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From the prize-winning author of Seating Arrangements comes an exquisitely written, fiercely compelling glimpse into the demanding world of professional ballet and its magnetic hold over two generations.
Astonish Me is the story of Joan, a young American dancer who helps a Soviet ballet star, the great Arslan Rusakov, defect in 1975. A flash of fame and a passionate love affair follow, but Joan knows that, onstage and off, she is destined to remain in the shadows.
After her relationship with Arslan sours, Joan decides to make a new life for herself. She quits ballet, marries a good man, and settles into the rhythm of Californian life with their son, Harry. But as the years pass, Joan comes to understand that ballet isn’t finished with her yet: for there is no mistaking that Harry is a prodigy. Inevitably Joan is soon pulled back into a world she thought she’d left behind and back to Arslan.
Gripping and dramatic, Astonish Me is a story about the nature of talent, the choices we must make in search of fulfilment, and how we can never truly escape from the secrets of the past.
‘So graceful, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises’ Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
‘Shipstead is a gifted writer who examines families and relationships in a poignant, insightful way’ Stylist
‘Étonnez-moi, Diaghilev famously challenged Jean Cocteau: ‘Astonish me.’ That’s a fair description of what Maggie Shipstead did to me on nearly every page of this impressive novel. Like its subject, the ballet, this book is intricately choreographed, technically demanding, yet seemingly relaxed, written in a prose of great emotional range and acuity. I will be paying close attention to Shipstead’s career from here on in’ Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot
‘Joyously good’ Daily Mail
‘Outrageously gifted’ Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
‘The smart money has to be on Maggie Shipstead winning a Pulitzer before she is 50’ Allison Pearson
Astonish Me
Maggie Shipstead
For two beloved friends:
NICHOLAS,
who knows about the place where art and life meet, and
MICHELLE,
who goes to the ballet with me
Table of Contents
Praise for Maggie Shipstead
Part I
September 1977—New York City
November 1978—Chicago
June 1982—Southern California
August 1984—Disneyland
October 1985—Southern California
Part II
February 1973—Paris
March 1974—New York City
January 1975—Toronto
February 1976—Paris
Part III
April 1986—Southern California
December 1987—Southern California
March 1990—Southern California
April 1991—Southern California
July 1992—Upstate New York
May 1993—Southern California
July 1994—New York City
Part IV
July 1977—New York City
December 1995—Southern California
May 1998—New York City
August 2000—Upstate New York
April 2002—New York City
Part V
February 1973—Paris
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Maggie Shipstead
In the wings, behind a metal rack crowded with bundles of cable and silk flower garlands and the stringless lutes from act 1, two black dachshunds lie in a basket. They are awake but motionless, their small, uneasy eyes fixed on the dancers who come smiling and leaping offstage and give themselves over to violent exhaustion, standing stooped, hands on hips, heaving like racehorses. The dancers grab fistfuls of tissues from boxes mounted to the light rigs with gaffing tape and swab their faces and chests. Sweat patters on the floor. A stagehand pushes an ammonia-smelling mop around. The pas de deux begins. Two Russian stars are out alone in the light, both defectors. The surface of the stage has the dull shine of black ice; rosin dusts it like snow.
Ordinarily, members of the corps do not dare acknowledge the dogs, but Joan Joyce crouches and strokes their long backs. She fingers their velvety ears and smooth little skulls. The creatures shrink away into their basket, but she persists. In the shadows, other corps girls stand waiting in a clump, tutus overlapping like a mat of stiff lavender blossoms.
“What are you doing?” one of them whispers. “You can’t touch those.”
Joan’s roommate Elaine Costas, a soloist, is sitting against the wall and stretching. Her pointe shoes are pressed together at the soles like hands in prayer, her face bent to their arches. Her costume is yellow, the bodice embroidered with gold. “If Ludmilla were going to murder Joan,” she says, looking up, “she would have done it already.”
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