The Violins of Saint-Jacques

By Patrick Leigh Fermor

Book Overview

"Mr. Fermor's elegant rococo fantasy about a volcanic eruption on an imaginary Caribbean island is just close enough to reality to raise a genuine shiver--possibly even a genuine tear. In truth, it is a small timeless masterpiece." --Phoebe Lou Adams, The Atlantic

An NYRB Classics Original

Patrick Leigh Fermor's only novel displays the same lustrous way with words as his beloved travel trilogy (A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road), the memoir of his youthful walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This slim book starts with the meeting of an English traveler and an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman on an Aegean island. He is captivated by her painting of a busy Caribbean port in the shadow of a volcano, which leads her to tell him the story of her childhood in that town back at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tale she unfolds, set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, is one of romantic intrigue and decadence involving the descendants of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. Then, on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ball, a whole world comes to a catastrophic and haunting end.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590177827
• ISBN13: 9781590177822
• Release Date: July 2017
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.9" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Small and perfectly formed

This gorgeous book, so dense in description and evocation of another land in another time, is nearly perfect. It describes the richness and mystical turbulence of creole life in bygone colonial days under French rule. Years later, a narrator listens to the tales of a woman who, while young, spent six explosive years on the island of Saint-Jacques. She is wistful and intense and full of memory for detail. Gorgeous

Perfect "Book Vacation"

Patrick Leigh Fermor is better known for his Travel Non-Fiction works, all of which are wonderful, but this book is one of the few I know that I would describe as perfect. It is the kind of fiction that magically transports you to another place and time. The delicacy and evocative power of Fermor's narrative voice is perfect for a story that occupies (like Dunsany's Elfland)the gray and luminous region between the world we know and folk tale... Rarely are flashback stories emotionally satisfying, but this device makes the loss of St Jacques all the more poignant. The character of the Governess is one of my favorite "book-people". If you can find a copy of this little book, snap it up!