum's business manager, Agnes, a childhood friend of Alena's who was completely devoted to her and who doesn't think much of the new curator. All the other members of the cast that we remember from Rebecca are represented in different guises as well. They are mostly snobbish and unpleasant people except for the dishy local police chief who soon discovers a mutual attraction for our young narrator.
All in all, this is a patient and fairly faithful rendering of the old story that I knew so well, and much of the writing was really good, I thought. Sometimes though it wanders off into the esoteric, self-referential language of the art world. Maybe this was meant as a deliberate skewering of a group of people who perhaps take themselves far too seriously, but at times it became just a little too campy for my taste.
Still, it was a fun read, and if it does not quite rise to the level of du Maurier, it is a worthy effort, even if I won't necessarily be adding "Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again" to my list of most memorable beginnings to novels.
April 17, 2014
I think I would have been happier if I had tossed this book aside at some point. It was, by turns, frustrating and annoying. Neither of these is (to my mind) a good thing in a book.
It is, as everyone notes, a retelling of Rebecca. I've read that fairly recently and so had it in mind. I think the new setting here is quite problematic. First off, it's modern--or close to it. (The time frame is a little unclear--like Rebecca the narrator is looking back at events in the past. I think the present--when the narrator speaks--might be around today. But in the past there are no cell phones.). Anyway, it's modern enough so that the narrator seems inexplicable to me--her passivity warrants some explanation. Why is a woman who managed to go to NYC on her own and forge a life so incapable of dealing with whatever it is she runs into on the Cape?
Second, one of the changes is her relationship with the main male character isn't romantic. Nor was his relationship to her predecessor--at least not in any acknowledged way. This really disrupts the dynamic. Why does she stay? Perhaps we are meant to see the fascination that holds her--a non-sexual one--but I didn't think it worked.
I suppose in general I just found her incoherent. Ugh.
And then there are some nits to pick. I'm a Cape person so I read this in part for the setting. Yikes. If you're going to set a book on Cape Cod you MUST do your homework. A house (or a museum) is either on the ocean or it is on the bay. Those are NOT interchangeable bodies of water. And I think you'd notice if a grand place overlooking the water had an extra story with windows looking out at the view.
Enough. I didn't like the book and I wouldn't recommend it. What else do I need to say?
It is, as everyone notes, a retelling of Rebecca. I've read that fairly recently and so had it in mind. I think the new setting here is quite problematic. First off, it's modern--or close to it. (The time frame is a little unclear--like Rebecca the narrator is looking back at events in the past. I think the present--when the narrator speaks--might be around today. But in the past there are no cell phones.). Anyway, it's modern enough so that the narrator seems inexplicable to me--her passivity warrants some explanation. Why is a woman who managed to go to NYC on her own and forge a life so incapable of dealing with whatever it is she runs into on the Cape?
Second, one of the changes is her relationship with the main male character isn't romantic. Nor was his relationship to her predecessor--at least not in any acknowledged way. This really disrupts the dynamic. Why does she stay? Perhaps we are meant to see the fascination that holds her--a non-sexual one--but I didn't think it worked.
I suppose in general I just found her incoherent. Ugh.
And then there are some nits to pick. I'm a Cape person so I read this in part for the setting. Yikes. If you're going to set a book on Cape Cod you MUST do your homework. A house (or a museum) is either on the ocean or it is on the bay. Those are NOT interchangeable bodies of water. And I think you'd notice if a grand place overlooking the water had an extra story with windows looking out at the view.
Enough. I didn't like the book and I wouldn't recommend it. What else do I need to say?
November 30, 2013
Very engaging readable novel about an inexperienced curator at a contemporary art museum on Cape Cod. It's not totally dependent on your knowing Rebecca, although since I practically have that book memorized, it certainly added to the entertainment value.
Pastan writes beautifully about art, contemporary art in particular. It's a pleasure to read a novel where modern art isn't the butt of a joke.
Pastan writes beautifully about art, contemporary art in particular. It's a pleasure to read a novel where modern art isn't the butt of a joke.
