Catherine Texier - Panic blood

PANIC BLOOD

Eva, a Franch chanteuse, is raising her young daughter, Mimi, in a once-elegant Times Square hotel with the help of Albertine, an aging French dressmaker. Young, beautiful and unabashedly sensual, Eva has carved out a paradoxically secure life for herself and her daughter in the sordid New York City neighborhood known as the Deuce. When Eva isn’t singing, she’s making extra money as Lola, of Lola’s Love Phone Fantasies, or making love to her tough, guitar slinging, boyfriend, Johnny. Their unconventional but secure existence is shaken by the arrival of Mimi’s father, Frank, a black musician who had vanished before Mimi was born, reappears and announces he wants to “get to know” his daughter and her “get to know him.” Eva’s safety and peace of mind are threatened and the life she has so precariously constructed begins to fall apart…

Provocative, haunting, and filled with unremitting suspense, Panic Blood portrays one woman’s struggle against the dangers lurking beneath the surface of the modern urban world.
Authentic and ominous, Panic Blood is an ambitious and fully realized novel by a very talented young writer.

Excerpted reviews :

“A surprisingly good read… The novel generates a sort of hard-boiled cynicism.”
The New York Times Book Review.

“For ultra-sophisticated readers.”
Library Journal

“The lineage here will be traced back to Selby, Kathy Acker, Anaïs Nin, Jim Thompson, Crane, Dreiser, Zola – to David Lynch’s films. All there. But this is really a Proustian novel, a novel of memory and desire. If the blues could be a novel, this is what it would be like. Courage, beauty, earned respect. These are the people Chekhov writes about: not for sale, finally.”
American Book Review

“Texier writes with the kind of restless energy which continually suggests the fluidity and danger of white-water rapids – it has the same cruel beauty of potential death hidden beneath the rushing flow of life. It is also a sexy book, with Eva’s private sexuality promoted as an inevitable, unstoppable force to be relished, embraced and indulged. But ultimately, it is about the price of staying alive as a woman.” Time Out (London)

1/2

Excerpted reviews:

“Panic Blood] makes for distinctly contemporary, hyper-urban and raw reading.”
The Sunday Times (London)

“Texier is …an extremely talented writer. She has an astonishing visual imagination that animates every detail of the book: Eva, with her emerald-green bustier, black hair in a twisted bun, carmine mouth and black Bakelite bracelet, is unforgettable. Similarly, wild child Mimi with her “sugary, oily” curls. Texier has great taste and delicacy when writing about sex, and combines powerful pornography with impeccably stylish sensual allure.”
New Statesman and Society (London)

“A poetic, personal story of survival in New York… [written] with delicate starkness.”
Montreal Mirror

2/2

Excerpted reviews:

“A sensuous, devoted piece of work that works hard to evoke French domesticity and later the headily foreign atmosphere of colonial Vietnam.” The Miami Herald

“[An] evocative, erotic and enjoyable story.” The Sunday Telegraph (London)

“A marvelous achievement, a historical novel that reads less like an invention than like a discovery, a love story that has sprung to life of its own accord from an old trunk. Graceful, subtle and vivid.” Paul LaFarge, author of Haussmann, or the Distinction

“Romantic… Echoes of both Madame Bovary and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening suffuse a nevertheless inventive and artfully composed delineation of a beguiling and complicated woman’s arduous journey toward self-understanding. A subtly textured fourth novel.” Texier’s best yet. Kirkus Review

“Elegant and affecting.” Scotland on Sunday

“Elegant as a pair of satin gloves, Catherine Texier’s Victorine is the enchanting narrative of a unique woman… This is a seductive work of art.” Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Crescent

------------------

3/3