Ungar\, Irwin A.
Quoting from William Maxwell, McCann tells the reader that it is the storyteller's work to rearrange the conflicting emotions of a life. 'In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.' Fiction or biography, it doesn't matter; this dazzling novel based on the life of Rudolf Nureyev has an integrity and truth that many biographies fail to achieve. By the end of the book a complete picture of a life has been drawn, from homeland and childhood to the art of music and dance. Friends and family - even servants - are given a voice to tell their own story, creating fictions within fiction. McCann knows that to understand Nureyev's loneliness and guilt it is necessary to devote time to the child's longing to have his father home from the war, so the first section gives a realistic picture of the Russian soldiers' struggle to defend the Soviet Union from 1941 until their final victory. It is atmospheric writing and ends with the trains carrying the lice-ridden wounded towards the city of Ufa where a six-year-old Tatar boy, Nureyev, watched daily to see if his father would be among the returning men. After his defection the dancer was forbidden to return to the Soviet Union and it was not until his mother was dying that he was granted 48 hours to see her and his sister. His father, who had never seen him dance, had died years before. It is a rich story and the telling is equally rich: words tumble out in lists and images, sentences begin over and over again with the same word as though McCann needs every nuance to say what he wants. There are descriptions of the craft of making ballet shoes, accounts of Nureyev's extravagance, his love of music, his obsession with perfection, his sexual adventures, his love on stage for Margot Fonteyn. Sometimes the telling is in note form, sometimes in dialogue and sometimes there are 20 or more pages of dense prose. A tour de force. (Kirkus UK)