Word: chloe
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...Colin feels ready to fall in love, doors begin to close "with the sound of a kiss on a bare shoulder," and the air turns sultry. This environmental adaptability is all very well in the first half of the book, when Colin's main preoccupations are his love for Chloe, for Duke Ellington's music, and for the gastronomical delights concocted by his cook. But when Chloe falls fatally ill the atmosphere of light and luxury changes. As he runs to her bedside his world literally constricts and darkens...
...Chloe dies, Colin's apartment shrinks into a prison, his records wear out, and to pay for Chloe's treatment he's forced to find work in a munitions factory, where guns are grown with the heat from human bodies...
...Vian's, is amusingly satirized as Jean-Sol Partre, the cult idol who enters packed lecture halls on elephant back, crushing his waiting fans. But when Chick, Colin's friend, sacrifices everything, including his girl-friend Alise, in order to buy Partre's work, the joke turns grisly. Chloe dies from a water-lily growing in her lungs: this is both Vian's preposterous parody of the consumptive heroines who litter romantic tradition, and a real tragedy in the context of a world where orchids grow from the sidewalk. By the time Chloe dies, here eyes "two bluish marks beneath...
...love story itself is simple to the point of banality, but set in this strange, poetic universe it becomes unforgettable. Vian's language evokes both sensuality and a kind of fragile tenderness; Chloe's skin is "amber-colored and as appetizing as marzipan," but she coughs "like a piece of silk tearing." This delicacy is poignant in the second half of the novel, as Chloe and Colin become the innocent victims of an inexplicable determinism for which no one will take responsibility. At Chloe's grotesque, horrifying funeral, Colin cross-examines Jesus...
...irresolution. The solo quartet, however, was unconscionably bad. The bass, Mr. Mac Morgan, was totally inadequate to his tasks, displaying no vestige of tone and only a certain diaphrammatic eloquence. Paul Huddleston, the tenor, was the best of the four soloists, but was unremittingly routine. The two women, soprano Chloe Owen and contralto Mary Davenport, sang like superannuated Valkyries, spoiling the quartet passage with their mettalic loudness, and obliterating every bar they touched...