Dancer Audiobook By Colum McCann cover art

Dancer

A Novel

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Dancer

By: Colum McCann
Narrated by: Dion Graham
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Buy for $18.00

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Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him.

There is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set.

Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
Literary Fiction Soviet Union Biographical Fiction Russia Fiction Genre Fiction Biography
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The depiction of his childhood and young adolescence was interesting, but his off-stage story became progressively less and less interesting. Knowing his tragic ending, I stopped reading before the HIV diagnosis. I was expecting the book to depict an interesting off-stage personality/intellect. Maybe the author just failed to deliver, or maybe there was no there there.


A genius Dancer, but unlikable and uninteresting

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