The Transformation

Description

Title: The Transformation
Author: Catherine Chidgey
Publisher: Victoria University Press, 2003
Format: Paperback
Condition: Good – slight discolouration to pages. Scuff marks on cover and spine.

Description:
Tampa Bay, Florida, 1898. The Tampa Bay Hotel dominates the town – Moorish minarets, Byzantine domes, electric lighting designed by Edison himself – a winter playground for bankers and celebrities, extraordinary and slightly absurd. It has one year-round resident: Monsieur Lucien Goulet III, a Parisian wigmaker who has fled to this frontier and set himself up as artisan to the glamorous. Goulet is brilliant, meticulous, and not quite right.

When he becomes entranced by the silver-blonde hair of a young widow named Marion Unger, he determines that what he makes from it will be his masterpiece. What he is prepared to do to obtain the raw material – and what he employs a teenage Cuban cigar-maker to do on his behalf – is where the novel turns dark, and gothic, and gripping.
The Transformation has the atmosphere of Süskind’s Perfume – the portrait of an obsessive in a richly rendered world, whose genius and monstrousness are inseparable. The NZ Herald called it Chidgey’s “third and best so far” and said she “could take any subject and produce something wonderful from it.” The Guardian praised her “confident, commanding prose and vivid atmospherics.” The Sunday Times said it was “both troubling and haunting.” The Sunday Express called it “as beautiful as it is terrifying.” Barnes & Noble selected it for their Discover Great New Writers programme. It was published in five countries.

Why We Stock It:
The novel that took Catherine Chidgey’s reputation international – and the closing chapter of an early trilogy that now looks like the foundation of one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary New Zealand fiction. Out of print, increasingly sought after, and well worth finding.