September 11, 2014
So...this book. Where to begin, where to begin...
I have to be upfront; I love Du Maurier's Rebecca. As in, it's on my top ten books of all time kind of love Rebecca. So I had tempered expectations going into the book; there's no way I was going to love it at much as Rebecca.
And, well...I didn't.
Not because it's worthless though, in it's own way it's a decent read. But honestly, I think it's finest quality is the fact that it's a reload of a classic. And I don't mean that as a bash, I think it was an awesome idea. I mean it more in terms of, when the reading got a little thin, it felt like it was solely surviving on the point-of-interest that you were constantly looking for/at the Rebecca parallels.
And speaking of the Rebecca parallels, I liked them. Mostly. Keeping the "Last night I dreamt I went to ______ again" line? *swoon* Loved it. The art world was an appropriate new setting; sophisticated and a touch inaccessible in that glamorous way Rebecca (the character) was. The eerily obsessed Mrs. Danvers/museum manager character? Well-played. Same with the creepy uncle/artist. Our narrator was likable with the proper amount of self-consciousness, etc.
What I DIDN'T really feel like were home runs... What I also wasn't totally sold on?
In the end, if you like Rebecca, and/or if you like art, read the book. It won't change your life, but it's not like it's a tome you have to slog through, and while it's prooooooobably decent enough to stand on it's own, reading or having read Rebecca first will definitely upgrade the experience.
I have to be upfront; I love Du Maurier's Rebecca. As in, it's on my top ten books of all time kind of love Rebecca. So I had tempered expectations going into the book; there's no way I was going to love it at much as Rebecca.
And, well...I didn't.
Not because it's worthless though, in it's own way it's a decent read. But honestly, I think it's finest quality is the fact that it's a reload of a classic. And I don't mean that as a bash, I think it was an awesome idea. I mean it more in terms of, when the reading got a little thin, it felt like it was solely surviving on the point-of-interest that you were constantly looking for/at the Rebecca parallels.
And speaking of the Rebecca parallels, I liked them. Mostly. Keeping the "Last night I dreamt I went to ______ again" line? *swoon* Loved it. The art world was an appropriate new setting; sophisticated and a touch inaccessible in that glamorous way Rebecca (the character) was. The eerily obsessed Mrs. Danvers/museum manager character? Well-played. Same with the creepy uncle/artist. Our narrator was likable with the proper amount of self-consciousness, etc.
What I DIDN'T really feel like were home runs... What I also wasn't totally sold on?
In the end, if you like Rebecca, and/or if you like art, read the book. It won't change your life, but it's not like it's a tome you have to slog through, and while it's prooooooobably decent enough to stand on it's own, reading or having read Rebecca first will definitely upgrade the experience.
February 2, 2016
Last month I read Rebecca, thanks to quite a few of my friends who have read it and loved it. I did enjoy it, especially as it's a very well-written gothic romance of the modern age. So when I saw this book advertised in a reader's catalog as an update to Rebecca, I had to check it out and see how it measured up.
Let me encourage you to read Rebecca first. I do believe this book stands beautifully on its own, but if one reads it with the knowledge of its forebear, it becomes even richer. Somehow Pastan has taken the original story and made it not only her own, but even better. The unnamed narrator in this novel is nearly as young and naive as the narrator in the original, but somehow it works more believably in this book. She's from the Midwest, and still finding her footing in the fast-paced world of the Manhattan art world when she finds herself offered a job at a small gallery on Cape Cod. I admit I loved this part, especially the fleeting description of the trip over the Bourne Bridge, as this is the part of the world in which I live. So for me, this narrator's naïveté was a little less grating and a lot more understandable. Straight out of curator's school, only having ever been an assistant, she is handed an entire gallery of her own to manage. That would make anyone shy and nervous.
