Breath and Bones - Tapa dura

"Cokal's storytelling blends the morbid and the titillating with imaginative exuberance... the story of Famke's quest...brings to mind the question Martin Amis asked of 'Lolita': how was it possible to limit her adventures to "this 300-page blue streak -- to something so embarrassingly funny, so unstoppably inspired, so impossibly racy?" "--THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Masterful. Cokal draws the reader in to a literate experience that's also a gripping tale in the tradition of great picaresque novels like Moll Flanders and Don Quixote."--Southwest Book Views "It's almost impossible not to be amused, then intrigued and finally impressed with the heroine of Susann Cokal's new novel, Breath and Bones...Cokal has a special gift for starting many of her chapters with lines that zing. Actually, each begins with some sort of quoted matter, but it is Cokal's own prose that arrests...At various points in its narrative, Breath and Bones elicits laughter, empathy, shock. But Cokal pulls our strings while maintaining a consistent, authoritative voice; she is sure of herself without being arrogant or chilly. Essentially, this is a book about art, flesh and spirit -- and Cokal delves into all three areas of her inquiry with wit but also heart."--John Mark Eberhart, The Kansas City Star "The story is a romp, in the tradition of Tom Jones, and a quinta-sensual novel with characters forever circling prey...That Cokal makes all this work is a testament to her research...[and] to her balance of the erotic with the esoteric..."--Pages Magazine "Cokal's rich language and ability to craft an intriguing tale and heroine will pull readers along as they hope for the heroine's happiness." --The Rocky Mountain News "Riveting."--LIBRARY JOURNAL "Another offbeat adventure from Cokal (Mirabilis, 2001), who sends a consumptive but dauntless Danish teenager across 1880s America in search of her lover...fun-in a kinky sort of way. An intriguing sophomore effort from a writer who definitely has her own unique voice."--Kirkus Reviews "...within it lies a historical richness that is Cokal's greatest strength, and which she used just as well in her first novel, MIRABILIS...[This] was an exciting time to be in America, with all its gritty splendor, and Cokal depicts it with authority and obvious pleasure."--PopMatters.com "This steamy historical novel (Cokal's second, after Mirabilis) chronicles the adventures-sexual and otherwise-of its consumptive, red-haired heroine, Famke, from her childhood in a late 19th-century Copenhagen orphanage to her fate in the American Wild West. [A] ...literary bodice-ripper..."--Publishers Weekly "It's quite a trick, lassoing the literary bounty of historical fiction, the sheer oddness of what people did and the words they used, and lashing it tight to a clever, irreverent, a la page voice. Susann Cokal has pulled that off in her second novel, Breath and Bones. Her language is fresh. It's bawdy. It's laugh-out-loud funny in parts. And if it's historically astute, do we care? This is fiction for fun."--The Durango Herald "A poetic, comic, tragic, and surreal story of art, love, and searching."--Richmond Magazine "Inventive...One might think the disparate elements in Susann Cokal's "Breath and Bones" incapable of being woven into whole cloth, but weave them she does with the results neatly balanced between the ridiculous and the engaging."--The San Diego Union-Tribune "As a story, Breath and Bones is definitely unique. As wordsmith, Ms. Cokal is a standout. I literally devoured this book, enticed by her skill to keep reading from first page to last...Throughout, Ms. Cokal blends fascinating characters and locations, humor and history into a splendid tale of an amazing woman and her travels. And she accomplishes the telling of her story in grand style."--The Midwest Book Review Susann Cokal's romping novel explores connections between art and sexuality through the eyes of an orphaned Danish girl, Famke, whose greatest pleasure in life is to serve as a model (and lover) for English painter Albert Castle. Famke becomes addicted not only to being looked at, but also to looking at images of herself, wholeheartedly embracing her role as sexual and artistic object...Throughout the novel she rejects the notion that sexuality is a matter for shame rather than a source of inspiration...[A] lovely adventure--exactly the kind of novel Famke herself would have relished.--NewPages.com "[L]usty, entertaining reading."--bookviews.com

In 1884, Famke Summerfugl is ousted from her convent in Denmark for ...sensuousness and pulled from servitude by a second-rate painter named Albert Castle. Loving to be looked at, and able to stand perfectly still without shivering, Famke is the ideal artist's model. When Albert takes his eight-foot masterpiece and leaves his model behind, Famke sets out over the Atlantic, convinced that she is his muse. Following Mirabilis, her highly acclaimed debut, Susann Cokal blends pre-Raphaelite painting, American brothels, Utahan polygamists, a bit of cross-dressing, a dynamite-wielding labor movement, one California millionaire, and the invention of electrical stimulation (as treatment for consumption) into a comic novel that gallops across the American west.