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Teaser Tuesday: Claude and Camille

Tuesday, time for the teaser again, and this time the book is something I picked up from the library on a whim, Claude and Camille.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Claude and Camille by Stephanie Cowell

Claude and Camille by Stephanie Cowell

Here are two teaser sentences from
Claude and Camille by Stephanie Cowell:

“The distant sun of late February retreated. He breathed in the cold air and the smell of turpentine and paint and the warm scent of her.”

Blurb: “In the mid-nineteenth century, a young man named Claude Monet decided that he would rather endure a difficult life painting landscapes than take over his father’s nautical supplies business in a French seaside town. Against his father’s will, and with nothing but a dream and an insatiable urge to create a new style of art that repudiated the Classical Realism of the time, he set off for Paris.

But once there he is confronted with obstacles: an art world that refused to validate his style, extreme poverty, and a war that led him away from his home and friends. But there were bright spots as well: his deep, enduring friendships with men named Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Manet – a group that together would come to be known as the Impressionists, and that supported each other through the difficult years. But even more illuminating was his lifelong love, Camille Doncieux, a beautiful, upper-class Parisian girl who threw away her privileged life to be by the side of the defiant painter and embrace the lively Bohemian life of their time. “

I needed a light diversion, had seen a few works by Monet at an exhibition, and found the premise interesting. The writer in me keeps cringing at the sentences, the adverbs I hate strewn all over. ‘Lazy writing’– I keep saying every few lines: “She slowly took in the sketched face and the bold strokes of the dress. She stood so close that the buttons of her nearly closed coat almost touched him.”

But I’m intrigued by the setting, the romance of the artistic life of Monet and his contemporaries, so I’m not giving up on this book. Yet.

How about you? Would you read a book like Claude and Camille?

Damyanti Biswas

Damyanti Biswas is the author of You Beneath Your Skin and numerous short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies in the US, the UK, and Asia. She has been shortlisted for Best Small Fictions and Bath Novel Awards and is co-editor of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her literary crime thriller series, the Blue Mumbai, is represented by Lucienne Diver from The Knight Agency. Both The Blue Bar and The Blue Monsoon were published in 2023.

I appreciate comments, and I always visit back. If you're having trouble commenting, let me know via the contact form, or tweet me up @damyantig !

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