Villa E: A Novel by Jane Alison. Liveright, 192 pp., $24.
Art and literature are in a twentieth-century mood. Between this year’s Venice Biennale (where over half of the featured artists were dead), the “neglected classics” reprint wave, and the MCM furniture boom, it’s easy to feel like everything new has already been done.
Forty years after the late Fredric Jameson heralded the dominance of “dead styles” in the New Left Review, we’re still waiting for a rupture, mired in a convergence of technocapitalism, climate doom, and intense politicization without mass politics. We can’t wield much power through elections or unions and we can’t imagine new futures, but following the archival turn of second-wave feminists, we can at least recover forgotten histories and elevate neglected voices.
Jane Alison’s novel Villa E arrives in the same spirit of revival. Here, the neglected twentieth-century woman is the modernist Irish designer Eileen Gray. It’s August 1965; Gray is eighty-seven and blind in one eye, and she’s sp…