Herma

From the Jacket:

Herma is many things: a glamorous story of a singer who rises from the choir of a country church to stardom at the Paris Opera: the parallel advantures of her agent and friendly enemy Fred Hite, filled with the excitment of the early days of aviation; and a provocative sexual intrigue whose twinned her and heroine, not brother and sister, are yet forbidden to each other by the secret that lies at the center of their odd and intimate relationship. From its evocative beginnings in the pastoral Southern California of the turn of the centura, Herma moves on to larger worlds--first the brash, adolescent San Francisco of the period, then the international world of opera in Paris at the most luxurious, opulent, and decadent moment of its history. Erotic, bejeweled, crowded with incident and a big, vivid cast of characters, Herma is MacDonald Harris's richest and most complex novel and destined to be his most popular.

Critical Acclaim for Herma

• "What a delightful jaunt this is through the turn of the century, touching down on all its grand personages and preoccupations, from opera and pioneer aviation to Caruso and Marcel Proust, all in the company of the charming Herma, whose middle name should be Aphrodite."
  Oakley Hall
• "A daredevil trompe-l'oeil coup-de-theatre. A fine example of fictive truth stronger than fact. The idea of coupling aviation with high-wire vocalism (correctly perceived and masterfully portrayed as cognate) invests this big book with metaphorical glamour. The performance is both assured and alluring."
  James McCourt.
• "This enchanting historical novel, which begins with the crack of a whip in a Victorian buggy and ends with an apocalyptic dog-fight in a World War I biplane, is a novel about aviation. It is also a novel about opera, indeed the most sumptuous one ever attempted, with full-blown portraits of luminaries such as Caruso and Puccini as well as detailed expositions of oepras and vocal techniques...What makes Herma a significant and delightful breakthrough for Harris is a new range of technique and feeling...Herma is an exhilarating work, surely one of the brightest of the season, by a superb craftsman working at the peak of his form. The shadow of mortalityi that spreads out at the end lurks implicitly from the beginning, a necessary counterpoint to the novel's vibrant and magical affirmation of life."
  Jack Sullivan, Washington Post Book World
• "A talented writer produces his finest novel...Herma is fascinating, touching, and immensely entertaining. It is Mr. Harris's ninth novel in 20 years of steadily sharpening skills and it outreaches all the work that he has done before...It is much superior to E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime.
  Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal.
• Herma is an original, skillful, and fascinating novel, set in California and Paris, between about 1885 and 1915. The writing is witty and allusive, stylish and yet natural. MacDonald Harris never strains for effect or raises his voice, but his book is both sensational and revolutionary...The writing is like an exactly observed fairy tale; it is also funny and exciting and convincing."
  Kendall Mitchell, Chicago Tribune.
• "This is, by any reckoning, an extraordinary novel, and a delightful one...A romance of Nabakovian subtlety and audacity written in language of shining precision...Surely one of the best novels about opera ever written, with a range of tone and feeling worth of some masterwork by Verdi, Herma has another element: magic."
  Publisher's Weekly.
• "MacDonald Harris...has been something of a bypassed talent, having received less attention than he deserves. Mr. Harris is an elegant and fastidious writer, a thinking man's novelist, with a penchant for international situations and polyglot dialogue."
  James R. Mellow, The New York Times Book Review.
• "What makes Herma so engrossing...is Harris's style. He has the ability to evoke the greatest emotion from a few well-placed words that, like the 19'th century stereoscope, makes everything three-dimensional when viewed through their lenses."
  Laurel Graeber, Village Voice Literary Supplement.

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