KINGS reasonable in Canada

My Bantam editor, Anne Groell, wrote to tell me that The Fall of the Kings has just gone back to press for another printing of many more copies - hurray! - and with a new, lower cover price in Canadian loonies, reflecting the US$ miserable fall against world currencies (- she didn't say that. I said that.).

Coincidentally (OK, actually while lazily googling my own damn webpage) I just came across a well-written, thoughtful, deep, and - I think - accurate review of The Fall of the Kings, written a couple years after the book came out by the admirable Robert M. Tilendis for Rambles.net. Here are some of my favorite bits - or you can read the whole review here.

In The Fall of the Kings, Kushner and her collaborator, Delia Sherman . . . avoid the usual devices of heroic fantasy; 'magic' is a matter of the workings of myth on the minds of men, making those places within each of us that respond to those motifs and stories that resonate in our deepest levels of engagement the real substance of the story.
( Read more... )

As deliasherman, looking reading over my shoulder, just sighed, "Wow! That's the novel we were trying to write!"

cyrano

Saw the Kevin Kline Cyrano de Bergerac production this afternoon. The staging was just swell; the acting ranged from pretty good to superb, although I must say I thought their Roxane (Jennifer Garner) was weak - too modern, and she doesn't have much of a voice for theatre. You need someone more interesting, I think, to make the objectified female love object real to a modern audience. Making her slightly Californian doesn't quite cut it. (And she hadn't matured by the last act; 15 years of dignified mourning were supposed to have changed her!) Besides, we need to see what makes her lovable. Which led me to think about writing something from her P.O.V. As I walked home down Broadway I thought, "Oh, there will be swordfights and cloaks in this one, too, but too bad there's no way for boy/boy romance this time around, ha ha" - but a quick look at Wiki told me how wrong I was! As a French Cyrano site puts it, Savinien est bien ami avec d’Assoucy – amis très intimes parait-il, mais... cela ne nous regarde pas.... They were both libertins (which may sound like libertines and is probably where it came from, but was originally from the Latin libertinus, meaning a(n intellectually) freed slave - i.e., a "free-thinker"). I knew Roxane was supposed to be a Precieuse from the Parisian women's salons, and was hoping she could be part of the Mme d'Aulnoy fairy-tale circle, but she's a generation too early; the Cyrano events take place ca. 1640 (Siege of Arras), and d'Aulnoy was born ca. 1650, publishing in 1680s. So a historical Roxane (who only kind of existed) would have been in with the Rambouillet Salon crowd instead.

Anyway, research rambles also led me to this, which I felt sure no true swashbuckling fan would want to miss.

The other best part of the performance was the Audience: many women behind us who sounded like they were straight from a TV sitcom about ladies from Queens at a matinee. I can't remember what they said, exactly; it was more the way they said it. And they sobbed loudly and recklessly over the ending. I do remember one saying, "I don't remember the ending being like that. I thought he got the girl!"

And at the end of Part I, right after Roxane reveals her marriage to Christian to the jealous Comte de Guiche, another woman behind us asked her companion, why the sudden marriage? Because the count, her friend explained with a faintly Southern accent, had been planning to bed her down first.
- To what?
- To bed her down.
- Oh. Could they do that?
- Yes. Because he had all the power.

Just so.