The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

I like the cover photo of The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (#395).  In fact, I think it is more evocative than Carole DeSanti's novel of Second Empire/Third Republic Paris.  Ms. DeSanti is a book editor at Penguin Group and should know her way around a good story, but here I think her storytelling has been sacrificed on the altar of her literary ambition.  The tale of Eugenie Rigault has only the barest bones of a skeletal structure on which to drape the swathes of metaphor, allegory and philosophical outpourings of the eponymous narrator.

Eugenie is a goose girl living in the region of southwest France where fois gras is the main industry, only a notch above a country bumpkin due to her mother's pretensions to have her painting displayed in the annual Salon.  Eugenie is led astray, with her own willing cooperation and rebelliousness, by the scion of a wealthy family who has come to broker a business deal.  She follows her lover to Paris in 1861, spending her small amount of cash in a vain effort to connect with him there.  Instead she meets an artist whose portrait of Eugenie as the Unknown Woman creates a sensation and sets tongues wagging about the identity of the model.  Eugenie is unaware of this and unable to benefit financially.  When her small stash of money is gone, so is the rest of her virtue, swallowed up in the government-sponsored industry of prostitution.  She is forced to abandon her child to the state-run foundling system so her child will have a better chance of survival than she can provide.  She trusts no one around her, least of all her lovers, male or female.  Eugenie eventually has a modicum of success as a procuress, always with the aim of rescuing her child.  She lives through the Siege of Paris and emerges even more determined to win back control of her daughter, only to find that her former lover has beaten her to it and spirited the girl away.

That's the story in a nutshell.  When I started reading this book, I felt as though I had come in during the middle of a play where I had missed some vital information in the opening act, and I never caught up all the way through the book.  When I finally reached the end, 404 pages later, my reaction was an indignant "That's IT???!!!"  There was neither a satisfactory conclusion to Eugenie's tale, nor the promise of more to come in the future (which frankly, I wouldn't have bothered with anyway).  I had hoped for so much more from this book.  I hope you're not as disappointed as I was.