Publishers Weekly
Cooley (The Archivist) delivers a craftily plotted, multilayered Manhattan adventure involving the incongruous intersection between an American perfumer and the Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1999, middle-aged Camilla Archer co-owns, with her ex-husband, a West Village theater accoutrements store and nurtures Danny, the 25-year-old daughter of Camilla's recently deceased cousin, Eve. Danny's true father is unknown, and she besieges Camilla who has her own issues with her deceased perfumer father, Jordan with inconvenient questions. Backstory: Camilla's mother died while giving birth, and the infant Camilla was brought to New York to live with Eve's parents. Eventually, Eve fell in love with her uncle Jordan, to devastating results. Meanwhile, a witty interloper narrator, who calls himself Meyerhold's doppelg nger, recounts the strange, brief encounter between Jordan and the Russian director Meyerhold in the 1920s. This narrator is a kind of dream-meister, who urged Meyerhold on a course of denial with his Soviet interrogators, to no avail, and stages Camilla's dreams about her father, whom she hasn't truly let go. Cooley demonstrates a solid grasp of the making of a perfume industry "nose," as well as the hip insouciance of the longtime Manhattanite. The narrative is set up as layers of theatrical contrivance, and the Meyerhold slant lends a compelling artifice to this quirky production. Agent, Deborah Schneider. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Camilla Archer is being stalked, but it's not what you think; her pursuer introduces himself as doppelg nger to legendary Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and he visits Camilla in her dreams, intent on assuring that Meyerhold's quintessence, or "mental scent"-those "incorporeal energies dispersed at every human being's death"-finds a new home in Camilla. The connection isn't entirely odd, as Camilla's father, a perfumer whose wife died in childbirth, once arranged to have Meyerhold design a perfume bottle. But however intriguing the Meyerhold episodes, they aren't all that convincing either, and they rub up oddly against the contemporary story. Camilla really does need help (but Meyerhold's?): she's facing the death of cousin Eve, with whom she grew up, as well as questions from Eve's daughter, Danny, about her paternity. Yet in the end it is Danny, along with Camilla's former husband, Sam, and pal Stuart, who rescues Camilla from a lifelong emotional bind. Camilla's story is affecting and the writing as fine as you would expect from the author of The Archivist. But however imaginatively conceived, this story hangs together uneasily. For Cooley fans and venturesome readers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/05.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Russian director commandeers a woman's dreams, forcing her to redefine her tortured notions of family, in Cooley's second (after The Archivist, 1998). Camilla Archer, daughter of deceased master perfumer Jordan Archer, should be happy. The owner of a theatrical curio shop in Manhattan, she's enjoying a playful affair with consummate handyman Nick. Her group includes Stuart, a wisecracking gay mentor, her ex-husband Sam (they split because she didn't want children) and her cousin Eve's daughter, Danny. But Camilla's dreams are being stage-managed by a mysterious masked figure who will be revealed as the spirit-essence of Vsevolod ("Seva") Meyerhold, a Soviet theater director eliminated in a Stalinist purge. He designs Camilla's dream-plays in order to groom her as a worthy repository of Meyerhold's contrary imagination, which calls for the expression of sorrow through cartwheels and taking roles as sad but ebullient commedia dell' arte characters. These unsettling nocturnal events prod Camilla to come clean with her intimates, whose fierce loyalty to our prickly and recalcitrant heroine is rendered believable by Cooley's assured yet unassuming eloquence. What does Camilla, at age 50, have to hide? Plenty-like having assisted, 20 years earlier, in the suicide of her terminally ill father. Eve, whom Camilla grew up with (and who has now recently died of meningitis), was always obsessed with Jordan, and even now Camilla (whose birth-unplanned-caused her mother's death) still harbors resentment of Jordan's seeming preference for Eve, a reference that may have resulted in the quasi-incestuous coupling that may have resulted in Danny. Though visceral imagery and scented symbols infuse and deepenthe narrative, there are times when the interludes of Meyerhold's real-life ordeal threaten to trivialize the present-day story. Still, motifs of artful disguise and neglectful or surrogate parentage intersect like nested Russian dolls as these curiously joined lives play out in an atmosphere as insular and fractious as that created by a cell of feuding Bolsheviks. Cerebral yet heartfelt exercise in connecting unlikely dots.
