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Aurélie Parts I-III
Aurélie Parts I-III
Aurélie Parts I-III
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Aurélie Parts I-III

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A revolving contract to steal Hokusai's Great Wave pushes an international art thief to her breaking point. After her identity is exposed she must use all her skills to evade her pursuers.

Aurélie is a noir novella now published as a collected edition.

Novelist Chad Taylor is the author of Departure Lounge, Electric, Shirker, Heaven, Pack of Lies and The Church of John Coltrane; and the short story collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself. He was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and the Auckland University Literary Fellowship. Heaven was made into a feature film and his novels and stories are in translation. He wrote the movie Realiti which was selected for Fantastic Fest. His most recent novel Blue Hotel was shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Awards Best Novel.

"Smart, original, surprising and just about as cool as a novel can get" – Washington Post
"Enigmatic noir" – Publishers Weekly
"Effortlessly cool" – GQ
"Accomplished noir... clear and uncluttered" – Time Out

LanguageEnglish
PublisherChad Taylor
Release dateSep 30, 2023
ISBN9798215673027
Aurélie Parts I-III
Author

Chad Taylor

Chad Taylor is the author of the novels Departure Lounge, Electric, Shirker, Heaven, Pack of Lies, and The Church of John Coltrane. He was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2001 and the Auckland University Literary Fellowship in 2003. Heaven was made into a feature film, and his novels and short stories have been translated into several languages.Chad Taylor's latest novel is Blue Hotel.The New Zealand Listener named Blue Hotel as one of its Best Books of 2022: the "long-awaited return by Taylor is a dark and funny tale set in 1980s Auckland that veers from BDSM dungeons to corporate raider offices."– "Full of depth, striking characters, sparkling writing, and a rich sense of time and place" Craig Sisterson, Crimewatch– "Blue Hotel is darkest crime noir. It takes place in old fashioned newsrooms, questionable newsagencies, seedy bars, S&M clubs and cars. It's as New Zealand-as, but it's not." – Karen Chisholm, AustCrimeFictionBIOGRAPHYChad Taylor's first published fiction appeared in Other Voices: New Writers and Writing in New Zealand, Sport and Landfall. His debut novel PACK OF LIES (1993) was published in Germany as Lügenspiele. His second novel HEAVEN (1994) was made into feature film produced by Sue Rogers and directed by Scott Reynolds.Read NZ describes Chad Taylor as "a writer of contemporary short and long fiction. His novels and short stories often focus on urban transience and the shifting realities of the modern city. Unreliable or unattractive narrators are common in his writing which often deviates from the premises of genres such as futuristic fantasy, murder mystery and romance triangle. His work has a strong visual quality and often employs filmic devices and structures."The 1999 entry for the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature describes him as "a writer of uncompromisingly contemporary fictions of transience and shifting realities in the modern city. Born and educated in Auckland, where his work is largely set, he graduated BFA at Elam and has carried that interest into the strong visual quality of his writing... The fictions often work on the edge of such conventions as the murder story ('No Sun, No Rain'), futuristic fantasy ('Somewhere in the 21st Century') or romance triangle (Pack of Lies, 'Calling Doctor Dollywell'), often through unreliable or unattractive narrators... As these literary norms are subverted, perceptions of reality and identity are challenged. Strong visual representations, especially of sex and clothing, and filmic treatment with fragmentary and mobile scenes and chronology, provide metaphorical access to these internal concerns."SHIRKER was published by Canongate Books (UK) in 2000. Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, writing in Entertainment Weekly said the novel "morphs from a mystery into an exploration of passion and mortality." Published by Walker Books in the USA, SHIRKER appeared in Italian and German editions and was published by Editions Christian Bourgois in France. The novel was praised in Stern, The Guardian and Livres Hebdo. Andre Meyer in Eye wrote that "Taylor's resistance to fashionable cynicism and the paucity of pop-culture references gives Shirker a timeless quality." The Sunday Telegraph hailed it as "a beautifully written and skilfully constructed nightmare from a writer of great imagination." He was awarded a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship for literature in 2001.ELECTRIC was published in 2003 by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Editions Christian Bourgois. Electric received strong reviews in Le Figaro, The Observer and HQ magazine. The Australian's Clare Harvey applauded the novel as "rare and refreshing." Novelist Scarlett Thomas in The Scotsman described ELECTRIC as "blank, noirish, drugged-up - an intense juxtaposition of big ideas." ELECTRIC was London Time Out's Book of the Week in 2003. Roger Howard described it as a story of chaos and urban malaise:"His setting is a New Zealand you won't see in Lord of the Rings: a city suffering from the same urban malaise as glitzier metropolises on other continents. Our