The Queen of the Night

Beautiful, detailed and fascinating. One of my favourite books of 2016 so far.

Well, if one can get along with a style of un-punctuated literature . . . Very odd. Strange plot too. Our heroine is trying to be all things to all people.

In September 2017, a fairly large group met at The LGBT Center to discuss "Queen of the Night" by Alexander Chee. This was a BIG book and even though we read it over the summer, a number of people couldn't finish it. Some didn't finish it because it was such a big book but others abandoned it because of its impenetrable language."Queen of the Night" takes places in late 19th-century frontier America and early 20th-century Europe (Paris and a few other cities). It's an operatic story full of plot twists, unbelievable story contrivances, beautiful custom ball gowns, spies, dazzling jewels, as well as handsome and cruel leading men. It's a historical novel that mixes real events within a rich fantasy.Much of our discussion unpacked some of the historical events, which all seem pretty true (again, remembering that they're interpreted as fantasy), based on real events and characters with Wikipedia pages. It's helpful to know about Napoleon III, the Franco-Prussian war, and the Paris Commune but not essential -- and if you don't know anything, you'll learn a bit. Other parts of our discussion revolved around opera, which once again seemed true. Similarly, it's helpful to know a little about opera plots, opera singers, and the opera "fach" system, but the book gives enough information to keep you informed. You'd better enjoy descriptions of gowns and jewels, which are threaded throughout the novel.The biggest discussion centered on the language. The novel is very well reviewed and many of us wanted to like but had a hard time. Everyone thought that it needed an editor to cut it down to size. Several readers stopped reading after a few chapters and others after 100 pages. Chee's style is often too verbose. A number of readers thought it was poorly written. Those of us who plowed through were interested in the story and the outcome but I don't think that anybody felt compelled to finish it.I enjoyed reading "The Queen of the Night," but when I put the book down I had to remind myself "I'd better finish this." I was never compelled to read another chapter or get to the end. I thought some individual scenes and occurrences were spectacular (like arias in an opera) but then followed by pages of drivel (like much of the emotive and silly repetition that drives me crazy in opera). It's sort of the opposite of "a page turner." Having said that, the ending is very satisfying although perhaps (once again) over written.A few observations:-- Sometimes the language in the book is so dense that I found it difficult to read very carefully. And the narrator-diva's self-analysis and meditations are often tedious and not helpful in advancing the plot or the character.-- Chee is a gay author but there's only very minor gay content in the novel (unlike his only previous novel "Edinburgh"). But opera seems "gay" and there's something about this story and diva that seems to give the novel a gay sensibility. Maybe it's all the gowns and jewels.-- The action in the novel is often romantic, fantastic, and soap-opera-ish, much like opera plots. The plot is episodic. Characters often seem thin or poorly defined, and motivations are often hard to discern. A couple of times I lost track of why something was going on. The psychology of the opera-singer narrator is sometimes hard to understand.-- One of the problems of the psychology of the narrator might be that she never really knows herself. Her sense of self-preservation is strong but she seems unaware of who she really is. She's often just a diva wearing fabulous gowns and jewels. (Uh huh, I mentioned fabulous gowns and jewels again.)

This was an amazing novel. As the author said in his notes, this was his take on an opera being done in the form of a novel. Hewas correct. The plot, the characters, the themes, the structure--they are all opera. Opera is huge, overblown often, full of emotion,often with very unbelievable plot twists. BUT, we are drawn to opera for those very reasons. The comments from reviewers about allthe "boring" details seem weak. This is the world to be created, and Chee does it well. Really, at the end, Lilliet's story is just beginning as she isback in America, with the potential of seeing her composer again in England. The further the story goes, the more insight she has aboutwho she is and what her life until this point has been about.

“I was inside my lover’s opera, I knew, very near the ending. If the curse was true, and it did seem to rise up around me, as if it would become the very ship that would take me back to America, then I would sing for Aristafeo at least once more, somehow, before losing my voice forever – perhaps regaining my soul if it had ever really been lost. His opera and its fate for me even protecting what had been true so far of us, may be true once again: Aristafeo delivered to me, his steps away from me once again leading back to me in some way neither of us could imagine. If not, I would never see him again. But the only way to know was to go away and see.”Is this comprehensible to you? No? Is that because you haven’t read Alexander Chee’s novel to this point? No, it’s not. I have read the entire 561 pages and can confirm that this tortured rambling means nothing to me either. The time-worn story of the beautiful girl from nowhere who becomes a great star can be done poorly (Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter) or well (Fay by Larry Brown). Here it is done very poorly indeed. Here every hackneyed trope of the genre is half-developed and then buried under flabby, meandering prose. Chee tries to invest his tale of the nameless farm girl who becomes a great singer with profundity, mystery and metaphysics at the expense of clarity and meaning. In the attempt to make his story mythic, Chee leaves everything muddied, vague and inchoate. There’s a deal of some sort, a curse of some sort, a secret of some sort, a plot of some sort, but the reader really has little understanding of what they are. This confusion and frustration means a boring read.This is typical – “Before I could ever hope to fear that an opera role would control my life if I took it up, I feared this role already controlled me, choosing me before I chose it, as if the opera hid some god of the ancients inside it, determined to make me his plaything. This was no punishment, no price to be paid, this hand was not my mother’s God, nor her ghost, nor did it seem providential – the spiritual mechanisms I knew or feared previously were not engaged here. This was something else altogether, determined and intent on its own satisfactions.”There is the occasional spark. When our heroine’s friend is being moved on from the brothel at which they both worked she reflects – “But if a circus was a family you had to audition for, a maison close was a family that would sell you as a compliment”. Passages describing the routines of handling the Empress’s outfits, famine in Paris and dress descriptions are sometimes engaging. But these are drowned in endless washes of apparently esoteric import, pages of description of the plots of operas (real and imagined) and heavy-handed overuse of the symbolism of angels, wings, disguises, voicelessness and magic jewels.To be fair Chee could perhaps write if he tried (or if he stopped trying so hard, perhaps). This almost works -“The wind turned and the rain flensed me then, the cold spray shocking me. More lightning came, more thunder. I watched the bolts fly down and strike Paris and wished to be struck also. To be consumed by the storm. I wanted to run the silver rooftops of the city until I was taken up, and if I was a Vila now, watch as my arms turned to swan’s wings lifting into the sky. Wreaths of lightning for my crowns, and palaces of thunder, the size of mountains, mine to command. This would be how I would leave, and I would never return.”But for this occasional almost-gem, the reader must wade through hundreds of pages like the following. (NB this next passage is apparently a pivotal moment toward the end of the story but, but given its opaqueness, we don’t think a spoiler warning is necessary)-“I knew the tenor meant for all this to enlist me, somehow. This gift was meant to deny the very real distance between us, a distance he at least knew was there even if he could not admit to it or know it for what it was, and this was what he sought to close now in order to begin whatever next life he believed waited for us. He wanted me to believe I was as he believed I was, his beloved, the recuperating invalid, nearly well, and apparently, if I understood him, a hero in the war, if unwillingly and unknowingly. But he could never close this distance between us because he still did not know why I had been returned to him He was gathering everything in himself to keep me here forever, sure he would succeed even as another plan was already in motion to keep us apart – a plan set in place by the man who had always controlled him.”By this point, I had no idea where these characters were, or what they were on about. Nor did I care. Avoid.