Dancer

Dancer - Colum McCann As the 3 stars say, I "liked it". I'm definitely ambivalent about fiction based on people who lived so recently; at least McCann had the decency to change the names of people still living (basically turning it into a bit of a roman-a-clef, whether he planned it that way or not), but I noticed that by and large the really major figures in the Western ballet world didn't get much more than an indirect word or two. Possibly they or their ferociously protective estates (Balanchine?) deterred the author from getting too much into real ballet gossip. A pity, perhaps. The writing is, as pretty much everyone agrees, superb; the frequent change of narrative POV keeps the reader hopping, but that's OK. The stream-of-consciousness "Victor" segment depicting Nureyev's life amongst the upper crust - and the gay bathhouses - in the US, is breathtaking. The opening evocation of the horrors of WWII in Russia will stick with me for a long time. I wonder how many of the allusions about Nureyev himself I would have picked up had I not recently read a Nureyev biography; and I also wonder whether it would have mattered.