protagonist, Samuel Usher, is a drug addict who supports himself by recovering data from damaged computers. He falls in with a couple of drifters who occupy themselves with recondite mathematics. But the favoured activity for all three involves powders on polished surfaces. When Jules dies in mysterious circumstances, Usher sets off to find out why. Thematically, Taylor's concerns are twofold: the infinite extent of digitised culture; and the limitless flood of narcotics (not to mention the global industry behind it). Electric looks at what happens when chaos rises up to warp these apparently unassailable worlds."In 2003 Taylor was awarded the Auckland University Fellowship for Literature and appeared at the Auckland and Sydney Writers' Festivals. In the same year he was listed as one of New Zealand's Top Ten Novelists Under Forty by The Listener, which said:"What could be more topical than electricity failure? More than a device to reveal the rat underbelly of Auckland, Chad Taylor's Electric has taken service failure and its character exposing metaphors to an international audience. Secretly we are delighted to be on the map of inner-city decline. Taylor's writing is relentless, cool, focused like a police horse in a riot. "He was sustained, without knowing it, by the French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure in an artist" (Mavis Gallant) might be a credo, but fortune has a way of changing. Chad Taylor deserves it because he has real style." (Elizabeth Smither)"Chad Taylor's Electric confirms him as one of the outstanding novelists of his generation. His Auckland is a node in the global marketplace and a casino of possibilities. He writes about drug-enhanced chaos, about abundance, excess, choices - about everything grinding down towards entropy. His novels are as smooth and as aggressive as the best techno. He captures the way a whole trendy sub-culture of Auckland speaks and thus renders their mindset with satisfying, pitch-perfect precision." (David Eggleton)Chad Taylor appeared at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Literary Festivals in 2005. His short story 'Oilskin' reappeared as a short film adapted by director Josh Bridgeman. 1993's Pack of Lies was re-published in Peter Simpson's Nine New Zealand Novellas and reviewed in New Zealand Books in 2005:"Catrina takes her ex-lover Babe, now pregnant, to a surprise out-out-of-town birthday party that never materialises. There are no beaches here, only a hot pool at a seedy motel, and a relentless tone of grimy, urban nihilism that is pure Taylor. It's another clever selection on [editor Peter] Simpson's part, ending as he began with a challenging read, and implying in the trajectory from [Janet] Frame to Taylor both continuity in the NZ novella and a strong future for the genre."DEPARTURE LOUNGE (2006) was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK, Editions Christian Bourgois in France, in Italy by Edizione E/O and in the USA by Europa Editions. The novel received a starred review in the Publishers Weekly (20.02.2006) and was recently dramatised for National Radio. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post described it as "smart, original, surprising and just about as cool as a novel can get" and compared the novel's style to Raymond Chandler:His style owes a lot to Raymond Chandler and lesser apostles of noir, but at the same time it's very much his own. His prose is spare but with a strong undercurrent of emotion; "cool" certainly is the word for him, but there's a good deal of heat beneath.The Houston Chronicle's PG Koch described DEPARTURE LOUNGE as a crime novel that played with expectations of the genre:"New Zealand writer Chad Taylor plays with the crime/noir genre for his own philosophical purposes in an open-ended way that subverts reassuring convention. In Departure Lounge, we first glimpse a newscast tragedy – a plane that has vanished in Antarctica – before moving on to the book's narrator, Mark Chamberlain, as he shoots pool with Rory, a real estate developer who is short on scruples and whose apartment Mark later burgles... For all its nighttime street life of taxis and clubs, this is an oddly silent book. It is as if we move through its impeccable structure seeking resolution the same way that Mark ghosts through all those houses he breaks into. Taylor in effect has taken the not-knowing at the mystery genre's core and enshrined it, occupied its amorphous territory and made of it, as in this slight book's emotional peak, a luminous art."Chad Taylor was one of 12 New Zealand authors invited to tour France for Les Belles Etrangeres in 2006. His sixth novel THE CHURCH OF JOHN COLTRANE was published in 2009. He appeared at the Frankfurt Book Festival in 2012.In 2013 his original 2005 screenplay REALITi was produced as a feature film which premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and was selected for Fantastic Fest 2014. Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News said: "This is a deliberately paced mind-bender ... A societal science fiction horror film. The more you hang in there, the more you#re rewarded." REALITi received five nominations in the New Zealand Film Awards including Best Screenplay.Taylor's original work on Kurt Cobain featured in the art & text project Mythiq27 in Paris in 2014. In 2015 he scripted the radio version of his short story 'Close to You' for Radio New Zealand. The production was nominated for Best Drama in the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) Prizes 2016.

