Kitty and Virgil - Hardcover

Bailey, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585670103 ISBN 13: 9781585670109

Publisher: Overlook Pr, 2000

Synopsis

Kitty Crozier first laid eyes on Virgil Florescu, a dissident poet who swam across the Danube to escape Ceausescu's Romania, in the hospital. She woke up after surgery to find a stranger sitting beside her bed gazing at her. He just smiled at her, stood and left the room. She next saw him in London's Green Park picking up litter from the grass with a long spike. So begins the most important, most demanding, most exhilarating relationship of Kitty's life. As their love for each other deepens, their previous lives and very different families reveal themselves to be oddly connected.

About this title

Review

Paul Bailey's latest novel is a homage to Romania, past and present, and took him four years to write as he travelled around Romania and Eastern Europe, gathering stories and learning Romanian in the process. The result is an eccentric tale of eccentric characters determined to hold onto their integrity in the face of a ruthless world. Taking place primarily amongst the more Bohemian elements of English upper-class society, the story revolves around Kitty and Virgil, two people who fall passionately in love with each other after a chance meeting in a hospital. Kitty is a well-off, middle-aged editor, Virgil a Romanian exile working as a refuse collector, tortured by the plight of his country but, more potently, by the murderous acts committed by his father years before Virgil was even conceived.

This is as much a dark, anarchic comedy as a love story: Virgil, a gentle, intense, intellectual character with a madman's laugh and a puny body, is sent up along with Kitty's practicality and self-obsessed, privileged family. But Virgil is literally haunted by his past, both personal and cultural. Bailey is clearly at ease with Romania's fragmented, deeply-romantic culture and takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Virgil's poetic version of it. The novel is set against the collapse of Romania's Communist regime in the late eighties, an event which indirectly causes Virgil's quest for truth to end in tragedy. Kitty and Virgil can be exasperating, with its cast of florid caricatures and the overblown, self-satisfied idiom they communicate in, but above all, it is funny, intelligent and moving. --Emily Ormond

Review

'A book about the destructiveness of intolerance, selfishness and the lust for order, and about the redeeming power of tolerance, love and pity.' -- Independent

'Bailey excels, making Kitty and Virgil a quietly poignant, moving and, in some ways, redemptive novel, as fine as any he has written to date.' -- Scotsman

'This strange, wonderful novel tells more about the awful reality of life under the Ceausescu dictatorship than any news footage.' -- Red

'Unquestionably the book of the year.' Daily Telegraph 'Bailey captures the lovers' story with an eye that is both urbane and affecting as it moves fluidly between Romanian and English settings.' -- Sunday Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Overlook Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1585670103
• ISBN 13: 9781585670109
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280