The Prodigy

By Grace Andreacchi

When a woman of a certain age develops an obsessive crush on a boy half her age, who’s more likely to get hurt? Jeffrey Sunshine is no ordinary boy but a prodigy, a singer whose voice and person alike are of an unearthly beauty. And this beauty is matched by a banality equally extreme. In this extraordinary novella the author flirts with voice and time, weaving a tale of devilish intricacy, where pity, terror and laughter chase one another through the dark labyrinths of a dream-like world. An Andromache Books title.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 17, 2025
• ISBN: 9781326377007

Grace Andreacchi

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years—sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Scarabocchio and Poetry and Fear (Andromache Books), Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra. Stories and poetry appear in both online and print journals. Her work can be viewed at graceandreacchi.com. 

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Copyright Information

The right of Grace Andreacchi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity of persons, places or events depicted herein to actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 Grace Andreacchi

All rights reserved

Published by Andromache Books, London

ISBN 978-1-326-37700-7

Cover image: Michelangelo,  from the Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco Ezekiel , detail

The Prodigy

Grace Andreacchi

butterflysmall

Andromache Books

by the same author

SCARABOCCHIO

POETRY AND FEAR

MUSIC FOR GLASS ORCHESTRA

GIVE MY HEART EASE

TWO MARTYR PLAYS

ELYSIAN SONNETS AND OTHER POEMS

Selected Reviews

Scarabocchio is a remarkable work by a remarkable writer. This masterful, stunningly imaginative, polyphonic piece is a harmonious unity of thought, imagery, and a unique technique.  It's a quantum fugue of shocking philosophies, odd lives and wild experiences woven into historical times, artistic movements, and personal fates. Its richness is inexhaustible, its depths are bottomless.

- V. Ulea, Sein und Werden

The great success of this novel is not so much the characters but the wild, often beautifully surreal, linguistic music that orchestrates our narrator’s telling of their lives.…The amazing sonority of Grace Andreacchi’s prose… Music for Glass Orchestra is in some ways about the vitrifications of our minds, how these glass harmonicas should be played, should perhaps be shattered and used to cut ourselves open again. 

                                - Review of Contemporary Fiction

Table of Contents

Copyright Information

by the same author

Selected Reviews

Foreword

epigraph

The Prodigy

About the Author

Foreword

The Prodigy, although just now being published for the first time, in fact dates from an earlier era, before its author had embarked upon that long journey into night that was to result in Poetry and Fear. A chance encounter with a then young violinist (who shall remain nameless), an unhealthy immersion in the perilous world of Thomas Bernhard, and far too many hours spent in darkened rooms alone with her favourite Handel arias induced the particular state of mind that gave rise to this little book. I have since had the pleasure of speaking with the author on several occasions and wish to assure the reading public that she no longer entertains a cruel and deliberate passion for this, or any other, beautiful boy, if indeed she has ever done so.

- Elisabeth Serafimovski

epigraph

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron felé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.

- Gustave Flaubert

The Prodigy

He was beautiful, she said, so beautiful that one looked in vain for the flaw, the tiny pimple, stray hair, patch of coarse or blemished skin that would render him human, heir to the thousand frailties of the flesh, one looked, I say, in vain, one was at last silent in the face of such perfection for what was there to say? He compelled one's love, she said. Even as a child he had this great beauty, even without genius he would have been recognized, he was destined to be a favourite from the cradle - a favourite, a courtisane, mistress to emperors and kings. He never had an awkward stage, just as his beautiful voice never changed but only grew in eloquence, virtuosity, power, so too he himself grew every day more beautiful. No, he never had an awkward stage, he made his début at the Opéra at the age of fourteen. He sang the rôle of Dido - it was but a joke, the Intendant's plaisanterie, for he knew nothing yet of music, of singing, although the voice was already sweet beyond compare and soft as the young linnet's in the bush. He was so beautiful, she said, it did not occur to me until long afterwards that he might also be stupid.

He knew nothing of his own gifts. His innocence was as radical as his beauty and that, I trust I have given you to understand, was a lusus naturae, not to be argued. He was born in that same howling American wilderness as I had been some eighteen years before him.  As far as I have been able to determine no extraordinary circumstances attended his birth - no angels sang around his cradle, no prophecies were uttered, no fairies came tripping to smooth his pillow, not even so much as a dove was disturbed from its nest on his account. As he grew in years and loveliness his innocence grew with him, it surrounded him like a bright halo and shielded him from the reality of other people. He did not notice their love, their hate. He was not really aware of them at all.

One day I realised that there was something after all. When a thing is too beautiful, when it thrusts itself too much upon our attention, drawing to itself more love than reason would warrant or piety admit, then it is no longer beautiful but horrible, an abomination, a shame to be blotted out, she said. He had eyelashes like that - she held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart - thick and glossy as an insect's wings, absurd, and ultimately defacing rather than enhancing that lovely face, and they were entirely natural, please bear that in mind, she said. I know for a fact that he used no make-up whatsoever, he scorned it, he never needed it, that face was made for the stage. Even those eyelashes from the boxes had the requisite effect, the eyes stood out like gems set in white marble, but up close it was a different story, up close they were in the worst possible taste, vulgar, sentimental, even slightly ridiculous, far too much of a good thing.

When they found him he had already been dead for several days. The flies were clustered around his body, especially the head and face where they appeared a thickly glittering incrustation of gems. He was dressed in the coat of platinum lace, the same he had worn for the last performance of Artaserse, and the flies played like living threads upon the lace, making it to shine with sudden bursts of dark and silver light. His hands were speckled black with fly dung, the nails were purple and curled away from the flesh. Then someone opened the window and the flies rose all together in a dark cloud. I saw the face - many more flies were