CriticalDance Forum

Gail Caldwell reviews "Dancer", a fictional version of Nureyev's life, in the Sunday Boston Globe:

Flight of the firebird

"The novel 'Dancer' traces the spectacle of Rudolf Nureyev's life, through defection and exile, artistry and excess"

Review from The Telegraph.

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Another review:

<a href=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/01/12/RV119499.DTL target=_blank>More</a>

More:

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A review from Ellen Emry Heltzel in the Seattle Times:

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=dancer12&date=20030112

Note for those within range of Seattle: the author will be reading at Elliott Bay Books (First Avenue South and South Main Street in Pioneer Square) on Thursday, February 6, 2003 at 7:30 p.m.

<small>[ 13 January 2003, 03:20 PM: Message edited by: Francis Timlin ]</small>

A dancer with feet of clay
Reviewed BY GREG EDEN for The Scotsman

DANCER
Colum McCann
Phoenix, £14.99

AT THE height of his fame, Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev owned seven homes around the world, took afternoon tea with JFK, partied with Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Andy Warhol and Marlon Brando, and appeared on the covers of Life and Time magazines in the same week. After one performance in Vienna, he received 87 curtain calls, and he was variously hailed as both the world’s most beautiful man, and the greatest exponent of his art since Nijinsky.

In Dancer, Irish writer Colum McCann combines historical fact with fiction to describe Nureyev’s journey from his impoverished roots in war-ravaged Siberia to the peak of a glittering career, and on to his decline and eventual death from Aids in 1993.

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USA Today weighs in on Dancer:

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Eat your heart out, Billy Elliot
Colum McCann rings the changes as he tells Rudolf Nureyev's story through the eyes of others in Dancer. Reviewed by Rachel Cooke for The Observer

"Dancer", by Colum McCann (Weidenfeld & Nicholson £12.99, pp352)

As a sunject, Rudolf Nureyev has it all: what kind of writer could fail to fall in love with him? The come-on lips, the stormy eyes and, of course, a life so sensational that, beside it, today's tabloid melodramas seem positively humdrum. How's this for a story? The boy, a determined, intemperate creature, is born to Tatar stock and grows up in the kind of grinding poverty where half a potato is considered a feast. Before long, however, a fiery, unrestrained talent for dance emerges.

He studies at the Kirov and is adored across the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold War, he defects and joins the jet set. His admirers include Jackie O and Princess Margaret, and his art collection is so vast it seems as if it might one day rival that of the Hermitage. Finally, in 1993, he dies from Aids, an illness he has kept secret. A light goes out.

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A review in the Miami Herald:

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The Globe and Mail has a review by Nikki Barrett in the January 25, 2003 edition. To access, enter

http://www.globeandmail.ca

and enter "dancer" in the seven day site search at the bottom of the page.

Dancer by Colum McCann
Reviewed by HUGO BARNACLE for The Sunday Times
DANCER
by Colum McCann
(Weidenfeld £12.99 pp292)


Novels about the cult of celebrity are becoming quite common. Usually they centre on imaginary celebrities, but Dancer tackles the life story of a real person, the Russian ballet star and all-round jetsetter Rudolf Nureyev. Colum McCann uses multiple viewpoints to create the sense of a character who exists largely through the attention of others: his mother and sister, his first ballet teacher, his fellow pupils, his hangers-on, his housekeeper, his shoemaker and his greatest dance partner, Margot Fonteyn.

Sometimes they voice their own thoughts; sometimes an omniscient narrator does it for them. “Rudi” himself comes to the fore occasionally, both in conventional third-person sequences and in supposed extracts from his journals and notebooks, but we are still left with the suspicion that when he is alone there is nobody there.

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Anybody ever read that goofy thing by Monique van Vooren called "Night Sanctuary" - ? It was basically the same thing, but Dancer is somewhat better written. I am about halfway through this thing so you will be mercifully spared any opinions (reading it on the stairclimber at the gym...). At least Monique actually knew Rudik and they travelled in the same circle. Somehow I kinda wish McCann had left Rudy out of it and juxtaposed another character-type and taken it from there... I would be somewhat skeptical of reviewers' opinions who usually know diddly squat about dance...

Tough act to follow
By Clement Crisp for the Financial Times


Rudolf Nureyev, 10 years afterhis death, still haunts the public imagination. His name isnewsworthy. Auction houses sell his possessions; fans buy anything - from workaday academic paintings of male nudes to his old shoes - and feel that he still touches their lives. His ballet productions continue to command huge audiences. His image - hair, nostrils, the scarred upper lip, the body in taut academic pose - is still bright in print and film. Biographies - variously awful, opportunistic, cheapjack - have unrolled the narrative of defection, talent, ceaseless performances, passion. And now, fiction: not that the other scribblings have seemed to me to explain the facts of his life or career with any distinction or biographical likelihood.

With Colum McCann's quasi-fictional Dancer we have a bizarre assemblage of incidents from the life of a dancer, Rudik, told by a series of narrators, who detail in selective and gritty fashion Nureyev's history as the author re-invents it, while in the process revealing something of their own lives and their own despairs.

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In the San Jose Mercury News: