Synopses & Reviews
Dancer is the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev as told through the cast of those who knew him: there is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties,
Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
Colum McCann is the author of the novels This Side of Brightness and Songdogs, as well as the story collections Everything in This Country Must and Fishing the Sloe-Black River. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and GQ, he has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Hennessy Award, the 2002 Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award, as well as being nominated as finalist to the IMPAC Prize. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he currently lives with his wife and children in New York City. A Russian peasant who became an international legend, a Cold War exile who inspired the adoration of millions, an artist whose name was a byword for genius, sex, and excess. The magnificence of Rudolf Nureyev's life and work is known, but now Colum McCann reinvents this erotically charged figure through the light he shed on the lives of those who knew him.
Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the killing fields of World War II to the wild abandon of New York's gaudy eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous, real and imagined. Shoemakers, nurses, translators, and hustlers take the stage alongside Margot Fonteyn, Erik Bruhn, and Andy Warhol. At the heart of this lavish spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, ambitious, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
Writing in ecstatic prose, as if inhabited by the spirit of his extraordinary subject, Colum McCann evokes the distinct consciousness of the man and the glittering reflection of the myth. The result is a monumental twentieth-century story of love, art, fame, and exile. "A beautiful, floating novel about Nureyev's life and art."The New York Times Book Review
"McCann is a consummate stylist who nonetheless imbues his fiction with the cold stamp of reality."The Boston Globe
"Exuberant and exhilarating . . . A brilliant leap of imagination."San Francisco Chronicle
"The goal of a book like this is to catch the spirit of the person and his age. It's a tall order, and one that Dancer pulls off brilliantly."The Seattle Times
"Fascinating . . . A triumph of voice . . . McCann's fluid lyricism brilliantly conveys Nureyev's towering professional achievement and the wasteland of his personal life."Newsday
"Dancer is the most breathtaking tribute to Nureyev since Jamie Wyeth's famous paintings."Esquire
"Remarkable: What McCann imagines so beautifully is the way a hero walks through life somewhat differently from the rest of us, the mere breeze of his passing setting off a thousand ripples of change, both good and bad."Salon
"An impressive evocation of life on three continents in the last half of the twentieth century . . . McCann's talent lies in imagining a life staged so publicly by creating the intimate lives and stories of those only watching from the wings."The Houston Chronicle
"Dazzling . . . an intimate portrait . . . Dancer is bigger than the dance, bigger than biography, too. . . . Relish McCann's dizzy, fascinating glimpse."The Miami Herald
"Breathtaking . . . Every sentence sounds new and beautiful, no matter how often it's read."USA Today
"McCann writes as if the fate of the world depends on it. Worry not, the world is saved: Dancer is a masterpiece."Aleksandar Hemon, author of Nowhere Man
"Nureyev took a leap from Soviet Russia to Paris and the postwar New York of Andy Warhola vertiginous leap. The reader follows, entering lives lived at the opposite poles of human experience and feeling, as in childhood, the extraordinary and terrible largeness of the world: blood and dancing, massive choirs and solitary monologues. Colum McCann is a precise and uncanny listener. And so an unforgettable storyteller."John Berger, author of The Shape of a Packet
"Dancer has the wingspan of a great Russian novel, which is only fitting for an imagined life of Rudolf Nureyev. This is the book you'll want to take on a long plane ride; you'll be so seduced you'll sip the wine and eschew the dinner. And you'll admire Colum McCann for taking big chanceswar, Russia, ballet, life in three continents, the pursuit of beauty. The writing issues from a knowing and compassionate heart: hard, when necessary, as the frozen ground of wartime Leningrad; supple and liturgical as Nureyev raising Fonteyn to heaven."Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes
"Rudolf Nureyev was an extremely complex person, yet Colum McCann has admirably captured the essence of this great man."Maria Tallchief, prima ballerina
"McCann writes as if the fate of the world depends on it. Worry not, the world is saved. Dancer is a masterpiece."Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project
"I finished Dancer several days ago and am still spinning. This is a beautiful book, layered with all the nuance and sweat and disciple that accompanied Nureyev's genius. In the purity of the storytelling, in its flawless narrative construction, this is prose that is itself a dance."Jeffrey Lent, author of Lost Nation
"Colum McCann has written a most generous book. Compassionate and at the same time restrained in all the best ways, Dancer is suffused with both energy and grief, liberation and loss."Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces
"The melancholy, sparkle, sinew and temperament of Dancer are as great as its hero's. Colum McCann's lyrically powerful prose creates, expands, and reveals life upon life, making truth out of myth and heart out of history."Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
"A chorus of voices breathe new life into the story of Rudolf Nureyev, one of ballet's greatest performers, in this vibrant, imaginative patchwork of a novel by Irish expatriate McCann (This Side of Brightness, etc.). As a seven-year-old peasant boy in 1944, Rudi dances for wounded soldiers in a hospital ward during World War II. By the mid-1950s he has outgrown life in the tiny Soviet town of Ufa, his unfailing determination to perform (against the stern wishes of his father) driving him into the wider world. It is his stubborn persistence more than his natural talent that distinguishes him, but his first teachers see great potential in him, and he is accepted into a ballet company in Leningrad. He defects to France and later moves on to Italy, where 'the ovations become more exhausting than the dance" and he is sucked into the drug and disco culture of the late '70s, even after his partner Margot Fonteyn urges him to stay focused. A relationship with New York gay hustler Victor Pareci allows Rudi to indulge his wildest impulses, but his brashness and self-absorption are tempered when he journeys back to his homeland in 1987 in the touching conclusion. The sections narrated by different characters, some central and some marginal, create a kaleidoscopic effect. Faithfully capturing the pathos and grim poverty of the Soviet Union at mid-century, McCann also reveals a splashy tabloid affinity for the excesses and effects of fame and notoriety . . . The novel is a lovely showcase for his fluid prose and storytelling skill."Publishers Weekly
"McCann's latest (after Everything in This Country Must) is hugely ambitious: a fictionalized account of the life of Rudolph Nureyevthe Cold War danseur noble lauded as the world's first 'pop star dancer'as told by those who knew him. Among the narrators are the irrepressible Yulia, the daughter of Nureyev's first ballet teacher; Margot Fonteyn, Rudik's brilliant dance partner; Victor, a gay hustler from the Lower East Side with a penchant for blow, bath houses, and back talk; and others. What emerges is a pastiche of both the man and the myth, the disparate voices combining to create a lyrical and variegated portrait . . . The work hangs together well and is . . . an enormous achievement. Both the Soviet Union of the war-torn 1940s and the displacement and hopefulness of an exile's life are perfectly evoked, and Nureyev-impossible, erratic, and brilliantis a golden flame that sets everything ablaze. Recommended."Tania Barnes, Library Journal
"For three decades, the legend of ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev spread from continent to continent: the semicultured boy from Ufa who takes the Leningrad dance world by storm; political asylum in Paris; the amazing partnership with Margot Fonteyn; the matinee idol dancer; the hyperactive sex life; the enfant terrible. Actual events and qualities of Nureyev's public persona are tossed together in this novel, and his legend, nearly 10 years after his death, becomes myth. Some of the characters are real (Fonteyn, for instance), while others have sprung from the author's imagination. McCann is such a good writer that, real or not, the characters' powerful voices lead the reader to suspend disbelief on an entirely deeper level. Only dance writers and true Rudi fanatics will be able to distinguish the real from the imaginary, and one even suspects they might have some problems. Still, even those who have never been to a balletor seen Nureyev dancewill find this book enjoyable."Frank Caso, Booklist
"A fictionalized biography of Rudolf Nureyev (1938-93), chronicled in an understated, intimate narrative from the celebrated dancer's childhood to the height (and excesses) of his fame. The town of Ufa, in the former Soviet region of Bashkir, was about as far off the beaten track as you could getespecially under Stalin, when it was a secret industrial city not even allowed to appear on the map. Yet Ufa was to provide the first audience for one of the greatest stars in ballet history, who made his world premiere as a six-year-old dancing in the wards of WWII military hospitals. Talented from the start but no prodigy, Nureyev trained long and hard to become a dancer-first in Ufa (very much against the wishes of his father, a Party member who dreamed of having an engineer for a son), and later in Leningrad, where he became a member of the famed Kirov Ballet. When success arrived, it arrived quickly, and by the late 1950s Nureyev was doing command performances for Krushchev and the Central Committee. In 1961 he defected to the West, in Paris, transforming himself into cause célèbrevilified at home (his father publicly denounced him) and idolized abroad. McCann (Everything in This Country Must, 2000, etc.) tells the story from different perspectives, in chapters narrated alternately by Anna Vasileva (Nureyev's first ballet teacher), Victor Parecci (the gay Venezualian prostitute who became his lover in New York), Yulia Sergeevna (his landlady in Leningrad), and Nureyev himself. Like many success stories, Nureyev's presented a depressing spectacle of vanity and decadence toward the end, and the later chapters (largely chronicles of parties, shopping sprees, hangovers, and petty spites) convey this vividly. The ending, a description of Nureyev's 1987 return to visit his family in Ufa, is appropriate and moving."Kirkus Reviews
Review
"A beautiful, floating novel about Nureyev's life and art."--
The New York Times Book Review"Exuberant and exhilarating . . . A brilliant leap of imagination."--San Francisco Chronicle
"The goal of a book like this is to catch the spirit of the person and his age. It's a tall order, and one that Dancer pulls off brilliantly."--The Seattle Times
"Fascinating . . . A triumph of voice . . . McCann's fluid lyricism brilliantly convey's Nureyev's towering professional achievement and the wasteland of his personal life."--Newsday
"A monumental life . . . Stylistically, Dancer is a leap itself." --Los Angeles Times
"An engrossing portrait of a man so complex that no mere biography could possibly convey more than a sliver of his personality. . . . The Nureyev who strides impatiently through its pages seems entirely convincing." --Terry Teachout, The Baltimore Sun
"Every sentence sounds new and beautiful, no matter how often it's read."--USA Today
"Dancer is the most breathtaking tribute to Nureyev since Jamie Wyeth's famous paintings."--Esquire
"Dazzling . . . an intimate portrait . . . Dancer is bigger than the dance, bigger than biography, too. . . . Relish McCann's dizzy, fascinating glimpse."--Miami Herald
Synopsis
Dancer is the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev as told through the cast of those who knew him: there is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties,
Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
Synopsis
Dancer is the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev as told through the cast of those who knew him: there is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protege from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
Colum McCann is the author of the novels This Side of Brightness and Songdogs, as well as the story collections Everything in This Country Must and Fishing the Sloe-Black River. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and GQ, he has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Hennessy Award, the 2002 Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award, as well as being nominated as finalist to the IMPAC Prize. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he currently lives with his wife and children in New York City. A Russian peasant who became an international legend, a Cold War exile who inspired the adoration of millions, an artist whose name was a byword for genius, sex, and excess. The magnificence of Rudolf Nureyev's life and work is known, but now Colum McCann reinvents this erotically charged figure through the light he shed on the lives of those who knew him.
Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the killing fields of World War II to the wild abandon of New York's gaudy eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous, real and imagined. Shoemakers, nurses, translators, and hustlers take the stage alongside Margot Fonteyn, Erik Bruhn, and Andy Warhol. At the heart of this lavish spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, ambitious, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
Writing in ecstatic prose, as if inhabited by the spirit of his extraordinary subject, Colum McCann evokes the distinct consciousness of the man and the glittering reflection of the myth. The result is a monumental twentieth-century story of love, art, fame, and exile. A beautiful, floating novel about Nureyev's life and art.--The New York Times Book Review
McCann is a consummate stylist who nonetheless imbues his fiction with the cold stamp of reality.--The Boston Globe
Exuberant and exhilarating . . . A brilliant leap of imagination.--San Francisco Chronicle
The goal of a book like this is to catch the spirit of the person and his age. It's a tall order, and one that Dancer pulls off brilliantly.--The Seattle Times
Fascinating . . . A triumph of voice . . . McCann's fluid lyricism brilliantly conveys Nureyev's towering professional achievement and the wasteland of his personal life.--Newsday
Dancer is the most breathtaking tribute to Nureyev since Jamie Wyeth's famous paintings.--Esquire
Remarkable: What McCann imagines so beautifully is the way a hero walks through life somewhat differently from the rest of us, the mere breeze of his passing setting off a thousand ripples of change, both good and bad.--Salon
An impressive evocation of life on three continents in the last half of the twentieth century . . . McCann's talent lies in imagining a life staged so publicly by creating the intimate lives and stories of those only watching from the wings.--The Houston Chronicle
Dazzling . . . an intimate portrait . . . Dancer is bigger than the dance, bigger than biography, too. . . . Relish McCann's dizzy, fascinating glimpse.--The Miami Herald
Breathtaking . . . Every sentence sounds new and beautiful, no matter how often it's read.--USA Today
McCann writes as if the fate of the world depends on it. Worry not, the world is saved: Dancer is a masterpiece.--Aleksandar Hemon, author of Nowhere Man
Nureyev took a leap from Soviet Russia to Paris and the postwar New York of Andy Warhol--a vertiginous leap. The reader follows, entering lives lived at the opposite poles of human experience and feeling, as in childhood, the extraordinary and terrible largeness of the world: blood and dancing, massive choirs and solitary monologues. Colum McCann is a precise and uncanny listener. And so an unforgettable storyteller.--John Berger, author of The Shape of a Packet
Dancer has the wingspan of a great Russian novel, which is only fitting for an imagined life of Rudolf Nureyev. This is the book you'll want to take on a long plane ride; you'll be so seduced you'll sip the wine and eschew the dinner. And you'll admire Colum McCann for taking big chances--war, Russia, ballet, life in three continents, the pursuit of beauty. The writing issues from a knowing and compassionate heart: hard, when necessary, as the frozen ground of wartime Leningrad; supple and liturgical as Nureyev raising Fonteyn to heaven.--Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes
Rudolf Nureyev was an extremely complex person, yet Colum McCann has admirably captured the essence of this great man.--Maria Tallchief, prima ballerina
McCann writes as if the fate of the world depends on it. Worry not, the world is saved. Dancer is a masterpiece.--Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project
I finished Dancer several days ago and am still spinning. This is a beautiful book, layered with all the nuance and sweat and disciple that accompanied Nureyev's genius. In the purity of the storytelling, in its flawless narrative construction, this is prose that is itself a dance.--Jeffrey Lent, a
About the Author
COLUMN McCANN is the author of the novels This Side of Brightness, Zoli, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. He has received a Pushcart Prize, been an IMPAC finalist, and was named the first winner of the Grace Kelly Memorial Foundation Award and the Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. He lives in New York City.
Reading Group Guide
1. The novel is told from a variety of viewpoints, from close first-person testimony to diary entries, from the documentary-like lens of the opening pages to the second-person imprecations of Nureyevs time in Leningrad to the intimate third-person tales of street hustler Victor Pareci or cobbler Tom Ashworth. Why do you think the story of Rudolph Nureyev is told by so many people other than Rudolph Nureyev? Which voices feel more fully-realized to you than others, and why?
2. The objects thrown on stage following Nureyevs performance; the details of the Russian soldiers marching in the snow; Nureyevs various purchases; the gifts he brings back to his family and friends in the U.S.S.R.; the items of his life being auctioned off. What is the significance of lists in the novel?
3. What is the use and larger implications of the term “former history” at the bottom of page 75.
4. Discuss the novels intermittent use of the second-person voice. What is implicit in its direction and command? What sort of commentary does it indirectly offer on the ideas of Celebrity or History?
5. The physicality of dance is often scrupulously, even tenaciously rendered throughout the novel. In addition, great care is given to the wording invoked in describing dance, from precise craft and medical terminology to the sound of turning joints or the rendered power of eye-contact. On page 91, a narrator turns intentionally vague when she says that Nureyev “was using something beyond his body.” What does such a phrase say about Nureyev as an artist? What does it say about Yulia as an observer?
6. For a book so concerned with the movement of history and personal history, there are also intense moments of stop-time. Think of Rudi pausing in mid-air. Think of the phrase uttered on the top of page 149: “Its our function in life to make moments durable.” Is this preservation of beauty, this preservation of the immediate the purpose of Art? What exactly is preserved by creating beauty, and furthermore, is history then a record of such preservation?
7. “Poverty lust sickness envy and hope, he said again. It has survived them all.” This is said of the last remaining piece of family china, a saucer dish, given to Yulia by her dying father. How is the saucer a symbol for other things in Dancer?
8. The only portions of the novel narrated by Nureyev are told in diary-like entries, and while the entries can be fairly lengthy and/or specific, none of them express how the man thinks or feels. Why do you think we are held at a remove from Nureyev, both in his own portion and by dint through all the other portions of the novel?
9. Explain the role of Victor Parecis section in the larger scheme of the book; also, in Nureyevs life. Think of the comparison made between Victor and Rudi on page 235, the two men being the edge of the coin.
10. How is violence a form of affection in the novel? Are the motivations to harm the same as those to love?
11. Dancer is a novel of communication. The communication of art, performance, feeling. Likewise, its a novel of communication communicated to the reader by voices. What does one learn from Nureyevs life by looking at it through the lens of the communicated? How does it alter or expand ones notion of novelwriting. What does it say about the art of storytelling? Think back to the story of the maimed soldier told in the middle of page 135, or the brief metaphor of the chess game used in the middle of page 327.