Set in late 19th Century Paris, Cathy Marie
Buchanan’s THE PAINTED GIRLS transports you to another time and place with such
evocatively rich sensory detail that you’ll find yourself immersed in the
clatter and clamour of those narrow streets, your head turning at the imagined
scents wafting from the local boulangerie.
Impeccably researched, Buchanan’s narrative peels apart the
darker criminal elements that were inevitable pieces of the lives of the
impoverished class at the same time that Zola’s words played on Paris’s stages
and les petits rats trained and
performed in the corps at the Paris
Opera Ballet.
If you’ve ever seen a copy of Degas’s sculpture Little
Dancer Aged Fourteen, you have already met the protagonist of Buchanan’s tale:
Marie van Goethem, a petit rat
herself who posed as the paid model over the course of several months, under
Degas’s mindful gaze. The painted girls of the title are the van Goethem
sisters, Antoinette, Marie and Charlotte, who, after the early death of their
father and due to the alcoholism of their mother, are required to make their
way in the world, earning money in order to live.
I remember seeing a copy of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen here in Toronto at the AGO in
2003 and marveling not only at the appropriate posture for a dancer and the
open fourth position in which her feet are placed, but also at Degas’s
fingerprints that remained visible after his wax maquette was alchemized into a
bronze. And, how fragile and young she seemed immortalized by one of the finest
sculptors of his time.
19th Century Paris was a rough place, if you
weren’t wealthy. Girls especially had to make difficult choices if they were
going to survive. In THE PAINTED GIRLS, Cathy Marie Buchanan focuses her
unflinching eye on the struggles of the van Goethem sisters and makes you
believe, through her craft, that every moment she unravels is true. True to the
core.
This is a novel that will work its way into your heart and
leave an indelible mark.
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