The Last Nude (original 2012; edition 2012)

Fairly lightweight, sometimes a bit soap-opera-y, but fun enough if you like reading about the artist/expat world of 1920s Paris. Also, I thought she did a really good job of showing what people will do for money, and why, and making it very human and relatable. ( )

I picked up Ellis Avery’s latest novel The Last Nude after reading Danika’s glowing review of it on the lesbrary earlier this year. It’s not every author who can claim your lifelong allegiance after you’ve read only one of her works, but I agree with Danika that Avery is one of these writers and that reading The Last Nude is enough to convince you. This historical novel, set in Paris in the decadent 1920s period between the two world wars, is an easy book to love and sink into. From the first unassuming sentence (“I only met Tamara de Lempicka because I needed a hundred francs”), The Last Nude is captivating and delightful. The writing is exquisite; the characterization rich; and the setting wonderfully and lovingly rendered in superb detail.

Just because the novel is beautiful, though, doesn’t mean it isn’t also without its delicious complexities. We are introduced to the whirlwind environment of 20s Paris, in all its queer, smoky glory through the eyes of Rafaela Fano, an Italian-American Jew who is also experiencing it for the first time. Rafaela (her actual last name isn’t known) is a real historical person about whom we don’t know much except she was Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka’s model and inspiration for some of her most arresting works, including La Belle Rafaela, which graces the cover of the novel. Rafaela is both sweetly naïve and street-wise, having survived her family’s attempt to arrange her marriage at age sixteen by trading sex for passage to Paris. She’s survived in the city thus far by doing sex work, sometimes in more explicit scenarios than others; Rafaela is on the brink of a so-called respectable job at a department store when Tamara, seduced by her beauty on the street, recruits the young woman to model for her.

Tamara, as you might have guessed, is unbelievably sexy and glamorous; of course, she’s also a supremely talented artist with an insatiable appetite for art, wealth, and power. Rafaela falls for Tamara, hard. You know from early on, despite the fact that the story is related to us through Rafaela’s perspective, that Tamara’s motives are more complicated and less wholesome than Rafaela’s young, innocent heart wants to believe. In fact, it’s not just Tamara, it’s the whole circle Rafaela is introduced to: we enter the exotic world of the queer, artsy, bohemian population and are by turns charmed and appalled by them just as Rafaela is. Like us 21st century readers, Rafaela is a stranger to this world, its hopeful possibilities, and its hidden sinister underbelly.

Despite the sense of apprehension you feel knowing that Tamara and Rafaela’s love affair is doomed, Tamara offers something to Rafaela that is priceless: she gives Rafaela her own body back and opens up her sexuality. After the first time they make love, Rafaela recalls:
“And suddenly I remembered a day when I was very small, before my brothers came along. When my mother went out for groceries, I slopped … oil on the banister and slid down. I climbed those stairs again and again, to get that feeling: how slick my knickers got, how distinctly I could feel the spreading wings of my little figa, how the shock of bliss pleated through me like lightning. I had forgotten this kind of eagerness until now, as my body sobbed into Tamara’s hand. Again, again! I wanted to crow. I was a giddy witch on a broomstick. I was a leaping dog. I was liquor; I was laughter; I was a sliding girl on a shining rail: something I’d forgotten how to be.”

Later on, Rafaela tells us how she has learned to love and revel in her body:

“Ever since my sixteenth birthday, my body had felt like a coin in an unfamiliar currency: small, shiny, and heavy, obviously of value to somebody, but not to me… My body felt coincidental to me—I could just as easily be a tree, a stone, a gust of wind. For so long, I still felt like the ten-year-old me, skinny as a last wafer of soap, needling through Washington Square on her way to Baxter Street. But my months with Tamara had worn away the lonely old questions and replaced them with a greed of my own: my body was just a fact, this night, a kind of euphoria. I coincided with it, and with the dancing crowd. Throbbing with the horns and drums, we formed a waterfall passing over a light, each of us a drop, a spark, bright, gone. The music danced us, and I knew it wouldn’t last, this body I’d learnt to love.”

If you’re at all familiar with famous lesbian/queer/bi expatriate women from this period, you’ll be delighted to see the literary couple Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, who ran successful bookstores and first published James Joyce’s Ulysses, function as Rafaela’s queer elders. Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas make appearances too, as well as Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, and Violette Morris. If you don’t know who any of these women are, I suggest looking them up asap. Ah, if only I could time travel back to one of their parties and chat with them, wearing smoky black eye shadow and red lipstick, and smoking cigarettes out of a long classy holder without knowing the consequences.