The ways in which Pastan makes this book her own are incredible. Her writing is so vivid and lyrical at times, and she immerses her readers into the art world completely. I'm not really knowledgeable about art in any way, but this book made me want to run down to the galleries in downtown Newport and inhale the creativity that oozes from canvases and sculptures. I thoroughly enjoyed the reimagining of the original characters; they're all there, to be sure, but smudged and recreated to fit better into Pastan's world on the Cape. It's really amazing how well she's able to stick to the original storyline with one major departure (you'll have to read this book to discover it) while also making it so different at the same time.
As good as Rebecca is, this is even better for me. I applaud Pastan for doing such a great job, and this book makes me want to look up everything she's written in hopes it's at least this wonderful.
Let me encourage you to read Rebecca first. I do believe this book stands beautifully on its own, but if one reads it with the knowledge of its forebear, it becomes even richer. Somehow Pastan has taken the original story and made it not only her own, but even better. The unnamed narrator in this novel is nearly as young and naive as the narrator in the original, but somehow it works more believably in this book. She's from the Midwest, and still finding her footing in the fast-paced world of the Manhattan art world when she finds herself offered a job at a small gallery on Cape Cod. I admit I loved this part, especially the fleeting description of the trip over the Bourne Bridge, as this is the part of the world in which I live. So for me, this narrator's naïveté was a little less grating and a lot more understandable. Straight out of curator's school, only having ever been an assistant, she is handed an entire gallery of her own to manage. That would make anyone shy and nervous.
The ways in which Pastan makes this book her own are incredible. Her writing is so vivid and lyrical at times, and she immerses her readers into the art world completely. I'm not really knowledgeable about art in any way, but this book made me want to run down to the galleries in downtown Newport and inhale the creativity that oozes from canvases and sculptures. I thoroughly enjoyed the reimagining of the original characters; they're all there, to be sure, but smudged and recreated to fit better into Pastan's world on the Cape. It's really amazing how well she's able to stick to the original storyline with one major departure (you'll have to read this book to discover it) while also making it so different at the same time.
As good as Rebecca is, this is even better for me. I applaud Pastan for doing such a great job, and this book makes me want to look up everything she's written in hopes it's at least this wonderful.
September 20, 2015
I was well and truly hooked by the time I got to p. 54, when our heroine is rescued from her dragon of a boss and transported to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua to see Giotto's frescoes. If I could revisit just one place in all of Italy, the Scrovegni would be my choice.
Yes, I know the attraction of this book for most readers is the way it parallels Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca. Our unnamed (of course) heroine is an art major from a small Wisconsin town and was never able to study abroad. Nevertheless, she has the visual equivalent of perfect pitch, which gets the attention of a wealthy collector Bernard. She happily agrees to take over as curator at his small art museum on Cape Cod, which turns out to be the equivalent of being thrown to the wolves.
The prose is gorgeous, the plot is an update of Rebecca, and the author's take on the contemporary art scene is wicked.
Here's a quote describing an artist whose work Alena wants to exhibit:
"Like a child at bedtime who insists she's not tired, Celia's provocation was all unproductive, almost self-negating. Sometimes I thought this was just her scorpion nature, but other times it seemed to me that she had settled on this pose purposefully, out of some dimly perceived, horribly misplaced idea that the job of an artist was to hide her light under the darkest bushel possible and wait for a dedicated acolyte to be drawn to it like a clairvoyant moth."
Yes, I know the attraction of this book for most readers is the way it parallels Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca. Our unnamed (of course) heroine is an art major from a small Wisconsin town and was never able to study abroad. Nevertheless, she has the visual equivalent of perfect pitch, which gets the attention of a wealthy collector Bernard. She happily agrees to take over as curator at his small art museum on Cape Cod, which turns out to be the equivalent of being thrown to the wolves.
The prose is gorgeous, the plot is an update of Rebecca, and the author's take on the contemporary art scene is wicked.
Here's a quote describing an artist whose work Alena wants to exhibit:
"Like a child at bedtime who insists she's not tired, Celia's provocation was all unproductive, almost self-negating. Sometimes I thought this was just her scorpion nature, but other times it seemed to me that she had settled on this pose purposefully, out of some dimly perceived, horribly misplaced idea that the job of an artist was to hide her light under the darkest bushel possible and wait for a dedicated acolyte to be drawn to it like a clairvoyant moth."
