- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo (15 Jan 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007104006
- ISBN-13: 978-0007104000
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,942,990 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The narrator of Thomas Sanchez's fourth novel teaches art history in America, but he dreams of Europe--or more specifically, of Spain. The Professor (as he identifies himself) specialises in a Spanish painter of the 1940s, Francisco Zermano, to whom he has devoted a spate of scholarly articles. He also spends hours staring at the man's paintings, trying to imagine the stories behind them. This iconographic detective is particularly curious about one bit of recurrent imagery: the body of a beautiful woman, which is rumoured to belong to Louise Collard, the painter's muse.
As Day of the Bees opens, Louise has just died alone in a small provincial village, and the Professor rushes to France to learn more about her role in Zermano's life. There he finds a pile of correspondence--and a revelation. According to legend, the artist treated Louise cruelly and abandoned her. Yet the letters reveal a deep and doomed love, one which is forever shattered when Louise is raped by a platoon of enemy soldiers (whom she later describes in her letters as "bees", a wonderfully eerie motif). Zermano, already beaten with a tire iron, is forced to watch the entire event. Here Louise recalls how the rape ruined her life, and its paradoxical resemblance to the redemption of true erotic love:
I have discovered something unnerving--that a woman in sexual ecstasy with her man forgets all detail; when it's over she wants to return and explore this abyss that still makes her tremble. The same thing can happen when she is raped, but for a different reason. Where joy once deleted memory, horror now destroys it. In two acts in her life can a woman lose all consciousness: in the act of lovemaking, and in rape, its cruel parody.After discovering Louise's letters, many of them never sent, the Professor embarks on a search for the ageing Zermano, hoping to help set the record straight. In these chapters, the violent and tragic love story at the heart of Day of the Bees is nicely counterbalanced by an obsessive academic's comedy of errors. --Emily White
Review
Praise for the author’s previous novels:
Rabbit Boss:
‘Beautiful, poetic, powerful’
Times
‘Rare and wonderful’
Washington Post
Zoot-Suit Murders:
‘May be the best of the home-front novels of World War II’
Los Angeles Times
‘A great novel of love, war and politics. Like A Farewell to Arms…’
Le Monde, Paris
Mile Zero”
‘Dazzling… a masterpiece’
New York Times
‘Mythmaking and magisterial’
Vanity Fair
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The way that the author combines his story with that of Louise's 50 years previously is very sentively done and you find yourself craving to hear about each. This book highlights the awful reality of France during the 2nd World War and how it affects peoples lives, but all the way through the message that love is a powerful and truly wonderful brings you hope. A definite must read.
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