Alena

Name: Alena
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Rachel Pastan
ISBN: 9781452688381

Author: Rachel Pastan

Narrator: Carla Mercer-Meyer

Unabridged: 11 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/23/2014

Categories: Fiction, Psychological

Synopsis

At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring assistant curator from the Midwest meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. It's been two years since the tragic death of the Nauk's chief curator, Augustin's childhood friend and muse, Alena. When Augustin offers the position to our heroine (who, like du Maurier's original, remains nameless) she dives at the chance—and quickly finds herself well out of her depth.

The Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past—a past obsessively preserved by the museum's business manager and the rest of the staff. Their devotion to the memory of the charismatic Alena threatens to stifle the new curator's efforts to realize her own creative vision, and her every move mires her more deeply in artistic, erotic, and emotional entanglements. When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena's death, her loyalty, integrity, and courage are put to the test, and shattering secrets surface.

Stirring and provocative, Alena is the result of a delicious visitation of one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century on a brilliant and inventive novelist of the twenty-first.

About Rachel Pastan

Rachel Pastan's novel Alena was named an Editors' Choice in the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of two other novels, Lady of the Snakes and This Side of Married, which was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her short fiction has been published in the Georgia Review, the Threepenny Review, Mademoiselle, Prairie Schooner, and many other places. In 2014 she edited Seven Writers, a chapbook of writing inspired by exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she served as editor-at-large for several years and developed the popular blog Miranda. Pastan grew up in suburban Maryland, the daughter of a molecular geneticist and a poet, and attended Harvard College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writers Seminar MFA program. Up until recently, she taught writing at Swarthmore College and now is the editor of the Swathmorean, a small town newspaper.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffrey on September 05, 2017

”Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again". ”Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again.” If you feel the electricity of a déjà vu moment from reading those lines, it is because you have just heard an echo that has been sent down the cavernous halls of a deep passage, and the words, in......more

Goodreads review by Barbara on July 24, 2020

This book, an homage to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, follows an arc that's very similar to the original story. At the beginning of "Alena" the unnamed narrator, a young woman working as a curatorial assistant at the Midwestern Museum of Art, is attending the Venice Biennale (contemporary art show) w......more

Goodreads review by switterbug (Betsey) on February 21, 2014

ALENA is a reinvention or homage to du Maurier’s REBECCA, which was a restaging of Charlotte Brontë’s JANE EYRE. However, I never read REBECCA. I think that it was the reason I enjoyed ALENA more than readers who hold REBECCA in such high esteem. But, how many readers of JANE EYRE were negatively cr......more

Goodreads review by Bonnie on March 04, 2014

Alena is a novel about the art world and the people who inhabit it. It is said to be an homage to du Maurier's Rebecca. However, not having read Rebecca in no way took anything away from my love of this novel. This novel stands on its own and I loved it. The novel gets its name from the first curator......more