Read
September 22, 2014A chilling psychological gothic novel that is in many ways a contemporary retelling of "Rebecca" by Daphne Du Maurier. A very young and intelligent woman find herself in the unique position of curator of a small, but innovative New England art gallery. Alena, dead or missing, was her predecessor, adored by literally everyone the young curator meets. The curator seems to meet judgment and disapproval at every step, with constant comparison to Alena, but all is not as it seems. Readers will learn a lot about art galleries and how shows are considered and staged. The extremely wide range of contemporary art is offered up for consideration. A touch of romance, an eerie setting, and a sympathetic main character combine for a gripping read. -GD
Click here to place a hold on Alena .
If you have never read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, treat yourself to this classic gothic novel from 1938.
Click here to place a hold on Alena .
If you have never read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, treat yourself to this classic gothic novel from 1938.
February 24, 2014
As a hard marker, I am shocked that I gave this book 4 stars and that I actually considered a 5. It is definitely not in my favorite genre, time period, nor are the characters the kind I would meet any present day. It was hard to get into, for me. And I had begun to think, "Oh! Another pretentious art world soap opera."
Well, I am glad I stuck with it. No spoilers. But the attempts to parallel "Rebecca" did not distract in the end. And the intensity of influence dominated by the dead title character was deftly put center stage. Also within a smooth prose style that, EVEN TO ME, about as far away from an Art History brain as you can get- described superbly the acceleration of "getting" a work of Art. Finally, almost making it a 5, there was an absolute entrancing interpretation of Venice through left brain eyes, and of the architectural identity of the Nauk on the sea. I become compelled to read on, and finished the second half in one long go. Reading it very slowly. Quite unusual for me.
Well, I am glad I stuck with it. No spoilers. But the attempts to parallel "Rebecca" did not distract in the end. And the intensity of influence dominated by the dead title character was deftly put center stage. Also within a smooth prose style that, EVEN TO ME, about as far away from an Art History brain as you can get- described superbly the acceleration of "getting" a work of Art. Finally, almost making it a 5, there was an absolute entrancing interpretation of Venice through left brain eyes, and of the architectural identity of the Nauk on the sea. I become compelled to read on, and finished the second half in one long go. Reading it very slowly. Quite unusual for me.
September 11, 2014
Equal parts, fascinating and disappointing. It's hard to remake a beloved gothic mystery classic like REBECCA and do it justice. The clumsy renaming of the original opening line, "Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again," gives fair warning. At least she didn't use 'the Nauk'!
On the other hand, Rachel Pastan has done such beautiful descriptive writing in this book, that alone makes it worthwhile reading, if you don't mind knowing in advance pretty much what's going to happen with the plot--assuming you have read REBECCA, that is. (And if you haven't read REBECCA, do it now!)
The ending seemed to fall a bit flat. Shouldn't Alena's killer have been accused of manslaughter at the very least? And no fire this time--just a glorious sunrise. Hmmm...
I did enjoy the Cape Cod setting though, one of my favorite places, the well-drawn characters, and the view into the world of art curating. I would recommend the book as an easy summer read and look forward to reading other books by this author.
On the other hand, Rachel Pastan has done such beautiful descriptive writing in this book, that alone makes it worthwhile reading, if you don't mind knowing in advance pretty much what's going to happen with the plot--assuming you have read REBECCA, that is. (And if you haven't read REBECCA, do it now!)
The ending seemed to fall a bit flat. Shouldn't Alena's killer have been accused of manslaughter at the very least? And no fire this time--just a glorious sunrise. Hmmm...
I did enjoy the Cape Cod setting though, one of my favorite places, the well-drawn characters, and the view into the world of art curating. I would recommend the book as an easy summer read and look forward to reading other books by this author.
