Villa E A novel

This concentrated tale of an epic duel between two temperamentally opposite artists opens with a vision of continents colliding and the Alps rising above the Mediterranean. That's where Villa E stands, the radically organic 1920s creation of real-life Irish designer Eileen Gray. White and shell-like, made of "liquid stone" (concrete), it is a masterpiece and a bone of contention. Unable to buy land in France, Eileen deeded the property to her lover, architect Bado, who promptly took credit for her work, while famed architect Le Grand, a bravura improvisation on Le Corbusier, brusquely commandeers Villa E in belligerent admiration and envy. Alison has Eileen (cool, keen, collected, and formidable) and Le Grand (voracious, egomaniacal, cruel, and intractable) narrate in alternating sections in 1965. In advanced years, they've long been bitterly estranged after Le Grand unleashed his rage and committed a shocking assault against the pristine villa, a veritable rape. In prose, by turns, as exquisite as Eileen's creation and as seething as Le Grand's lust, Alison incisively evokes artistic genius and angst, while infusing a historic scandal with profound heartache and resolve.

Alison (The Sisters Antipodes) serves up an elegant meditation on aging, art, and nature, inspired by a famous villa in the French Riviera. In 1965, architect Le Grand, a thinly veiled Le Corbusier, makes frequent visits from Paris to the cabin he built steps from the Villa E, which was designed and built in 1929 by fledgling architect Eileen, who hasn't seen the place since she sold it 10 years earlier. Alison hints at the house's "sordid history" (the real villa, built by furniture designer Eileen Gray, was defaced by Le Corbusier after he recognized his influence on Gray's design) when a nostalgic Eileen decides to pay a visit. Elliptical passages detail Le Grand's consuming work schedule and failing health and Eileen's reminiscences about the villa and her artistic growth in the intervening years. In the buildup to their reunion, Alison reveals why Le Grand remains obsessed with Villa E and why Eileen turned her back on it. The star of the show is the seascape, the power and beauty of which Alison depicts in lyrical prose ("In the cove, waves rush through, wash through pebbles, are pulled back to the sea, rush through pebbles again, and this happens today and has happened for millennia"). Readers are in for a treat. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Aug.)

Alison's (Nine Island) historical novel explores the intersecting careers of the real-life Irish designer Eileen Gray and Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (called Le Grand in the novel). During the late 1920s, Eileen designs and builds a villa, now well known as Villa E-1027, on the southern coast of France. It was intended to be a retreat for her and her lover Bado (who's inspired by the critic and editor Jean Badovici). Alison vividly depicts a critical meeting between Eileen and Le Grand wherein Le Grand recognizes his influence in the villa's design, while Eileen is perhaps not as deferential as Le Grand desires. Thus begins their troubling relationship, marked by Le Grand's obsession with the villa. When Eileen's relationship with Bado dissolves, Bado assumes ownership of the house, though who truly owns Villa E is never fully resolved. Le Grand continues to visit the seaside home and, as history reveals, vandalizes it by painting several murals with sexual and sexist undertones on its modernist white walls. Alison's sparse yet poetic prose beautifully depicts both exteriors (the villa and its Mediterranean setting) and interiors (the many emotions that Eileen and Le Grand experience over the span of decades). VERDICT Alison skillfully probes the nature of collaboration, influence, and credit in the world of architecture and design, as well as the often gender-confining roles of artists.--Faye A. Chadwell

A Modernist architectural masterpiece on the coast of southern France is at the center of a clash between two designers of genius--one widely celebrated, the other not so much. Modeled on historical fact, Alison's new novel is a twin bio-fiction tracing the connections and conflicts between 20th-century icon Le Corbusier--here named Le Grand--and Irish architect Eileen Gray, referred to only as Eileen. In 1925, when she was 40 and living in Paris, where she had a shop selling furniture she designed, Eileen traveled south and fell in love with a piece of coastal land. There, encouraged by her lover, Bado, she built the structure she'd been yearning to design, "a house that was intimate and modern but not a machine." (Le Grand famously asserted, "A house is a machine to live in.") Not a French citizen, Eileen couldn't purchase the land herself, instead buying it in Bado's name, which would be her downfall. The "slim white house, moored like a yacht, modern in the ancient sun," is a triumph, but Bado makes it his own, eventually forcing Eileen to move on and design a second home in the hills. Le Grand becomes a frequent visitor to the coastal house, acknowledging its genius but seeing his influence in it: "That genius and his own primary genius here mingled to make this villa. Masculine spirit meeting feminine form." Breaching the villa's purity, he paints sexual murals on its white interior walls, which, because of his reputation, cannot be expunged. The novel explores the characters and lifelong achievements of both figures: he protean, domineering, and unrepentant; she sensual, committed, enduring. Looping, impressionistic, and atmospheric, narrated in retrospect from both characters' points of view, the book offers more psychology than plot, but does so persuasively. A remarkable gender parable filtered through a sophisticated imagination. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.