The Destiny of Nathalie X

by William Boyd

Book Overview

This new collection of eleven stories by the author of The Blue Afternoon takes readers back in time from a contemporary Hollywood film shoot to World War I in Vienna, introducing an unforgettable cast of characters. Artful, witty, moving, The Destiny of Nathalie X is a confirmation of Boyd's standing as a master storyteller. 208 pp. Author tour. 15,000 print.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679767843
• ISBN13: 9780679767848
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A remarkable collection by a gifted writer

These dense, finely etched stories are my introduction to William Boyd. Such an ordinary name for such a fancy writer! The title story is set in a place I know well near LAX; indeed I can almost see the exact setting of most of the scenes, where a French director, a black auteur, as it were, is composing his film. The setting is purposely banal in the extreme: a cheap pizzeria next to a nondescript motel within litter distance of the airport, chosen instinctively to comment on the low culture of America, I suppose, when all of Hollywood and Bel Air, West L.A. and Brentwood, avec filmdom execs, etc., beckons just beyond. This is explained by understanding that "He's an artist, he don't look back," to re-gender a Bob Dylan lyric, as Boyd does on page 11.The second story, "Transfigured Night," set in Austria and Poland during the first world war, is somewhat Kafkaesque and not typical of this collection. The third story, "Hôtel des Voyageurs," begins in Paris and is rendered in a self-revelatory first person narrative that is the book's signature technique (although this is just a warm up to the near-perfection of "Alpes-Maritimes" and "The Persistence of Vision" in which Boyd's narrators give themselves away completely, much to the reader's amusement). One might call "Hôtel des Voyageurs," a one-night stand (actually afternoon) for sophisticates in which a euro trash girl plays a Comtesse that the narrator coyly, in the British manner, brags about bedding. This inadvertent self-revelation by the first person narrator is a technique that Boyd has worked to perfection.The next story, "Never Saw Brazil" continues the cosmopolitan, polyglot exposition. Boyd seems to know several European languages and is not shy about sparkling his text with italicized dialogue in a number of tongues including Portuguese. He is also very big on food and presents a variable cookbook of dishes throughout. The story, "Lunch," is almost a toast to gastronomy."The Dream Lover" and the aforementioned "Alpes-Maritimes" are set in the south of France and concentrate on love and self-discovery among twenty-something expats expressed with irony, delicacy and a kind of ultra sophistication much envied, I understand, by assistant editors at Elle and The New Yorker. (Probably also at Granta, where four of these stories first appeared.)In "Cork" Boyd presents a female narrator who has a love affair with a strange but touching man who was once in her employ in Portugal harvesting and selling cork. Here the narrator seems reliable and self-aware.The final story, "Loose Continuity" begins in 1945 at the corner of Westwood and Wilshire near UCLA were I went to school while flashing back to Germany in the twenties as the female narrator, Gudrun, recalls a lost love as she watches the workmen finish her café design.Boyd use of language is innovative and, at times, startling. Some examples:The narrator in "The Dream Lover," as he ascends to the roof of an apartment building: "

Can't say enough good

Can't say enough good about Wm. Boyd: he is hilarious, erudite, humane, urbane, witty, twisted, clever, poetic, "relatable"--everything you want in a novelist and storyteller. On a par with the great Kingsley Amis and V.S. Naipaul. Read him.