March 7, 2014
I have such a mixed reaction to this book. On the one hand, I didn't put it down - I read the whole thing last night. So the story did keep me going. However, in the morning, I wasn't sure that it was a good book. Kind of like eating pie for breakfast - it seems like a good idea while you're eating it, but later you realize that it really wasn't good for you. Guess I have pie on my mind.
There are parts that I think are very well-written, nice turn-of-a-phrase sort of things. There also are sentences that made me roll my eyes. There are characters and actions that seem unnecessary in that they do not move the story along.
In the end, I'm glad I read the book; I found it entertaining. But just not sure I respected myself in the morning. And it's not a book that I'm going to carry around and insist that other people read it.
There are parts that I think are very well-written, nice turn-of-a-phrase sort of things. There also are sentences that made me roll my eyes. There are characters and actions that seem unnecessary in that they do not move the story along.
In the end, I'm glad I read the book; I found it entertaining. But just not sure I respected myself in the morning. And it's not a book that I'm going to carry around and insist that other people read it.
March 21, 2015
I enjoyed this book--I can usually appreciate a re-imagined classic if it's done well--but ultimately found it a little disappointing. I liked how the author kept the framework of Rebecca but added a fresh twist to it; I liked that the story is set in the contemporary art world and the amount of insight the author gives into that world; and I appreciated the settings of the story, Venice and Nauquasset, and how the author brought them to life. What I didn't like was the ending. It felt unfinished and anticlimactic and was very disappointing after the excellent setup that had come before. I'm sorry not to give this book a higher rating--much of it was very good--but the ending was just too jarring.
September 28, 2019
This barely drudges up the suspense and primality of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.
Described as an adaptation of du Maurier's novel, Alena doesn't come close to the depth and beauty of that marked Rebecca as a classic.
Alena tries to be mysterious, as a nameless young curator is given a job by the enigmatic and broodingBernard, the owner of the Nauk, a small art museum on Cape Cod.
Alena is the equivalent of Rebecca, a beautiful, alluring woman who has most everyone wrapped around her dead finger, including the main male character.
The curator has a hard time living up to everyone's expectations of her - because they're always comparing her to the near-perfect Alena.
Rebecca is one of my favorite novels, and I was excited to the delve into this homage to it, but the book failed so much, from the characters, to the plot, to even the writing style. I couldn't sink deep enough to feel myself cloaked by the story, as I did with Rebecca.
To be fair, du Maurier is a craftswoman, and very few could compare to her writing, and even trying to take on an adaptation of one of her best-known novels is bold and I applaud that effort. But the book has a diluted feel to it - like it only takes on the grays and whites of Rebecca and forgets to mix in the other colors that brought that book to life.
But in Alena, there is none of the menace that was in Rebecca, though Alena's friends do try to fill that role towards the curator. Still, I never felt she was in true danger, even by Bernard's hands. And I didn't get the dark feel within the Nauk, or the town Nauquasset like you do with Manderly. It's not the same opulence and dark beauty that Manderly draws you in with.
I didn't get a good grasp on any of the characters, including the curtaor, and don't understand what happens to her in the end. It seems like she's writing about the past, and that she's still in contact with Bernard, but I never truly learned or understood what happened to her. Even Alena's death, once Bernard reveals it, falls flat and is lackluster - not at all the gruesome death I imagined.
Described as an adaptation of du Maurier's novel, Alena doesn't come close to the depth and beauty of that marked Rebecca as a classic.
Alena tries to be mysterious, as a nameless young curator is given a job by the enigmatic and broodingBernard, the owner of the Nauk, a small art museum on Cape Cod.
Alena is the equivalent of Rebecca, a beautiful, alluring woman who has most everyone wrapped around her dead finger, including the main male character.
The curator has a hard time living up to everyone's expectations of her - because they're always comparing her to the near-perfect Alena.
Rebecca is one of my favorite novels, and I was excited to the delve into this homage to it, but the book failed so much, from the characters, to the plot, to even the writing style. I couldn't sink deep enough to feel myself cloaked by the story, as I did with Rebecca.
