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Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

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2365113,946 (3)11
"This witty companion to Rameau's Nephew, Diderot's light-footed masterpiece, traces the vagaries of a young woman's life as it begins to duplicate the surprising gyrations of an eighteenth-century lascivious novel she has uncovered. Along the path of temptation, love, lust, folly, and reconciliation through the sophisticated labyrinth of contemporary Manhattan, we join this delightful young Candida on her cockeyed quest for truth." "Margaret Nathan is the scholarly though mortifyingly forgetful author of The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny, an unlikely best seller celebrated by feminists and by deconstructionists, and soon to be a television movie. Happily married to a benevolently egotistical Columbia professor, Margaret seems blessed - until she finds herself seduced by the libertine novel she has discovered in the library. Thus begins a series of amorous contretemps that plunge Margaret into the maelstrom of contemporary sexual practice, until she is washed up panting on the farther shore of self-understanding." "A screwball comedy of ideas, Rameau's Niece is insightful, affecting - and hilarious. At once an affectionate satire of New York intellectual life and a moving account of a young wife's coming-of-age, it confirms the stylistic accomplishment and command that critics hailed in Schine's previous fiction while advancing her work to new heights of comic complexity and psychological insight. Rameau's Niece is one of the funniest, most original, and most delightfully readable novels of the season."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
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Showing 5 of 5
The conceit that fuels this novel is a certain style of pornographic (or at least... titillating) writing that couched itself in 'philosophical' terms to hide the true content from the authorities.... Margaret Nathan, the protagonist is a successful feminist literary critic who is analyzing such a text, when she falls into a series of doubts about the nature of desire - that is - if all desire has a corporeal basis.... this leads her into thinking about adultery which leads her into doubting her husband who is a charismatic professor which leads her into some shenanigans of her own. Schine usually amuses me while being clever and occasionally more than that, insightful, but this novel became irritating after awhile as Margaret and her quirks, forgetfulness being the primary one, wilfully misunderstands everything around her. I still 'buy' the premise, but somehow or other it became tedious in the execution. Not the worst, and still, by far, a better-crafted novel than many, but not Schine's best. *** ( )
  sibylline | Jul 12, 2014 |
Wonderful, my favourite of hers so far. Margaret has a lovely husband, a terrible memory, and a surprise bestseller under her belt, an edition of a post-Revolutionary anatomical treatise by a Frenchwoman. Now she's editing an eighteenth-century philosophical dialogue which is really the story of the seduction of the eponymous niece of Rameau -- written by a philosopher at a time when "philosopher" had a secondary meaning of dirty, dirty man (e.g. Sade, Casanova). Unfortunately she gets rather caught up in her work, and rediscovers erotic yearnings. This novel is great fun, affectionately satirical, and pokes gentle fun at the idea of the search for knowledge as a form of sexual desire. ( )
  annesadleir | Aug 26, 2011 |
"Rameau's Niece" by Cathleen Schine is a funny piece about a young woman who becomes confused, or flustered, and seeks out a sex partner outside her marriage. There is erudition on display here, but to what end? Its one posessor, protaganist Margaret, is a darn fool. The humor comes from her internal decision-making process, and from her imbecilic intellectualism. Her search for knowledge is really a search for carnal knowledge. The whole thing was annoying, is spite of the acknowledged humor.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2010/06/rameaus-niece-by-cathleen-schine.html ( )
  LukeS | Apr 7, 2009 |
Fiction, Margaret is influenced by an anonymous French manuscript, an 18th-century erotic novel she is translating, First published under the title "Rameau's Niece", New York, Ticknor & Fields, 1993, 280 pp., The title is a takeoff on Denis Diderot's novel "Rameau's Nephew. First Italian edition, under the title: "Le disavventure di Margaret", Adelphi, 1998, translated by Annamaria Biavasco and Valentina Guani, 310 pp. "Film version "The Misadventures of Margaret", 1997, directed by Brian Skeet, starring: Parker Posey as Margaret, Jeremy Northam as Edward Nathan, Craig Chester as Richard Lane, Elizabeth McGovern as Till Turner, Brooke Shields as Lily ( )
  Voglioleggere | Oct 4, 2008 |
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"This witty companion to Rameau's Nephew, Diderot's light-footed masterpiece, traces the vagaries of a young woman's life as it begins to duplicate the surprising gyrations of an eighteenth-century lascivious novel she has uncovered. Along the path of temptation, love, lust, folly, and reconciliation through the sophisticated labyrinth of contemporary Manhattan, we join this delightful young Candida on her cockeyed quest for truth." "Margaret Nathan is the scholarly though mortifyingly forgetful author of The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny, an unlikely best seller celebrated by feminists and by deconstructionists, and soon to be a television movie. Happily married to a benevolently egotistical Columbia professor, Margaret seems blessed - until she finds herself seduced by the libertine novel she has discovered in the library. Thus begins a series of amorous contretemps that plunge Margaret into the maelstrom of contemporary sexual practice, until she is washed up panting on the farther shore of self-understanding." "A screwball comedy of ideas, Rameau's Niece is insightful, affecting - and hilarious. At once an affectionate satire of New York intellectual life and a moving account of a young wife's coming-of-age, it confirms the stylistic accomplishment and command that critics hailed in Schine's previous fiction while advancing her work to new heights of comic complexity and psychological insight. Rameau's Niece is one of the funniest, most original, and most delightfully readable novels of the season."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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