“A work of tremendous psychological intricacy and physical beauty. Jane Alison writes sentences that are as hypnotic and lyric as the sea.” —Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise
Le Corbusier was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century, pioneering Modernist architecture and giving the world everything from pristine white villas to Brutalist concrete office buildings to jet-age city plans.
His contemporary, Irish designer Eileen Grey, was far quieter, most known for her exquisite furniture. She taught herself architecture, too, although she made only three houses.
But the first of her houses, built in the twenties on the south coast of France, was a subtle feminist critique of the outspoken Le Corbusier. And it came to obsess him—so much that he spent his last three decades infiltrating the house, taking it, and erasing her name.
Why? Was it the house that obsessed him, or Eileen?
Focusing on the last week of Le Corbusier’s life, Villa E is a novel about two brilliant, complex artists and the extraordinary place that bound them—now a World Heritage Site. It is a story of artistic and sexual obsession, guilt, and the transformative power of memory.
Reviews
“Villa E is an irresistible tale of beauty, obsession and hubris. Jane Alison’s portrait of Le Corbusier as a master builder reduced to vandalism by envy is complex and powerful.” — Nancy Horan, author of Loving Frank
“In this nimble, atmospheric novel, two artists are drawn together and must reckon with their distinct creative hungers, the landscapes that shape and haunt, and the grace and the wound of the passage of time. Villa E is a work of tremendous psychological intricacy and physical beauty. Jane Alison writes sentences that are as hypnotic and lyric as the sea.” —Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise
“In this extraordinary novel, which somehow manages to be both lush and spare, Jane Alison depicts two artists near the ends of their lives, slowly converging on the exquisite villa one has made, and each has loved. Watching Eileen and Le G spiral down into the past and embrace the future, I, too, was transported to the shores of the Mediterranean: light, water, rocks, a gleaming building. Alison writes like no one else.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven
“Alison’s jazzy, experimental new novel . . . is a feminist fable . . . and also a stirring meditation on art and the conflicts that engender sweeping change, whether in architecture or painting or fiction . . . Villa E is both paean to the legacies of modernism — from Gray and Le Corbusier to Joyce — and a beautiful book from a writer who boldly tacks against the winds of literary realism.” —Hamilton Cain, The Boston Globe
“Le Corbusier was known for designing houses to resemble a “machine for living in,” as he put it, but Eileen’s villa observes naturalistic principles. Built around a spiral staircase fastened to a cliffside rock, the structure calls to mind a nautilus seashell. . . . Villa E pays homage to this design by creating two spiraling narratives, arranged like the strands of a double helix, as Eileen and Le Grand continuously turn over their memories. The effect is elegant and enveloping . . . Ms. Alison’s previous work was the critical study Meander, Spiral, Explode (2019), which explored geometric patterns in narrative fiction. Villa E artfully puts those concepts into practice.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Alison (The Sisters Antipodes) serves up an elegant meditation on aging, art, and nature, inspired by a famous villa in the French Riviera…. The star of the show is the seascape, the power and beauty of which Alison depicts in lyrical prose…. Readers are in for a treat.” —Publishers Weekly
“The novel explores the characters and lifelong achievements of both figures: he protean, domineering, and unrepentant; she sensual, committed, enduring. Looping, impressionistic, and atmospheric, narrated in retrospect from both characters’ points of view, the book offers more psychology than plot, but does so persuasively. A remarkable gender parable filtered through a sophisticated imagination.” —Kirkus Reviews
“The latest novel from Alison…is itself a kind of spiral…aside from the historical anecdote itself (once described as an ‘act of naked phallocracy’), the most interesting aspect of the book is the way Alison represents these two different consciousnesses on the page—their slipstream thoughts, both recursive and immediate, but each distinct, pinning their bodies in space.” —Literary Hub
“[A] concentrated tale of an epic duel between two temperamentally opposite artists…. In prose, by turns, as exquisite as Eileen’s creation and as seething as Le Grand’s lust, Alison incisively evokes artistic genius and angst, while infusing a historic scandal with profound heartache and resolve.” —Booklist
ESSAY
WRITING ABOUT A MALE MONSTER OF ART
Here’s an essay I wrote for LitHub about creating Villa E.