Word: grandolets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...VICTORIA GRANDOLET-Henry Bellamann-Simon & Schuster...
...told him that she wanted a child he flushed darkly, swallowed hard, laughed, and began a matter-of-fact, apparently inconsequential story about all the tangled family feuds, murders, suicides, money troubles, duels, wickedness, misery. When Victoria asked him about all the Negroes with family resemblances to the Grandolets, he silenced her with a look so black and a voice so low and level that she was drenched with fear. When they decided to have a child, Victoria was conscious of an odd chilliness crawling slowly over her skin, suddenly realized: "She had never liked to be touched by anyone...
Victoria never knew why she began to torment her guests by emphasizing their stupidities. Niles did not know why he suddenly began a love affair with his cousin. Victoria did not know why she began a loveless affair with a doctor. Their neighbors, who watched the Grandolets growing richer, and Victoria becoming the cool, aloof mother of the Grandolet heir, did not know that the household was anything but successful. Victoria did not know, when the years of deception finally ended, why she looked at the columns of the mansion in the moonlight, turned her clearsighted ruthlessness against herself, began...
...Victoria Grandolet is an uneven, atmosphere-saturated novel, expertly written, distinguished by some subtle shadings in its portraits, and weakened by an overemphasis on the romanticism of the Old South. It is noteworthy because there might seem to be no earthly reason why this story of married life should come to its unhappy end. The story proceeds from highly complicated causes to effects that are always more than a little ambiguous. But in its account of the silent, invisible, termite undermining of affection and trust, the ghastly cost of the withholding of truth between man and wife, Victoria Grandolet makes...
George Washington Cable, late great Southern novelist, said that Creole society was a ship in which ladies were passengers and men the crew. The women asked passengers' questions, got sailors' answers, replied wittily and "laughed often, feeling their constrained insignificance." Victoria Grandolet might serve as a lecture with that acute observation for a text...
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