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A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity: A Novel, by Whitney Otto
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The bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt transports us to San Francisco in the early 1980s, a magical, fog-shrouded city suffused—as are many of its denizens—with possibility and restless energy. In A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity, Whitney Otto’s charac-ters congregate night after night at a North Beach bar called the Youki Singe Tea Room, their lives conjoined by the bonds of friendship and shared experience. At the Youki Singe, the stories of these young people’s lives—their parties, their eccentric living situations, their passions for books and art and one another—are recorded in one patron’s “pillow book,” her version of the intimate journals of the courtesans of Edo Japan. Meanwhile, though, the careless joys of the drifting life are giving way to a desire to find something more substantial, a need to belong to something or someone.
The title A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity is taken from a series of woodblock prints by the eighteenth-century artist Utamaro, a master at depicting Japan’s legendary Floating World, where, it is said, the patrons of the great pleasure quarters—and their escorts—devoted them-selves to the pursuit of music, sex, food, poetry, theater, and fashion. Now, two hundred years later and an ocean away, the young men and women of Otto’s San Francisco find themselves in their own version of a Floating World.
Illustrated with more than two dozen beautifully reproduced woodblock prints, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity conjures an atmosphere both dreamy and contemporary. Whitney Otto engages the senses as well as the mind while exploring the intricacies, the trouble, and the rapture of human connection.
- Sales Rank: #2317023 in Books
- Published on: 2002-03-05
- Released on: 2002-03-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.81" h x 1.17" w x 5.83" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Amazon.com Review
Set in San Francisco in the 1980s, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity is a novel of late youth--the final indulgences and excesses of a group of friends before paths are chosen, before character is set. Whitney Otto (How to Make an American Quilt) takes as her inspiration the floating world depicted in Japanese prints of the Edo period. Her characters, most of them denizens of the Youki Singe Tea Room in North Beach, live in the moment. They are unambitious, minimally employed, well-educated, and self-indulgent. Dreamers of various kinds, the women (who have artful names like Jelly, Coco, Gracie, and Theo) are passionate about their friendships, their parties, and their appearance. The narrative is as fluid as the characters, sometimes delivering a perfectly formed short story about a minor figure, and other times tracing back to explain a pivotal high school incident. Readers who give themselves over to this flowing story line, and to the shifting array of characters, will find this a rewarding and oddly moving novel. A Collection of Beauties perfectly evokes a particular mood of watchfulness, as its characters wait for their world to form around them. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
The bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt experiments again with a patchwork narrative, building an elaborate, piquant story of the loves and lives of a group of young 1980s San Franciscans around a series of 18th-century woodblock prints that depict the women of Edo, Japan. Each of the 12 chapters begins with the reproduction and explication of a print; all the prints date from a long period of peace in Japan, stretching roughly from 1615 to 1868. Out of this peace came a flowering of the arts of pleasure, and it is the pursuit of pleasure that Otto documents in 20th-century San Francisco as well. Against the backdrop of a North Beach fringe bar, the Youki Singe Tea Room, dozens of Otto's expertly tailored characters drink, adjust and readjust their senses of loneliness, acceptance and desire in a series of short vignettes. Among them are Roy, "a purveyor of `artificial paradises,' who is neither sinister nor extraordinary in any way"; Jelly, who travels with a coterie of beautiful women and adoring men; Pirouz, Iranian born and raised in France, who falls in love with San Francisco and marries Jelly to secure a green card; and Raphaella, singer with a golden voice, who usurps Pirouz's attentions. Many more characters come and go in Otto's merry-go-round of parties, connections, break-ups, art and glittering San Francisco skyscapes. Stylish almost to a fault, the novel makes a fetish of beauty and unusual art objects, but it is the intricate web of human connections that gives it deeper appeal. 10-city author tour. (Mar. 12) Forecast: The eclectic format of Otto's latest will be familiar to fans of How to Make an American Quilt, though the young, hip, multicultural protagonists will appeal more to those who enjoyed The Passion Dream Book, her most recent novel.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Otto's title recalls a set of 18th-century Japanese woodblocks showing the lovely ladies of Edo, Japan, at the height of the country's most sensual period. It also refers to her scruffy collection of characters, who gather at the Youki Singe Tea Room in North Beach as they try to avoid the obvious: they should be doing something better with their lives.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Good intentions, bad execution
By madamemusico
Whitney Otto, one of my all-time favorite writers, has misstepped badly in "A Collection of Beauties." In trying to recreate a modern version of a Japanese pillow book, she took as her model the diaries of Dawn Powell, a rich white woman who leeched off artists without having a shred of art in her own soul. True to form, the characters in this book look and act artistic, but only one--Micha the painter--has any genuine talent. The others are basically rich, spoiled wastrels of the early '80s, lost in their world of parties, dope and ennui while they kind of flutz around the art community without ever really being part of it. Perhaps the most typical character is Micha's lover, a woman so vapid that she hasn't even bothered to unpack most of her things or buy furniture for her apartment because she is simply too lazy to do it. What a waste of talent!! Whitney, go back and re-read "The Passion Dream Book," that is your masterpiece. Give us more like that and less of a Dawn Powell-lookalike,
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
a world to float away to
By Deborah Condon
I found this book very charming. The front page of each chapter contains a lovely pictorial reference to the Japanese floating world of Edo, a reinforcement of the feeling the book evokes, of an ephemeral age and time - a signature of a particluar generation - this one in the 1980's in a city that itself is a delight - San Francisco. Its characters are an ensemble of detached, almost superficial, visually cued men and women (boys and girls?) of late twenties redeemed by their sense of kindness and by open caring and affection. It reminded me very much of a book of equal sweetness set a decade ealier in the 1970's - Vibram Seth's The Golden Gate, a lyrical poem set in the Bay Area that captured the mixed up romances and changes of a different, more hopeful, pre-AIDS generation. Both books have a lightness and loving nature with the City itself more a stage than stadt.
The chapters intertwine characters and timelines like a Shakespearean Oberon, Titania and the path-crossing lovers. The only shortfall is that we never get to know any one character very well. All educated, some are users, some self-consciously detached, a few with a described past, none with exact ambitions. What they all share is a "floating" before landing into the not yet arrived-at weight of jobs, marriage, committment, irrevocable choices or downhill slides, as they pass into their 30's. Maybe many of us landed earlier, especially now that marriage is a sooner thing than it was in the 70's and 80's. But even without a connection to either a belated coming of age, being young in the 80's or a feeling for S.F. (I lived in S.F. in the 70-80's), this is still a reading pleasure, at least a light read for the beach, a cut above the predictable romances. It's bound to refresh.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Overwhelmingly marvelous.
By erica
This is an amazing book. It is beautiful, enchanting, and a little bit cynical. The plot weaves in and out among itself: the book is composed of a series of what at first appear to be independent short stories, but soon begin to link and spread, forming a connecting and disconnecting network. The stories skip in and out of time and place, following a pattern in theme rather than in chronology; the discontinuity can be confusing if you want to remember everything, but it contributes wonderfully to the dissipative, collectivist mood of the book. Each story opens with a copy of a Japanese print and a description that is meant to parallel the events of the story, and the book as a whole is meant to reflect a famous Japanese diary. These connections are occasionally obvious and often obscure; searching for them is part of the excitement of reading such an interwoven work. The prose is always smooth and often beautiful, and the characters and plot are developed with a distinct sense of artistry. The book as a whole is amazingly balanced, readable, and occasionally stunning. It deserves to be read slowly and in a quiet room.
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