Villa America

Product Information

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ There are very few villas with an open plan living space, that opens out onto a terrace, from which you can truly appreciate the majestic sunsets that adorn Mustique. Villa America sits high enough up the hillside that you can see the tops of the palm trees, the Caribbean Sea and the Grenadines beyond. Perfection, particularly when holding a Rum Punch.

In the afterword, Klaussmann suggests that the novelist’s task is to explore the unexplained. She is intrigued by Gerald’s sexuality, seeing his well-documented ambivalent masculinity as signifying repressed homosexuality, so she has invented a character and a storyline to delineate this. We know that one of the Murphys’ parties featured caviar flown in by a local pilot from the Caspian Sea. Klaussmann forges this pilot an identity as Owen Chambers, an American who ends up having a tortuous and ultimately tragic affair with Gerald. In a novel that is profitably courageous in entering the heads of almost all its characters, Owen’s point of view is represented almost as frequently as Gerald’s and Sara’s. Propelled by the drama-filled foibles of nearly every prominent lost generation figure a history buff could wish for, Klaussmann's atmospheric prose contains a treasure trove of trivia for fans of the era. These moments of life-enhancing vitality enable Gerald and Sara to feel that their creed has been successful. But if it is life that is created by their imaginative vision, then it is life that is destroyed when the vision fades. As in Tender Is the Night, Klaussmann presents the imaginative idyll as necessarily transient. The tragedy that ensues is all the more terrible because of its disturbing formal consonance with the story they have brought into being. “Something can always happen,” Sara tells Gerald towards the end of the novel, “especially when you think you’re safe.” She is proved horribly right when they are left grieving for a broken world that can no longer be enriched by fantasy. What a gorgeous and profoundly moving book. I've been obsessed with the Murphys since I was a young teen...and Liza Klaussmann's novel felt both like it was utterly 'true' to their legend and yet also new and vital. I can't wait for the whole world to get to read it. Sinuous and striking, heartbreaking and strange, Costalegre is heavily inspired by the real-life relationship between the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen. Acclaimed author Courtney Maum triumphs with this wildly imaginative and curiously touching story of a privileged teenager who has everything a girl could wish for except for a ...This act of inventive licence enables Klaussmann to conjure a satisfying plot. Where a more rigorously accurate biographical novel such as Colm Tóibín’s The Master , about Henry James, is built up slowly out of indistinct encounters and moments of ambivalence, Villa America is unusual for its genre in its pace and symmetry. The price is a loss of authenticity. In Tóibín’s novel, James seems steadily to emerge from the shadows, like a figure in a painting that is being carefully cleaned. We are left trusting the fiction to illuminate the biography. In Klaussmann’s novel, Gerald and Sara leap on to the set in full Technicolour but we cannot quite believe in the representation. On the coast of Antibes they built Villa America, a fragrant paradise where they invented summer on the Riviera for a group of bohemian artists and writers who became deeply entwined in each other's affairs. There, in their oasis by the sea, the Murphys regaled their guests and their children with flamboyant beach parties, fiery debates over the newest ideas, and dinners beneath the stars. Klaussmann is a magnificent storyteller. Luminous, rich and superbly plotted, VILLA AMERICA swept me up into the deeply human, beautifully drawn lives of the Murphys and their dazzling circles of friends and family. This novel moves at a gallop but I kept stopping to marvel at the subtlety, the grace and the firework prose. I absolutely loved it. The lives of certain artistic figures make for compelling fictional subjects, gaps in the official versions of their lives opening up what Liza Klaussmann aptly calls a “shadowland” of novelistic possibility. The members of the Bloomsbury Group, for example, or the bright young things who cavorted on the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s and 30s: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, and the “lost generation”.

For Klaussmann, as for the Murphys themselves, the question now becomes whether their memories of happiness can remain a force for redemption. “The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden,” Fitzgerald wrote to Gerald and Sara as they tried to make sense of their loss. If nothing else, the moments of painfully recollected radiance provide confirmation that something precious has been at stake in the tragedy. The entire James Villas team would like to thank each and every customer that has ever booked with us, it has been a pleasure being part of your holiday experiences for so many years. It was, for a while, a charmed life, but these were people who kept secrets, and who beneath the sparkling veneer were heartbreakingly human. When a tragic accident brings Owen, a young American aviator who fought in the Great War, to the south of France, he finds himself drawn into this flamboyant circle, and the Murphys find their world irrevocably, unexpectedly transformed. I believe so in us,” Gerald Murphy announced in a letter to his wife Sara in 1918, “it is my creed – we can do anything ourselves.” Defying the destruction of war and the constraints of their puritanical American families, they pursued a vision of creation together. He became a painter, she gave birth to three children and together they created a house, the sumptuous Villa America on the French Riviera, where a whole “lost generation” of artists could congregate to turn life into art. Among their visitors were Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, who would make the house famous as the setting for Tender Is the Night. Customers with bookings that return on or before 30 th November 2023 will be unaffected by the closure and their bookings will go ahead as planned.