Kitty and Virgil - Hardcover

Bailey, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857024508 ISBN 13: 9781857024500

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1998

Synopsis

A love story set in Romania and England by the author of the Booker short-listed bestseller, Gabriel’s Lament. Paul Bailey’s most ambitious novel yet.

Kitty Crozier wakes up in a hospital ward and finds a stranger looking down at her. Thus begins the most important, most demanding, most exhilarating relationship of Kitty’s life. Her lover’s name is Virgil Florescu, a poet who has escaped from Ceausescu’s Romania. As their liaison deepens, more is revealed of their previous lives and of their different families. Both Kitty and Virgil have unusual fathers: Kitty’s is a phenomenally accomplished philanderer, while Virgil’s has changed his political allegiances from left to right and back again in order to ensure his survival.

The book is rich in characters and despite its tragic theme – which is not revealed until late in the narrative – is often fiendishly funny. For all its concern with public issues of morality, it is very much about family life – or rather, that of two distinct families with interesting histories and secrets, not all of them unhappy.

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: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1857024508
• ISBN 13: 9781857024500
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288