Novels based on history can be fascinating, particularly when the author demonstrates both a convincing commitment to facts and a dramatic ability to animate characters, events, and settings of the past. Adrien Goetz’s fictionalized history of the actual Villa Kerylos in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, follows this dual agenda. While the ups and downs—friendships, love, betrayal, and adventure—are given their due, the book is most successful in its historical research. Still, Goetz’s exploration of such themes as class disparity and anti-Semitism—set against the construction of a villa based on one from an era, ancient Greece, known for its democratic ideals—adds a certain piquancy to the tale.
The main protagonist is the Villa Kerylos, built in 1902–08 by the architect Emmanuel Pontremoli, for his clients Theodore and Fanny Reinach, who are French, Jewish, and extremely affluent. The narrator, the fictionalized Achilles Leccia, is a Greek Corsican whose mother, a chef, and father, a gardener, live nearby on the estate of Gustave Eiffel. (For all the engineering innovation of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, its designer occupied a rather traditional house.)
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