Ellis Avery

Agreeing to model nude for Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka to avoid prostitution in 1927 Paris, young American Rafaela Fano inspires the artist's most iconic Jazz Age images and becomes her lover while discovering darker truths about Tamara's private life. By the award-winning author of The Teahouse Fire.

The Last Nude

Agreeing to model nude for Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka in 1927 Paris, young American Rafaela Fano inspires the artist's most iconic Jazz Age images and becomes her lover while discovering darker truths about Tamara's private life.

Erin 

Wow. I was not expecting to love this book as much as I did. I read a lot of historical novels set in France. It's everything that I love. And a lot of them are the same. I mean, they vary, but at their core, they feel the same. This one is different. The relationship between Rafaela and Tamara is indescribable. It's lustful and passionate, and this isn't limited to the physical aspects of their relationship. There's a connection between an artist and a muse that no one will ever be able to understand. It's an intense philosophical binding that cannot be replicated and only comes once in a lifetime. Tamara de Lempicka is not a terribly well-known artist, especially outside the realm of art to the common reader. But you can be sure that anyone who reads this will be craving for more information about her, for more glimpses into her life and passions. It genuinely feels like I can never be satisfied by any piece of information about her I can find - everything I read just glances over this part in her history, delegating Rafaela to a mere footnote, and their relationship to the nonexistent.

Sometimes it is difficult to believe that Rafaela is merely 17 years old - how can someone so young have such feeling and maturity, to not only equate herself to Tamara's 30 year old peers but the other Parisians and their problems around her. Especially difficult when she turns to prostitution to keep up with her rent. We spend most of the book and the story inside her head, reading her thoughts and feelings. Particularly, we spend the entirety of Rafaela and Tamara's relationship with her, only finally getting Tamara's thoughts and reflections after they part. I do feel that within Rafaela's perspective, you really get to know and feel for her. When she cannot stop thinking about her artist, and their connection, when she is drawn back, day after day, mesmerised by the rhythmic strokes of Tamara's work, you cannot help but feel those emotions too. When she speaks her desire to run away to Italy together, never to return, you also want to escape to Rome and Venice, where they will eternally live and paint and love. And, when it all comes to an end, when she experiences the heartbreak of Tamara once again valuing money and title over a simple little thing like love, you can't help but also feel your heart ache, reminding you that despite her perceived maturity, Rafaela is still a young, naive girl, expecting everything to fall into place.

About 2/3 of the way through the book, I read an interview with the author from 2011 when it was published. In it, she mentions that while writing Rafaela, she realised that she had another voice in the back of her head demanding to be written, and that it was Tamara's voice. While it may take Rafaela 120 pages to say something, Tamara could do it in two lines. And thus leading to the final few chapters from Tamara's point of view, fifty years since she last saw or spoke to her muse. Within these last few chapters alone, I felt a range of emotions. It was unexpected, and at first I was grateful to be able to have a different look at their hedonistic relationship. But then it became clear to me how selfish Tamara was, not thinking about how other people may feel about things, or how her actions may affect them. She may know that it be unfair, but her attitude feels dismissive, rather than considerate. But as her chapters went on, and in her old age, others can see her deterioration but she cannot, you feel sympathy for her, which I was also not expecting. She becomes (what I have recently learned is) an unreliable narrator. You get the feeling that if she were to entirely retell the story from her perspective, it would be entirely different than Rafaela's version. And yet, her unkindness doesn't feel disingenuine. Rather, she was frank and clear about what she wanted all along - but what she may have wanted changed frequently. I truly believe that she did want a relationship with Rafaela at one point in their arrangement - until of course, she didn't. I do think she wanted, at one point, to run away to Italy, to preserve what became a perfect concoction of art and lust and pleasure, until she found another path that would serve her better. I am still not really a fan of her, per say, but I do think I understand her more after these final few chapters.

Artists are hard to understand, unless you are one. I most certainly am not an artist, but I do find them fascinating, which is why a book such as this one appeals so much to me. I keep flipping through it, rereading passages, wanting to read it over again, read it for the first time again, wanting to be finished with it and immersed in it at the same time. I haven't felt like this about a book in a really long time, and the feeling is almost foreign. This story plunges you into Paris, parades you into the world of art, and makes you feel that no matter what came before, or what comes after, sometimes, narrowing in on a private, relatively unknown story is just the distraction needed from life. The passion for art, and for love, is abundantly clear, and I wish we had more of it in the world.

The Last Nude

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