Petite Mort
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
'Part Moulin Rouge, part Alfred Hitchcock' Grazia
'A sly, erotic thriller concerned with doubleness and duplicity' Guardian
Mesdames et Messieurs, presenting La Petite Mort, or, A Little Death ...
A silent film, destroyed in a fire in 1914 at the Pathé studio, before it was seen even by its director.
A lowly seamstress, who makes the costumes she should be wearing, but believes her talent - and the secret she keeps - will soon get her a dressing room of her own.
A famous and dashing creator of spectacular cinematic illusions - husband to a beautiful, volatile actress, the most adored icon of the Parisian studios.
All fit together, like scenes in a movie. One with a twist that will leave you breathless ...
Beatrice Hitchman
Beatrice Hitchman is an author and academic. Her first novel Petite Mort was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Polari Prize, the HWA Debut Prize and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Prize. She currently works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton.
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Reviews for Petite Mort
20 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Absolutely outstanding. A sort of Gothic Hitchcock type story. Just read it; the less you know going in, the better.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of cinema, this is a fascinating reflection on the early days of the French Film industry: the book takes the form of an interview and switches between 1967 and 1913 as an elderly actress tells her story to a journalist.Petit Mort is an erotic thriller, stylish and multilayered, focused around a rediscovered silent film: the mystery is unraveled slowly and with a wealth of subplots and distractions before hitting the reader with a sudden and unexpected twist. Written with delicate assurance, this debut novel marks Hitchman as an author to watch Be warned however, none of the characters is particuarly likeable - especially not Adele Roux, around whom the tale revolves. The appeal she holds for the legendary [and secretly lesbian] actress Terpichore is unfathomable...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It is 1913, and Adèle Roux is a provincial girl with ambition, who dreams of the glittering world of film and becoming an actress. Determined to escape her abusive father and make her mark, she departs for Paris, but the closest she can get to fulfilling her dream is accepting a job as a costumière at the Pathé factory. When one of the directors, André Durand, sets his sights on her, she doesn’t hesitate to use her affair with him to improve her position, even when he moves her into the house he shares with his actress wife, Terpsichore. As time progresses, suppressed passions are brought to the surface and escalate in an act of violence, that has life-changing consequences for all the participants.Oh dear, it looks like I’m going to be the odd one out again with a more critical review. I liked it, for the most part, but wouldn’t rave about it like the other reviewers did, there were just too many inconsistencies in it for that, which continue to niggle even now I’ve finished the book. This is not what I have in mind when I write in a review that a novel stayed with me long after the last page has been turned.It's a slow starter and remains more of a character study until approximately two-thirds of the way through, but the promise of murder and mystery kept me going, even though I often felt my thoughts drifting off towards the next book I've got lined up. The novel is told from Adèle's point of view, in flashback, to an investigative reporter, who has been given an exclusive after a film from 1914, thought to have been lost in a devastating fire that destroyed the Pathé factory, has turned up unexpectedly. Without warning, the perspective of the first-person narrator changed to that of the journalist, and I was left confused for a minute until I had worked out what had happened, and from then on I was forewarned whenever the timeframe switched to 1967. Adèle starts to tell her tale in the present tense, then jumps to the past tense and back again, often in the same chapter, without any apparent reason, occasionally relating events out of order, which was simply puzzling at first and then became distracting and irritating. The reader is subjected to very intricate background stories for the principal characters, told in third person, that were not all necessary to understand their personalities and motivations, especially as it turns out that those stories were also related by Adèle, who cannot possibly have known all the details. On the plus side, Beatrice Hitchman's writing is lovely, and she handles her characters confidently and evokes the atmosphere of Paris before the First World War and the strained relations in the Durand household beautifully. The nature of the final twist did indeed come as a surprise but did not have me convinced for one minute. A shame, I had expected more, but I'm certain Beatrice Hitchman's name will be one to watch. A generous four stars.(This review was written as part of Amazon's Vine programme.)