Skip to main content

Varina by Charles Frazier review – clear-sighted view of a divided America

The Cold Mountain author has returned to the civil war for this novel of flight and separation

In February 1911, at a whites-only ceremony in New Orleans, the Jefferson Davis monument was erected to mark 50 years since the inauguration of the first and only man to hold the office of president of the Confederate States. Schoolchildren dressed in red, white and blue sang “Dixie” and were choreographed into a living Confederate flag. On 11 May 2017, under cover of darkness, the statue was taken down.

If historical fiction seeks to to shed light on the present, now is the time for Charles Frazier to return to the civil war period that provided the background for his million-selling debut, Cold Mountain. As statues of Davis and other Confederate leaders come down across the south, Frazier has chosen to focus on the president’s second wife, Varina Howell: bluestocking, opium addict, friend of Oscar Wilde and surely the most obscure woman to have borne the title first lady in America.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PvmA5f
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more