Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Riverhead Books (2014), 320 pages
Description
"A contemporary retelling of Daphne du Maurier's gripping and iconic novel Rebecca, ALENA tells the story of a bright young curator who finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor at a small, cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod"--
Original publication date
2014
Media reviews
It’s a tricky business, reimagining a much-loved work of literature. All of us readers carry around a list of fictional worlds we’d like to revisit, but when another author offers us the chance by taking on our favorite stories — reshaping the narrative, shifting the viewpoint — we tend to
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be skeptical. We don’t want it to be too close to the original, but it can’t go too far afield, either. The triumph of Pastan’s story is that it manages to be more than a companion piece to du Maurier’s. “Alena” proves itself an intriguing and substantial novel on its own merits, while still offering the kind of gothic plunge we remember and crave from our younger years. Show Less
The writing at times is so fine you wish this weren’t a retold story, that Pastan would soar off on her own. At other times, she indulges in heavy-handed art-world jabber, allowing her narrator to casually sprinkle her conversation with, for example, praise for “the tension between the fidelity
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to realistic form and the idiosyncratic use of color.” “Alena” is often a brilliant takedown of the self-serious art world, rendering it helplessly camp by sprinkling some of its august and/or provocative names — Larry Gagosian, Damien Hirst, Andy Goldsworthy, Marina Abramovic, Cindy Sherman, Kira O’Reilly — over this reimagining of du Maurier’s pop-culture totem, a deformed soap opera with twisty roller-coaster plotlines and theatrical loop-de-loops Show Less
Although offering a wry, perceptive commentary on the contemporary art world, the novel lacks the creeping sense of dread pervading du Maurier’s classic. Nor does the narrator’s relationship with Bernard raise the dramatic stakes, not merely due to the fact that a curatorship is inherently less
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fraught than a marriage, but since Bernard, after launching the action, disappears from it almost as completely as Alena herself. However, unlike Alena, Bernard, when gone, is easily forgotten.
A technically able but rather tepid reimagining of the gothic staple Rebecca. Show Less