To be fair, du Maurier is a craftswoman, and very few could compare to her writing, and even trying to take on an adaptation of one of her best-known novels is bold and I applaud that effort. But the book has a diluted feel to it - like it only takes on the grays and whites of Rebecca and forgets to mix in the other colors that brought that book to life.
But in Alena, there is none of the menace that was in Rebecca, though Alena's friends do try to fill that role towards the curator. Still, I never felt she was in true danger, even by Bernard's hands. And I didn't get the dark feel within the Nauk, or the town Nauquasset like you do with Manderly. It's not the same opulence and dark beauty that Manderly draws you in with.
I didn't get a good grasp on any of the characters, including the curtaor, and don't understand what happens to her in the end. It seems like she's writing about the past, and that she's still in contact with Bernard, but I never truly learned or understood what happened to her. Even Alena's death, once Bernard reveals it, falls flat and is lackluster - not at all the gruesome death I imagined.
Read
July 27, 2017Alena by Rachel Pastan was a very clear reboot of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. As someone who always loved that story, I was hooked. The book is centered around the art industry and the a specific museum. The scandal and drama is real. The characters are spicy and vindictive in a way that only could be told in fiction, but also seem to leap from the page. The backdrop is perfect for a reboot of Rebecca.... read more on https://bythecoverreview.com/2017/07/...
October 23, 2023
rebecca retelling at a cape cod museum — right up my alley!!
February 24, 2014
I won this book from Goodreads.
I've finished it, but I'm not sure whether I liked it or not. The story was intriguing enough that I wanted to know what happened, but not so interesting that I couldn't put it down. The language was beautiful-artistic-in a way that not much writing is done today.
Alena is a modern retelling of Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier. The storylines are similar, in this retelling, the narrator dreams of being a curator and Bernard, a gay rich man, owns a museum. He invites her to be its curator, hoping to revive the museum after it closed 2 years before due to the disappearance of its former curator, Alena. When she arrives, everyone is still obsessed with Alena. She did things a certain way, and the narrator is afraid to change anything. When Alena's boot washes onto shore, her case is reopened and questions abound about the circumstances of her death.
None of the characters are particularly likable. It has been some time since I read Rebecca, but I don't remember the characters as being unlikable. The narrator of Alena is annoying and naïve. At the same time, I'm on her team. I root for her because I want her to grow a backbone and tell Agnes what's up. Bernard is so absent as to be only a supporting character. I suppose this is to preserve his sense of mystery. Agnes is...well, she's Mrs. Danvers. Who likes Mrs. Danvers?
I do think the element of art in the story was a great idea. Everyone says Alena has an eye for talent, for which artists are going to make their big break. Her job was to show them before they were big. As time went on, her tastes leaned toward the macabre-toward living art, but with a sense of destruction and death about it. Alena is not Rebecca, but I could see Rebecca as someone who's tastes were extreme.
Overall, it was a decent book. I assume my opinions would be different if I had never read Rebecca. It is definitely interesting as a comparison to Rebecca, but I think as a stand alone novel, it has few redeeming qualities that could turn it into a classic.
I've finished it, but I'm not sure whether I liked it or not. The story was intriguing enough that I wanted to know what happened, but not so interesting that I couldn't put it down. The language was beautiful-artistic-in a way that not much writing is done today.
Alena is a modern retelling of Rebecca, by Daphne DuMaurier. The storylines are similar, in this retelling, the narrator dreams of being a curator and Bernard, a gay rich man, owns a museum. He invites her to be its curator, hoping to revive the museum after it closed 2 years before due to the disappearance of its former curator, Alena. When she arrives, everyone is still obsessed with Alena. She did things a certain way, and the narrator is afraid to change anything. When Alena's boot washes onto shore, her case is reopened and questions abound about the circumstances of her death.
None of the characters are particularly likable. It has been some time since I read Rebecca, but I don't remember the characters as being unlikable. The narrator of Alena is annoying and naïve. At the same time, I'm on her team. I root for her because I want her to grow a backbone and tell Agnes what's up. Bernard is so absent as to be only a supporting character. I suppose this is to preserve his sense of mystery. Agnes is...well, she's Mrs. Danvers. Who likes Mrs. Danvers?
