De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel, by Joanna Scott
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De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel, by Joanna Scott
Ebook PDF De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel, by Joanna Scott
A gripping novel about a seemingly charmed marriage and a mysterious disappearance at sea
In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn’t what he seemed.
Originally from Belgium, young Armand de Potter comes to New York without a penny in his pocket. With cunning ambition, he quickly makes a name for himself as both a worldwide travel guide and a trusted―if illegal―antiques dealer. After marrying, he moves the family to a luxurious villa in Cannes and embraces an aristocratic life. But as he grows increasingly entangled in the antiques trade and his touring business begins to falter, Armand’s control starts to fray. As the world closes in, he believes he only has one option left.
Told with masterful narrative agility, De Potter’s Grand Tour is a tale as grand as the tour guide at its center. Drawing on real letters, legal documents, and a trove of diaries only recently discovered, Joanna Scott points delicately toward the story’s historical basis and unfolds a detective tale of the highest order.
De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel, by Joanna Scott- Amazon Sales Rank: #8068838 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-08
- Released on: 2015-09-08
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .50" w x 5.25" l,
- Running time: 8 Hours
- Binding: MP3 CD
Review
“Joanna Scott is a writer to treasure and her beguiling new novel is an intrepid exploration of the world, of the past, and of the human heart.” ―Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
“Joanna Scott's writing is always a wonder, but this, with its hints of Hawthorne's ‘Wakefield,' is her best yet: a wizardly dialogue between fact and fiction, the known and the unknown. I'll be haunted by her elusive, touching, and deluded hero for a long time.” ―Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and Ship Fever
“Joanna Scott is the great tour guide of contemporary American fiction, navigating us across oceans of memory and longing. She doesn't sail around the reefs and shoals but steers us right for them, keeping every promise that we'll emerge on the other side intact, if not quite the same as before. In the company of Aimée de Potter as she intrepidly searches for her husband's ghost and secrets, Scott charts here one of her grandest tours yet, one more utterly singular story only she could have written.” ―Steve Erickson, author of These Dreams of You
“Like some exquisite and mysterious tapestry that Armand de Potter himself might have admired on one of his journeys, Joanna Scott's new novel masterfully weaves an irresistible story of love, secrecy, ambition, and devastating folly. De Potter's Grand Tour coalesces history and imagination with such brilliant clarity that a world now long lost seems like a personal experience freshly remembered. Joanna Scott is a magician, a conjurer, one of the very best writers at work today.” ―Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner's Tale
“Only one of our wisest, deftest, most knowing prose stylists at the height of her powers could have invented the utterly beguiling experience that is De Potter's Grand Tour. Joanna Scott has given us a daringly original and serious novel that in its magical rendering of the interior voices of a Gilded Age European adventurer and his American wife is as credible and moving as it is historically astute. One of the most delightful books I've read in years.” ―Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule
“What a whirl of a book, full of secrets and surprises. I read De Potter's Grand Tour in a couple of days, losing myself in its pages, sorry to see the last words run like swift water under the bridge where I lingered, novel in hand. Joanna Scott is among the handful of American writers I will always want to read, and here she offers a capacious circumnavigation of a world tinged by melancholy, love, mystery, shimmering beauty, and unlikely passion. A lovely and strangely affecting read.” ―Jay Parini, author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year
“Joanna Scott's forthcoming novel, De Potter's Grand Tour, is a delicate, enchanting, utterly delicious text, melancholy at the heart and yet slyly funny. Scott is of course a fearlessly intelligent writer, and this book is surely one of her finest. An aching quandary at its center, a question of love and abandonment involving exotic travel.” ―Louise Erdrich, Birchbark Books Blog
From the Inside Flap
Praise for author Joanna Scott:
"Scott's prose is sensitive and beautifully crafted . . . Her characters are both eminently human and touched with magic and mystery." ―The Washington Post Book World"The wit, the magical prose and the daring devices of Scott's writing create an enchantment." ―The Nation
About the Author
Joanna Scott is the author of ten books, including The Manikin, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Various Antidotes and Arrogance, which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and the critically acclaimed Make Believe, Tourmaline, Liberation, and Follow Me. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Award.