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    Aurélie Parts I-III - Chad Taylor

    Aurélie

    Parts I-III

    Chad Taylor

    Novels by Chad Taylor

    Blue Hotel

    The Church of John Coltrane

    Departure Lounge

    Electric

    Shirker

    Heaven

    Pack of Lies

    Reviews

    Smart, original, surprising and just about as cool as a novel can get — Washington Post

    Enigmatic noir — Publishers Weekly

    Effortlessly cool — GQ

    Accomplished noir … clear and uncluttered — Time Out

    Full of depth, striking characters, sparkling writing, and a rich sense of time and place – Craig Sisterson, CrimeWatch

    Aurélie

    Part I

    The Great Wave

    1

    Lloyds had lost $12.8 billion. GM had lost $9.6 billion. The US Senate had approved a $787 billion stimulus package. The Federal Reserve bought $1.2 trillion. The November rain sounded like birds pecking on tin.

    Clouds were moving fast across Paris. A worker in white overalls behind the riot barriers was smoking a cigarette, his back against the wind. The traffic was busy: angry horns, blurting motorcycles, police vehicles. The protestors in La Défense had surrounded the office building with bullhorns and chants. Cameras flashed as Ivo Fraine ducked into his waiting S8. The financier was small-framed, thin, athletically built but not for sport. Ivo was a scrapper who had worked his way up from poor beginnings. In newspaper photographs his wife Marie appeared elegant. Her father was in government. It was through his father-in-law that Ivo had arranged investment in oil exploration in Bakassi. The protestors angered by this business decision pelted the chauffeured Audi with eggs. The police countered with batons.

    Aurélie watched standing with her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket. After Ivo had been driven away and the demonstration had broken up she went to an internet cafe in Rue d’Odessa and logged into the Gmail account she shared with TropicalDandy which contained a single email that was never sent, only updated by either party. TropicalDandy wrote that Ivo, Marie and their two children lived in a fourth floor apartment in Passy with a Chubb monitored fire and security alarm connected to a receiving center via a dedicated 24/7 line. When not working at his office or spending time with his family Ivo’s weekly routine required spending Tuesday evenings in Bagneux.

    On a Tuesday at six Aurélie shouted herself a taxi. The apartment building at the address in Bagneux was being cleaned. The workers had chosen to not properly close the hose on the water blaster high up on the scaffolding which now dripped water across the entrance in a constant rain. Residents concerned to avoid getting wet were less scrupulous about protecting the front door’s security keypad. After an hour waiting across the street not listening to music on her broken 40GB iPod Classic Aurélie had observed the security entrance code for half-a-dozen residences.

    Ivo Fraine’s Audi pulled up outside the building quite early, around nine. Ivo’s passenger opened the door before the vehicle had stopped moving which forced the driver to brake. The woman was about Aurélie’s age with a heart-shaped face and dark curls. When Ivo stepped out to try to reason with her she took a swing at him. Ivo tried to laugh it off and she went for his face with her fists. Ivo’s driver got between the two of them and dragged his boss back to the car. The woman shouted insults at the limousine as it drove away. After it was gone she staggered in a circle running her hands through her long dark hair, cursing and stamping the ground. When her anger was finally exhausted she went into the building. A few minutes later a light came on high up in the scaffolding. The window was on the second-to-top floor. Aurélie looped the cord of her earbuds around her fingers as she wondered what Ivo and his date had been arguing about.

    She received an answer the next day at an internet café in Rue du Moulin des Prés. TropicalDandy wrote in their shared email that Ivo Fraine and his family had left for a holiday in Buenos Aires in an apartment as beautiful as so many others left vacant in the city after Videla. The financier would be gone for two weeks. No wonder his mistress was furious.

    That night a light rain was falling as Aurélie waited outside the apartment building in Bagneux. When the woman left she protected her hair with a scarf which prevented her noticing Aurélie following her to the Metro.

    Both women disembarked at Rue Saint-Maur. The Lucky Clover was a short walk from the station in a narrow side street with juvenile graffiti on the shutters. A bottle of bourbon lay smashed on the sidewalk. The music coming from inside the nightclub sounded terrible. Aurélie left the woman to go inside and took the Metro back to Bagneux . She ducked her head under the dripping scaffolding as she punched in one of the neighbours’ security code. The waiting elevator looked like a cage. Aurélie took the stairs.

