Bellocq's Women
-
- £5.99
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
In 1912, in Storyville, the notorious red-light district of New Orleans, a photographer named E. J. Bellocq took a series of photographs of the women who worked in the brothels. Rediscovered in the 1950s, Bellocq's photographs have become famous, but the man himself remains a mystery.In Bellocq's Women, Peter Everett performs as remarkable a feat of fictional reconstruction as he did in Matisse's War and The Voyages of Alfred Wallis. All we have of Bellocq are his photographs and a few fragmentary memories; in this extraordinary novel Everett not only brings the photographer to life - and with him his strange, tortured relationship with his mother and two young girls, one his landlady's daughter, the other a child whore - but also his world - the opium dens and bar rooms of New Orleans and the whore houses with their surreal combination of violence and homeliness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everett, author of critically acclaimed fictional reconstructions Matisse's Warand The Voyages of Alfred Wallis, died in 1999, and his posthumously published last novel, also a remarkable reconstruction, is his grand finale. While we never know exactly how true-to-life this novelization of photographer E.J. Bellocq's life is, it rings pitch perfect. In 1912, Bellocq, a talented photographer, captured the women who worked in the brothels of Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans, in a series of images. Rediscovered in the 1950s, Bellocq's prints are well known, but the man behind the camera remains a mystery. Here, in crisp clean prose, with exacting attention to detail, Everett describes Bellocq's difficult life. His mother is unstable, and his father runs away to Mexico with another woman, an incident that leaves an indelible mark on the young Bellocq. As an adult, Bellocq is a sensitive loner who spends most of his life in the opium dens, barrooms, brothels and rooming houses of New Orleans, taking stark and often macabre photographs. Bellocq's strange relationships with several female prostitutes, including a 10-year-old child named Sylvie, cause him much heartbreak, as does the love of his life, his landlady's daughter, Miriam. The poignant, melancholic tone of the narrative is punctuated by moments of extreme beauty: "Lightning seared the sky with blue flashes; a bolting horse ran out of the dark and was gone as swiftly as an apparition." Though Everett's material is dark most of the characters' lives are marked by poverty, alcoholism, violence and insanity, and descriptions of excrement, urine, STDs and vomit proliferate thisis an eminently readable novel with a haunting cinematic quality.
