Sunday Salon: George Rabasa, The Wonder Singer

Unbridled Books © 2008, 336 pages

Forty-year-old Mark Lockwood has been commissioned to ghostwrite the autobiography of Senora Mercè Casals, diva. For six hours a day he and the Senora, once the world's greatest soprano, talk--she reliving her roles as Norma and Aida and Violetta. She relives the rest of her life as well, singing on her father's cue in bars and hostels, the stranger her father handed her off to, the Spanish Civil War, the men in her life who claimed her and used her and loved her. But after 500 hours of conversation recorded on the precarious snakes of tape spooled in a suitcase's worth of cassettes, Lockwood's diva up and dies, her 80-something body floating "pale, blubberous and opalescent in her bath." The fate of Lockwood's book, given her death, is now up in the air. Lockwood was the right man for the job while the Senora was alive, but with her death his agent wants a bigger name, a bestselling author, someone who can churn out a doorstep-sized biography that will grace the supermarket aisles. He's ready to ditch Lockwood with a fat kill fee. But Lockwood has the tapes, without which the book project--like the diva herself--is pretty much dead in the water. Now obsessed with the diva and with his book, Lockwood grabs the tapes and runs.

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Comments

[gautami tripathy]

1.

Sounds like a great book!

Do check out my Sunday Salon posts :D

[Anni]

2.

OFF:
Hello Debra, I tried to send you an e-mail about a change in my blogs, but it returned always, I don't know why, must be something technical problem.

Anyway, the case is: I decided to continue my blog "Portrait of a Hungarian Bibliophile" at an another place :
http://almost-insider.blogspot.com
here is the rss feed of the blog:
http://almost-insider.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
and I would like to ask you for change it in the TSS-member list (name: Anni, blog name: Almost insider)
The tag [Hungarian] can stay, of course.
I promise, I'll write about my reasons in the next TSS-post.

Thans, Anni