Published in 2019
250 pages
Yelena Moskovich, was born in 1984 in Ukraine (former USSR) and emigrated to the US with her family in 1991. After graduating with a degree in playwriting from Emerson College, Boston, she moved to Paris to study at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre, and later for a Masters degree in Art, Philosophy and Aesthetics from Universite Paris 8. Her plays have been produced in the US, Vancouver, Paris, and Stockholm. She lives in Paris. She’s also written for The Happy Reader and in French for Mixt(e) magazine.
What is this book about?
For the first ten years of her life, Jana was a simple Czech girl, a watercolour. Her days were a clock run by the Czechoslovakian State Security, snapping hidden photos in their plainclothes. Much fervent artwork was created: Man Subverting Republic (Black and White), Woman Distributing (Tryptic). Man and Woman Organizing (Reprint).
Jana was a watercolour, until the raven-haired girl Zorka came. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris, hasn’t seen Zorka in a decade.
Aimée is in Paris too, happily married and trying to get into her hotel room. On the other side of the door is her wife Dominique, face down on the hotel linen, one hand drooping off the side of the bed, fingers curled in, wedding ring white gold like an eye frozen mid-wink.
A body now, no longer a person.
As Aimée and Jana’s stories slowly circle through time and place, they lead inexorably together…
Written with the dramatic tension of a Euripides tragedy, the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film and the imagination of a unique talent, Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel of love, desire, identity and belonging.
