Paris Never Leaves You - Softcover

Robbins, Adr�ana

3.43

68 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812570782 ISBN 13: 9780812570786

Publisher: Forge Books, 2000

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As the daughter of blockbuster author Harold Robbins, Adreana Robbins's childhood was divided between glamorous Hollywood and the picturesque south of France. Like her father's works, Adreana Robbins's debut novel is an exciting page-turner, packed with exotic settings and glimpses into the lives of the wealthy and powerful. Through her own lyrical style, reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's, Robbins captures the allure of Parisian high society and uncovers generations lost in deceit and betrayal. Shortly before her twenty-first birthday, Djuna Cortez journeys to Paris to claim a mysterious legacy from a grandfather she never knew, Joaquim Carlos Cortez, a world-renowned surrealist painter. Djuna is shocked to learn that he has left her an estate that includes a winery and chateau in Loire, an apartment in Paris, and a priceless art collection, which includes his own works and those of his friends and contemporaries, Miro, Picasso, and Dali. Even more, Joaquim Carlos has made Djuna his literary executor, asking her to see to the publication of his journals. Robbins skillfully relates the parallel comings-of-age of the impressionable Djuna in contemporary Paris and the controversial, hot-blooded Joaquim Carlos in the wild Paris of the 1930s and World War II, both transformed forever by the City of Light. Setting her tale in France, Spain, Morocco, and the seductive Mediterranean, Adreana Robbins carries her readers on a passionate journey. Djuna, overwhelmed by sudden wealth and responsibility and caught up in a jet-set lifestyle, struggles with love, intrigue, and danger. Through her grandfather's journals, Djuna learns of Joaquim Carlos's own struggles: to succeed in the exciting new world of surrealist art, to overcome his obsession with physical pleasure, to survive under Nazi terror. But the greatest shocks come when Djuna uncovers the secrets of her family's painful, mysterious past. Drawing courage from the truths she learns about her family and herself, Djuna strives to recover her freedom and her sanity, and to claim her grandfather's powerful artistic legacy.

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I came to Paris naive, open, untouched, and as transparent as a glass palette. The year I spent in the City of Light I was to discover a city of art and sin. I experienced Paris, not through my mind, but through an awakening of the senses that allowed me to discover hidden desires. I became aware of a city filled with mutable colors, rich textures, contagious moods, intoxicating powers, diaphanous and distorted faces, masks of comedy and tragedy.

Paris captured my heart, imprinting my memory like a first romantic kiss. The city demanded confidence, arrogance, or at least an attitude. In Paris one could reach as high as the Eiffel Tower. I had no limitations, except for my own anger, which was ignited along with my passion, the moment I set foot along the Champs-Elysees.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The daughter of Harold Robbins debuts with a Paris romance in which Cinderella marries Prince Charming, only to find hes secretly the Beast. Robbins overstates her heroine's every feeling and supercharges each character into near-caricature. She clearly loves landscape and description and reels off plenty of brand names stickered to the rich and famous. Motherless, penniless American Djuna Cortez, only 21 and alone in the City of Light, has just had her charge card cut off by her surly father, Emile, when she receives a letter stating that shes inherited vast wealth from Emile's father, the well-known painter Joaqum Carlos Cortez. (Emile himself is passed over, for reasons revealed only near the close.) Aside from her grandfather's bank accounts, Djuna also inherits his large apartment and studio, his paintings and chateau, publishing rights to his ten journals, and his winery in the Loire Valley. As Djuna reads the journals, the story alternates between her firsthand account of Parisian high society in the mid-1980s and Joaqum's notes about his youth as a budding bohemian artist in Paris during the '30s and '40s: his love affairs, models, and ritzy friends, including towering but luminous egoist/hat-designer Mitya Troubetskoy and, much later, budding novelist Pascal Maron, both of whom have been Joaqum's lovers and are now partial inheritors. Djunas snooty half-brother introduces her to six-foot African model Navarine, who in turns leads her into a romance with Jean-August Briard, a strangely reserved but blindingly handsome ``cosmopolitan hero out of a Fitzgerald novel'' who knows everything about grapes and offers to help save her failing winery. Unfortunately, Djuna discovers only after she marries him that his reserve masks sadism. Within months, shes bruised, battered, and seeking divorce. Then Jean-August really gets mad . . . . Carefully crafted for its genre, but only faintly reminiscent of anything real. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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