    The woman’s apartment was locked. The lock on the front door was biaxial. Aurélie unzipped her narrow tools wallet. She slipped a filed blank into the lock so its revised shoulder touched the lock facing and tapped it with a screwdriver and there was a click as the lock pins jumped and the tensed key sprang back. She tucked the wallet back into the pocket of her leather jacket and stepped inside.

    She closed the apartment curtains before switching on the light. Glasses were piled in the sink. There was a whisper of movement in the radiator. Cigarette butts in the ashtray. A bent spoon burned black. The workstation was a little sliding desk. The laptop was an IBM ThinkPad X.A yin-yang button was Blu-tacked to its lid. The library books on the desk had not been stamped. Lucky Strikes, a bangle bracelet plaited from strips of reclaimed plastic, an anarchist feminist flag sticker, a ninja star, guitar picks, a leaking ballpoint pen and a matchbook for the Lucky Clover: the woman was a regular customer.

    The user name and password written on the Post-It note lying beside the ThinkPad was zoe74 / zoe74pwpw. Zoe’s machine was slow to boot up. Bookmarks for song tabs, the Federation Anarchiste (FAF), Cercle Social, the Bureau of Social Secrets. Columns from the San Francisco Examiner 1960-1971. The West African Anarkismo Newswire.

    Aurélie searched the browser cache: an online order for vitamins, the Christie’s catalogue, the weather, more news, news, boring social media. Apart from automated bill notices and spam Zoe’s email box was empty. Aurélie clicked through the folders and documents on the drive. Sixty-four gigabytes, 90 per cent full. A lot music but not enough.

    The drive had been partitioned under a different user name and password. Zoe had a whole other life in there, locked away.

    Zoe’s underwear was pegged out to dry in the bathroom. Aurélie went through the cabinet and the drawers, the cupboards, the laundry. The real medicine kit was behind the toilet cistern: a hypodermic and two needles wrapped in a rubber band. The glass hypodermic was a real antique, as smooth as a champagne flute. The blue and white capsules from the bottle with a blank pharmacy label could be ground up and injected but they were not as good as the real thing.

    Aurélie returned everything to its place. Before she left she threw herself into the corner of the desk until her ribcage was sufficiently bruised.

    *

    By the time Aurélie got back to the Lucky Clover one of the two bands playing that night had finished but entry was still full price. She paid the woman on the door who pocketed the money instead of putting it in the till. The bouncer eyed Aurélie’s pale wrist as the woman stamped it with ink.

    The proportions of the Lucky Clover would have made it an excellent shooting gallery. On the stage at the end of the room the second band was playing Louie Louie, badly. The audience were dressed like the covers of records that had been released before they were born: rappers in pressed sweats, punks with good teeth. A boy in a leather jacket and a girl in a Ben Sherman shirt were having a competition to see who could care less. Aurélie bought a warm beer in a glass scalloped with cleaning fluid and leaned against the counter not drinking it.

    Zoe was standing at the counter with a man Aurélie took to be the woman’s dealer. He was bald with a silly string moustache and a dog that did not like to be patted too hard: ne pas rapide. Aurélie had to shout to make herself heard over the band. She lifted her shirt to show the injuries she had sustained at La Defense. She yelled that the police were pigs. Bakassi stood on the coastal region between Nigeria and Cameroon. Drilling for oil would poison the delicate marshlands, Zoe shouted. After listening to the problems of the world for half an hour her dealer rolled his eyes and moved on.

    At midnight the band finished and the Lucky Clover threw everyone out and Aurélie and Zoe walked back to the Metro arm-in-arm.

    In Bagneux Aurélie stood back from the front door as Zoe fumbled with her key. The view from the apartment kitchenette was a pattern of grey saw-tooth rooftops. Zoe went into the bathroom and came out with the needle kit. Her dealer had given her the good shit this time. You have you watch these bastards, they are dishonest. She dissolved the smack in a little bubble of water in a teaspoon with a candle, stirring it with the needle tip. She drew the fluid into the needle through a cigarette filter and sat up on the counter and spread her legs and injected it and went pale and fell back and the syringe dropped out.

    Later after she stumbled into the bathroom and threw up Aurélie wiped the filth off her mouth and carried her back to the bed where she rolled wet and happy and rosily warm, tumbling in the current of her thoughts. Aurélie made herself a cup of tea.

    In the early hours of

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