The consequences of the way Tamara treats Rafaela don’t fully emerge until the second part of the book, much smaller than the first, and from the perspective of Tamara as an old woman. On the one hand, I felt robbed of the chance to see in her own words how Rafaela pulls herself up after Tamara’s betrayal and ‘follows her dreams.’ On the other, Avery had to do something to humanize Tamara for us, if only to complicate the view of her as a ruthless egotistical villain. Although I can’t say I was completely satisfied with Tamara’s atonement, I was glad in the end to know that Tamara did care for Rafaela, amidst her self-delusions and guilt. In a way, these revelations made the love story all the more tragic; they also made the novel even more complex, powerful, and poignant than it already was. This, considering The Last Nude is (lesbian) historical fiction at its finest, is quite an achievement. ( )

In the golden age of 1920's Paris, wealth radiates off the streets. Gertrude Stein holds lavish salons, the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop hosts expatriates and aspiring novelists such as James Joyce, and painter Tamara de Lempicka prepares to create her greatest masterpieces.

It is this world that the reader, and our main character of Rafaela Fano is thrown into. Struggling and desperate, Rafaela - a young girl who has recently run away to Paris rather than marry against her will - reluctantly agrees to let a mysterious, dazzling woman paint her nude. This woman turns out to be Lempicka, a Polish Art Deco artist.
Rafaela goes from model to muse to lover, and falls deeply in love with the glamorous older woman.

This book was well written and lovely reading. Avery has a lovely way of describing things. For example, "The soft morning air was lush as cream..." (page 59). Her characters become real, especially Tamara herself.
At her betrayal, I felt as stung and hurt as Rafaela did.

The only fault I could find with this book was that I wish it had described more of the Parisian 1920's - a time period that I find fascinating.

Recommended. ( )

In her novel, The Last Nude, Ellis Avery provides a vivid portrait of the Parisian art scene in the Jazz Age in a story featuring real people in intimate relationships with fictional characters. The narrator of most of the novel, Rafaela Fano, is apparently fictional but is probably suggested by the experiences and accounts of young women like her. She is an American teenager, half Italian and half Jewish in her ethnicity, who is sent by her family for an arranged marriage in Italy. Objecting, she escapes from the custody of her aunt/chaperone and jumps ship in Marseille, from whence she makes her way to Paris.

She survives for a year, 1926-27, doing odd jobs and resorting to prostitution when she has no other option. Then she has a chance encounter with the artist Tamara de Lempicka, who is an historical figure, one of the most popular portrait painters of her generation, a prominent leader of Art Deco in the field of painting. The Polish-born but cosmopolitian Lempicka, a refugee from the Bolshevik Revolution, hires Rafaela as a model. Soon they are also lovers. Lempicka was apparently bisexual and was a champion of the erotic frontier as well as the avant garde in the arts.

Rafaela falls in love wtih Lempicka, only to be devastated when she learns that the artist has been using her as a sexual plaything and inspiration for her art and career- but doesn't love her in return. While the affair lasts, Rafaela reveals her talent for clothing design and the craft of dress-making and she encounters Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, who championed James Joyce and published his Ulysses when no publisher in Britain or America would touch it. Rafaela is also intrigued to learn of the vibrant lesbian culture thriving in the Paris of Gertrude Stein.

Avery does a marvelous job of evoking the heady world of the arts in the Paris of 1927, the city that helped nurture Hemingway and Picasso, Cocteau and Ravel. It was a place of both decadence and unmatched fertility for those casting off tradition and the artistic conventions evidently rendered obsolete and irrelavant by the Great War.

The later chapters are told in the voice of Lempicka in her last months before her death in 1980. She has found herself living in Cuernavaca, living amongst other artistic expatriates from the Old World. Having married into the aristocracy, again (for her first husband was a Polish count who lost his wealth to the Bolsheviks) and achieved financial security and status as the Baroness Kuffner, she wisely recognized the rising Fascist threat in Europe in the 1930s and moved to America before the war.

She arranged for the escape of her daughter, Kizette, from occupied France in 1941 and, apparently harboring some feeling, including guilt, for Rafaela, attempted to arrange her escape as well. But Rafaela seems to have rejected the offer, a memory that haunts Lempicka in her last days. A masterful novel, The Last Nude matches the power of fiction to the richness and tragedy of history. ( )

I've tried to read this a couple of times now, and I just can't get into it. I'm having a hard time getting into the rhythm of the writing. Given that I've had this one for better part of a year now, I think I'm just going to set it aside as a DNF and give it a go again later on. Sorry!