Judy Cuevas/Judith Ivory is a unique writer. If Nardi interprets these qualities through a blasé facade, Hannah appears more spontaneous and candid, though they can’t escape the recognition slowly enveloping them. Both leads are imperfect, ambitious and romantic, but in opposite ways, like two sides of the same coin. Where I was expecting a rather gloomy, though already knowing the author extremely well written, tale of ruined lives, overblown artistic blues and melodramatic last-minute love-induced salvations, brighten up toward the end by some improbable happier notes just to assuage the genre’s staples, I have instead encountered an introspective and eventually uplifting story filtered through a subtly humorous and disenchanted glance that I found irresistible. Oh la la, they don’t write ‘em like this anymore.
But back from a forced sojourn in a Swiss clinic, while covering the last steps on the path to rehabilitation at the family château in the country, Nardi meets Hannah Van Evan from Florida, vivacious, full of joie de vivre, outré ”Hannah with an h”, arrived at the old pile of charming stones to catalogue its valuables and to show him that maybe an authentic kind of bliss could be within his reach if only he wanted to. Now thirty-two and on the brink of complete annihilation, his blue blooded but impoverished relatives have decided to save him, with the side-benefit of engaging him off to a rich heiress and thus replenishing the house coffers. Former enfant prodige on the sculpting scene in fin de siècle Paris, his reality started to deteriorate soon following as his art lost inspiration a couple of years before, and in the best decadent fashion, he’s been able to find a sort of surrogate solace by drinking ether, keeping himself in a constant state of stupor and numbing his frustrations in elusive, synthetic bliss. "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life" as Wilde would have put it around those days, and the Aesthetic adage seems to perfectly suit Bernard “Nardi” de Saint Vallier’s case lately.
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