Künstlers in Paradise

by Cathleen Schine

Overview

There was a time when the family Künstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed the fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the Künstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America.

For years Mamie Künstler, ninety-three years old, as clever and glamorous as ever, has lived happily in her bungalow in Venice, California, with her inscrutable housekeeper and her gigantic St. Bernard. Their tranquility is upended when Mamie’s grandson Julian arrives from New York City. Like many a twentysomething, he has come to seek his fortune in Hollywood. But it is 2020, the global pandemic sweeps in, and Julian’s short visit suddenly has no end in sight.

Mamie was only eleven when the Künstlers escaped Vienna in 1939. They made their way, stunned and overwhelmed, to sunny, surreal Los Angeles, where they joined a colony of distinguished Jewish musicians, writers, and intellectuals also escaping Hitler. Now, faced with months of lockdown and a willing listener, Mamie begins to tell Julian the buried stories of her years in Los Angeles: her escapades with eminent émigrés like Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann. Oh, and Greta Garbo. While the pandemic cuts Julian off from the life he knows, Mamie’s tales open up a world of lives that came before him. They reveal to him just how much the past holds of the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250892492
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/12/2024
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	98,964
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Cathleen Schine is the author of The Grammarians, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, and The Love Letter, among other novels. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Los Angeles.

Hometown:

New York, New York, and Venice, California

Date of Birth:

1953

Place of Birth:

Bridgeport, Connecticut

Education:

B.A., Barnard College, 1976

Website:

http://www.cathleenschine.com/

Editorial Reviews

01/30/2023

Schine (The Grammarians) delivers another witty novel of manners, this time juxtaposing 1940s Hollywood with the present. Mamie Kunstler, 11, escapes from Vienna with her well-to-do Jewish family just as WWII begins. They settle in Los Angeles, where Mamie’s playwright mother, Ilse, lands a job writing for the movies. In 2020, as L.A. goes into pandemic lockdown, cantankerous Mamie takes her 24-year-old grandson, Julian, into her crumbling Venice home. Mamie entertains Julian, who’s having trouble finding himself, with stories about her charmed life around the movies, when, at a young age, she knew Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, and Greta Garbo, the last of whom she encountered on the beach at 12 and reconnected with at 20, the details of which she teases out to an increasingly enraptured Julian. One day while walking Mamie’s Saint Bernard, Julian meets Sophie, an attractive neighbor, and the two strike up a friendship with the promise of romance. Nothing much happens over the course of this effervescent confection, but it hardly matters because Mamie, Julian, and company are such enjoyable characters to hang out with. Reading like a cross between Leopoldstadt and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, this does the trick as an emotionally resonant meditation on family, memory, and the need for stories. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A People Magazine Book of the Week
An NPR Best Book of the Year

"A moving and entertaining novel about how we revisit memories to make meaning for ourselves and others. . . . Ms. Schine has a wonderful ability to weave research and substantive ideas into her novels without weighing them down. Her buoyant dialogue has the zip of great comedy routines."
—Wall Street Journal

"Schine’s delight in language is contagious—she offers up words like baubles, turning them this way and that to catch the light. . . . A paean to the regenerative power of storytelling and to Los Angeles itself."
—Kim Hubbard, New York Times Book Review

"The novel emphasizes echoes across history but explores intergenerational gaps, too, and—despite handling such weighty subject matter as survivor’s guilt, sexual repression, and the ongoing traumas of racial and religious persecution—maintains a remarkable lightness of tone and of characterization."
—New Yorker

"Künstlers in Paradise is a tender family story, but it is also a profound meditation on the nature and power of storytelling, inheritance, and legacy, the malleability and perdurability of memory."
—Boston Globe

"Dreamy, drifty, and droll, studded with lush botanical description and historical gems. Schine’s many fans will enjoy."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Reading like a cross between Leopoldstadt and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, this does the trick as an emotionally resonant meditation on family, memory, and the need for stories."
—Publishers Weekly

"Few authors could pull off what Cathleen Schine does in Künstlers in Paradise: creating a seamless, multilayered saga about family dynamics and relationships, immigration, the early days of Hollywood and the often disturbingly cyclical nature of history. . . . Künstlers in Paradise is truly a trove of unexpected rewards."
—BookPage, Starred Review

From the Publisher

2022-12-24
The plight of Jewish intellectuals evicted from their homes by Hitler meets the plight of Los Angeles families trapped in their homes by the pandemic.

“ ‘I do not believe in life after death,’ Mamie said. ‘I sometimes have trouble believing in life before death: it is all so improbable.’ ” With her usual bounty of witticisms and aperçus, Schine takes on the recent plague year from the perspectives of two protagonists. Mamie Künstler is a 93-year-old violinist who came to Los Angeles from Vienna in 1939 with her parents, Austrian Jews who became fixtures in the Hollywood émigré community. Eighty-some years later, Mamie lives in a bungalow in Venice with her long-time companion, Agatha, “a person of indeterminate age and indeterminate nationality whose job description was both indeterminate and, as far as Julian could tell, all-encompassing.” Julian is Mamie's grandson, age 24. When we meet him, he is lolling around New York pursuing esoteric hobbies, such as transcribing the screenplays of Kurosawa. Desperate to jump-start his life, Julian’s parents send him to the West Coast to help Mamie, who has recently fractured her wrist, and Agatha, whose driver’s license has been suspended. Not long after Julian arrives, he’s trapped by lockdown. “I’m terrified, pissed off, and bored,” he tells his grandmother. “That is a perfect description of my childhood, Julian. Uncanny.” As the relationship between the two develops, as the rhythms of quarantine take over, including the ubiquitous “jingling tray” of the cocktail hour(s), Mamie begins to share the stories of her youth, which feature well-known real people such as Otto Preminger, Arnold Schoenberg, and, most importantly, Greta Garbo. Meanwhile, Julian is awarded a pandemic romance, allowing Schine to revisit the unpleasant social rituals of 2020 and ’21 with characteristic wryness: “With the languorous timing of a stripper, Sophie detached one elastic from one ear, the other elastic from the other ear. She batted her eyelashes at him, then slowly, slowly lowered the mask as if it were a veil, an exotic veil.”

Dreamy, drifty, and droll, studded with lush botanical description and historical gems. Schine’s many fans will enjoy.

Kirkus Reviews