I do think the element of art in the story was a great idea. Everyone says Alena has an eye for talent, for which artists are going to make their big break. Her job was to show them before they were big. As time went on, her tastes leaned toward the macabre-toward living art, but with a sense of destruction and death about it. Alena is not Rebecca, but I could see Rebecca as someone who's tastes were extreme.
Overall, it was a decent book. I assume my opinions would be different if I had never read Rebecca. It is definitely interesting as a comparison to Rebecca, but I think as a stand alone novel, it has few redeeming qualities that could turn it into a classic.
January 9, 2015
So, I didn't remember the opening line for Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca upon which this is based (probably because I read Rebecca maybe 20 years ago....), which I guess is important to the story since Alena opens with the same line. This could have been a lot better than it was. It wasn't that suspenseful, and the weakness of the main character (unnamed) drove me nuts and the cast of secondary characters just didn't come togther for me. The main character has been appointed the curator at an art museum on Cape Cod; its previous curator, Alena, died under mysterious circumstances. The new curator is a a young woman from Wisconsin. She is fearful before there was anything to fear, lacks any confidence whatsoever, she is afraid of her own shadow, she lets the other staff run her over (figuratively), and her obsession with Alena is just weird and completely unbelievable. Parts were just silly... when the town's police officer investigates some news about the disappearance of Alena, he has group conversations with several people at the same time - all whom potentially had something to do with Alena's disappearance. The so-called connection between her and Bernard (owner of the museum) was way too far-fetched. Lots of eye-rolling moments.
December 9, 2013
Finding your place in the art world can be a series of missteps, but to follow in the footsteps of a ghost can be a life-altering experience. The main character in Alena does just that--while working for a curator of a Midwestern museum, she meets Bernard Augustin at the Biennale in Venice. After seeing her eye for art, he quickly hires her to be the curator at his museum, the Nauk, on the Cape. The drawback, however, is that is has been closed since the disappearance of his last curator and friend, Alena. Everyone assumes that she has drowned, but the spirit and life that she led is clearly palpable to the main character throughout her time serving at the Nauk.
This book is an amazing look at how an unexpected death can leave traces of life throughout the people and places that the deceased have touched. It is also an interesting look at death and how art and death are related. This book is touted as a restaging of Rebecca, but not having read Rebecca I cannot say whether the effort has succeeded or not. Though any reader looking for a solid story and a buried mystery will enjoy this book.
This book is an amazing look at how an unexpected death can leave traces of life throughout the people and places that the deceased have touched. It is also an interesting look at death and how art and death are related. This book is touted as a restaging of Rebecca, but not having read Rebecca I cannot say whether the effort has succeeded or not. Though any reader looking for a solid story and a buried mystery will enjoy this book.
April 19, 2014
Another occasion when I wish I could give 3.5 stars. A modern-day retelling of Rebecca, with a nameless narrator who finds herself hired as the curator of a Cape Cod art museum after the previous curator has mysteriously disappeared, presumed drowned. All the parallels are there, from the nasty employer the protagonist is taken away from, to the Mrs. Danvers-like figure at the museum, to the mysterious nature of the epynomous Alena, to the beginning: "last night I dreamed I went again..."
I don't know if I would have liked it as much if I weren't constantly looking for the parallels with Rebecca (they're there, all the way through, down to the ending that is not what you think). The author plays on the fact that the reader is most likely familiar with the inspiration, so she gives the parallels little twists. For that reason, it was very interesting to read... but I don't know that I really liked or sympathized with the main character.
I don't know if I would have liked it as much if I weren't constantly looking for the parallels with Rebecca (they're there, all the way through, down to the ending that is not what you think). The author plays on the fact that the reader is most likely familiar with the inspiration, so she gives the parallels little twists. For that reason, it was very interesting to read... but I don't know that I really liked or sympathized with the main character.
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