Overview
A feverish and gripping novel about obsession, creation, and redemption.
After being mauled and disfigured by a lion during the 1966 International Automobile Show in New York City, actress and model Nell Theobald became obsessed with legendary soprano Birgit Nilsson, stalking her from opera house to opera house across the world, before dying mysteriously in 1977.
Forty years later, a young bookseller and music journalist discovers Theobald’s enticingly strange and patchy archive. He grows enamored with the scope of her life, uncovering a woman tormented by her lofty, romantic whims and her need to make art. Who haunted sordid nightclubs and rewrote entire operas by evening. Who was part of the wrong crowd and whose life grew increasingly grim because of it. So what happened to her, really?
As the unnamed narrator struggles to forge a career for himself while attempting to account for Theobald’s life, he grows increasingly desperate to find any semblance of truth in a contemporary New York City complicated by surveillance and infinite layers of mediation.
Heaven’s Oblivion is an operatic noir rendered in sensitive and poetic prose. Its dreamy—and at times searingly comical—tone renders the glamorous clubs and opera houses of the 1970s alongside the experimental art communities present in New York today.
Above all else, it is an exuberant meditation on the struggle to love and create art in a world that doesn’t understand.
After being mauled and disfigured by a lion during the 1966 International Automobile Show in New York City, actress and model Nell Theobald became obsessed with legendary soprano Birgit Nilsson, stalking her from opera house to opera house across the world, before dying mysteriously in 1977.
Forty years later, a young bookseller and music journalist discovers Theobald’s enticingly strange and patchy archive. He grows enamored with the scope of her life, uncovering a woman tormented by her lofty, romantic whims and her need to make art. Who haunted sordid nightclubs and rewrote entire operas by evening. Who was part of the wrong crowd and whose life grew increasingly grim because of it. So what happened to her, really?
As the unnamed narrator struggles to forge a career for himself while attempting to account for Theobald’s life, he grows increasingly desperate to find any semblance of truth in a contemporary New York City complicated by surveillance and infinite layers of mediation.
Heaven’s Oblivion is an operatic noir rendered in sensitive and poetic prose. Its dreamy—and at times searingly comical—tone renders the glamorous clubs and opera houses of the 1970s alongside the experimental art communities present in New York today.
Above all else, it is an exuberant meditation on the struggle to love and create art in a world that doesn’t understand.
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