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Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. The truth about lying By Theda Bara Joanna Scott (not to be confused with either the romance novelist OR Joanna C. Scott) delivers, in her new novel, a complex study of Armand de Potter -- a man who isn't who he says he is and cannot become what he aspires to be. Scott had access to diaries and letters to guide the broad outlines of her story, we're told, but I get the feeling that the de Potter of this novel is largely her own invention. She certainly uses him to her own ends.Descriptions of the European landmarks, to which the Grand Tour of the title takes us, are among the top reasons to read this book. De Potter is the perfect guide for the American tourist in Europe because he talks easily about everything he sees. His obsession, however, is Egyptian culture and he is ultimately willing to ruin his paying business to feed a fantasy about becoming a recognized authority on the bargain basement antiquities he so assiduously collects. This may be Scott's theme -- no one is who they seem to be, really. And this is the story of Armand de Potter's life.I liked the real people who salt the pages of the novel at key moments. Scott describes an actual turn-of-the-last-century power at the University of Pennsylvania named Sara Stevenson. When Stevenson leaves the University of Pennsylvania (where de Potter has, gratis, housed his collection), she leaves de Potter's fate in the hands of a controversial figure, Dr. Hilbrecht, another real person who fits seamlessly into this story. De Potter hopes to impress Hilbrecht with the gift of a small male bronze, but Hilbrecht pressures de Potter into an on-the-spot analysis of another small antiquity and de Potter's "wrong" answer allows Hilbrecht to instantly label de Potter as a fraud. Unfortunately, he never learns that Hilbrecht's own reputation is questionable; de Potter is always too quick to believe that he's beaten. Eventually, he disappears altogether, an apparent suicide, but even that may be an illusion.The unknowability of de Potter or his fate is the real point of the book, I think. Rather than a straightforward retelling of the known facts of his life, Scott writes a circular narrative that loops around and through, exposing de Potter's weaknesses, his vanities, and his lies. De Potter's inability to share the truth about himself is a tragic flaw in the classical sense. The novel has a contemporary feel, though, and photographs of the de Potters appear throughout the book. Each photo took me by surprise and I would interrupt my reading to peer at them. If there's a photo, then it's a true moment. Or does the photo of a fraud hold any truth at all? Is Scott revealing anything about de Potter's life or merely perpetuating his secrets? I think these are questions we're supposed to ask.This is historical fiction in the broad sense, but read it mainly for the more enticing conclusions it draws about life and lies.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Missing the grand tour By Amelia Gremelspacher Armand was a self made man in the days before this was a compliment. He had come to America shedding his identity as the son of a "bastard" in the late 1800's. His name was changed immediately by an immigration officer's mangling of the original. He never used the name of his birth today. He became a collector and sold his imagined noble heritage as a calling card for selling and mentoring luxury tours through Europe and parts of Asia. His wife Aimee, christened by him from her name Amy, knew him only as a great man, a professor, a man of learning.As his kingdom crumbles, he boards a boat and disappears. The book trace his life's roots and his present. The tawdriness of his collection comes to life. What happened to the man? Aimee is left to discover her future and to construct her new identity.I am not a fan of Armand. His struggles to rationalize to himself are dreary. I believe he would irritate me in person. His pretensions are obnoxious. While many an anti hero rises from his lack of appeal in the books I read, this one did not. I found the book just so so. The settings of the tours had great potential for enriching the prose. While they are described, they are flat to the touch. This may have been a deliberate tool for the further revelation of De Potter's mediocre life, it deadens the writing. I was engrossed enough to pursue the ending, but even it did not satisfy.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Interesting mix of fact and fiction By Bookreporter The historical Armand de Potter was novelist Joanna Scott's great-grandfather. This veteran traveler disappeared at sea, and the real-life mystery of his disappearance inspired the literary mystery at the heart of Scott's new novel, DE POTTER'S GRAND TOUR. Much of the book’s substance is gleaned from de Potter's own writings, as well as the letters and journals of his wife, and is peppered with archival photos of the de Potters and their voyages. This, as well as the somewhat formal language and very objective telling of plot and details, at times makes Scott's newest work read more like nonfiction than a novel.Despite this somewhat distanced storytelling style, Scott's de Potter is a complicated character whose nuanced personality and motivations come across, especially in the novel's surprising conclusion. Born into a poor and somewhat ostracized branch of the de Potter family, Armand de Potter reinvents himself as an aristocrat and academic after he immigrates to the United States in the late 19th century. He also begins to fashion himself as a collector, starting with objects he retrieves from the New York Harbor as a member of the Dredging Club.After his marriage to a much-younger woman, Amy (who also reinvents herself as the much more Continental-sounding Aimee), de Potter's collecting ambitions only grow, as the couple relocates to France and begins leading guided expeditions throughout Europe and to Egypt and beyond. In an effort to receive recognition for his collection (and, by extension, validation for himself), de Potter sends most of his acquired antiquities to a small museum in Philadelphia, which, as he discovers during an undercover visit, fails not only to recognize him with the publication of a catalogue (as he's been promised) but also to acknowledge him even with a simple plaque. Nevertheless, de Potter's collecting habit/compulsion continues, as he secretly signs away his family's fortunes to acquire and then ship his collection around the world.After de Potter's sudden disappearance, his wife is left behind to uncover many of these financial secrets, as well as the confusing and often contradictory life history of her husband. Even as she attempts to keep herself and their son afloat, she wonders if she ever really knew her beloved spouse or if their seemingly perfect life together was just an illusion.At times, it can be difficult for readers to feel emotionally invested with the de Potters, given Scott's objective distance and the narrative structure, which switches back and forth (subtly, so that readers need to really pay attention to verb tense, etc.) between de Potter's current location and the couple's past experiences. Periodically, though, Scott breaks through this detachment with a perfectly written scene that is every bit as evocative and emotionally compelling as a reader might expect or want. As such, DE POTTER'S GRAND TOUR is an interesting mix of fact and fiction, reporting and storytelling that shows how historical fact can inspire fiction and how fiction can bring history to life.Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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