‘The Last Nude’ By Ellis Avery

Posted on 21. Dec, 2011 by Sarah Burghauser in Fiction, Reviews

In 1927, Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempika meets American fledgling Rafaela Fano as she drives along Paris’ Boise de Boulogne.  Dazzled as much by Tamara’s wealth as by her glamour, Rafaela goes home with her to pose for paintings in exchange for a much-needed one hundred francs.  Ellis Avery’s sumptuous second novel, The Last Nude (Riverhead Books), imagines the life and death of Tamara and Rafaela’s relationship, which blooms from this historical chance encounter.

Avery weaves the story of a hot affair, a creative meeting of the minds, and also of the radiant and contagious deceit between these two women.

Despite Rafaela’s wish to earn just “enough money to be left alone,” she also admits that when she goes to work with Tamara, “Every time I took a pose that summer, it took me.”

But on the eve of their departure for a holiday vacation in Italy, when she is poised to punish Tamara for sleeping with another woman by stealing her most prized painting, a private copy of La Bella Rafaela, for the treacherous Baron Kuffner, Rafaela has a change of heart.  “I didn’t care about Ira Perrot,” she says.  “All I cared about was the look on Tamara’s face, as fierce and vulnerable as a wild bird in a trap.  She hadn’t seen Kuffner’s wink.  She hadn’t seen my throat tighten with horror at myself, at how badly I’d betrayed her.  She only saw me.  ‘Just two more hours,’ she mouthed.  All she wanted to do was survive and get on that train with me.  And all I wanted to do was to be worthy of her.”

Not so, for we learn that the duplicitous Tamara has prepared a guileful scheme of her own.  With the tender assistance of infamous bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, and go-to friend Anson Hall, Rafaela is able to make a narrow recovery from the traumatic ruin of her relationship with Tamara.

The painting, La Bella Rafaela, spawned from Tamara and Rafaela’s romance, serves as a centerpiece against which all other works of art and all other relationships are compared throughout the story.  It is the painting, in the end, which endures, retaining its purity and intrigue in the midst of a carnival of affairs and betrayals.

While the book begins as a passionate tale from the lush landscape of Paris in the 1920s, livened by entrancing sex scenes and seductive exchanges, the story takes a turn toward the fast-paced—morphing into a plot-driven whodunit, which will have readers asking whose allegiances are where and what will become of the beloved La Bella Rafaela.

The Last Nude
By Ellis Avery
Riverhead Books
Hardcover, 9781594488139, 320pp
January 2011

About Sarah Burghauser

Sarah B. Burghauser is a San Francisco-based writer, scholar, and mixed-media artist. She holds an MA from Oregon State University and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, where she has also taught. She has worked with Semiotext(e) Press in Los Angeles and has been awarded fellowships with the Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Voices Retreat, The MacDowell Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. Sarah regularly publishes with A Café in Space, the Anaïs Nin literary journal, and her essay “Learning To Be In A Skin” appears in the anthology, Queer Girls in Class: Lesbian Teachers and Students Tell Their Classroom Stories (Peter Lang Publishing Group 2011).

Tags: Ellis Avery, Historical Fiction, lesbian fiction, review, Riverhead Books, Sarah Burghauser, The Last Nude