Maum’s coming-of-age novel among some of Europe’s elite is heartbreaking in its evocation of a teenage girl whose mother collects artists to save but who ignores the daughter struggling not to drown. Maum captures the language and the intense flux of adolescent lability. She does it so well that readers may feel they’ve intruded on something private.
... delightful ... If frustrations arise from Maum’s whimsical approach...it also provides satisfactions in the gentle comedy of artists in the jungle ... It’s a testament to Maum’s writing that I found myself finishing the book with a sense of a young woman’s growth. In Lara, Maum has given a little-considered daughter a more hopeful future.
... an indefinable mixture of counterfactual history and surrealist dreamscape ... It’s amusing to imagine this motley assortment bickering at the dinner table, but the glimpses we have of them are brief and undeveloped. Ms. Maum is so reliant on the reader’s ability to figure out their historical models that it’s not quite clear what she’s gained by giving them made-up names ... The exception is the novel’s narrator, Lara ... Movingly, Lara communicates her loneliness in frank and naive paintings that are never good enough to hold her mother’s attention ... For all the strangeness of Costalegre, its core is solid and affecting: A teenage girl who wants her mother to notice her.
In Costalegre, Maum warns us about the threat of concentrated power, and by extension, the threat of wealth on freedom and art. Leonora’s wealth gives her power. She has, after all, leveraged her wealth to save herself and her favored artists. She is the gatekeeper, and her wealth essentially decides the value of the art ... There are few warnings more dire in an era of oligarchs, concentrated wealth, and the rise of fascist governments ... With Costalegre, Maum demonstrates her adroit versatility ... she has given us a dystopia from the past, more relevant and frightening today than many of us thought possible.
Someone with a far greater knowledge of Surrealist and Dadaist art and literature than I have would likely have great fun with Courtney Maum’s new novel, Costalegre, since they’d more easily be able to connect the dots between the fictional characters she has created and their historical antecedents. The good news, however, is that whether or not you’re already familiar with the basis of the book, there’s plenty of historical background, lush and evocative setting, and emotional resonance to satisfy any reader ... the Mexican setting is strictly Maum’s imagination at work, creating a verdant yet somehow threatening setting that helps isolate her characters and raise their emotional stakes ... a fascinating novel, not only because of its exploration of a particular artistic and historic moment, but also as a portrait of a young woman desperately trying to find herself in relation to others but encountering disillusion at every turn. Lara’s observations, musings, dreams and sketches give readers a glimpse of her inner life that, one realizes, offers far more insight into this character than Lara’s mother ever even cared to have.
Lara’s narrative, told as a series of diary entries, drawings, and lists in the faux-British lilt of the 1940s era, veers quickly from sarcasm to sincerity and back again. Lara’s day-to-day observations move the plot at a clip. Their sensory details situate the reader alongside the characters, looking over the shoulder of a photographer placing cherries on each of his model’s eyelids or knee-to-knee with Lara journaling in her room. With both humor and criticality, Maum’s coming-of-age novel probes the hypocrisy of the art world, the challenges of being a child of artists, and the dangers of not being loved ... Costalegre delivers searing commentary on individualism in the art world. Lara’s struggle for emotional connection brings to light a central question around the artist lifestyle and personal relationships.
Maum’s slender, intelligent Costalegre is about many things: art as spectacle and art as discipline; life as joke and life as tragedy; the role of unreason in paintings and politics ... Maum wonderfully inhabits Lara’s in-progress sensibility ... But what happens is less important here than how it feels ... Costalegre though often funny, is warmly earnest — a sentimental novel in the best sense of the word ... Youth is a time of excitement and giant grayness, when everything seems amplified. Costalegre makes us feel this time, and these feelings, again.
...discerning the real-life inspirations for the artists is part of this evocative tale’s allure. But its depth is found in how astutely Maum tracks her diarist-narrator’s intellectual and emotional coming-of-age through her evolving eloquence and sharpening perceptions. Wounded by her mother’s inattention, infatuated with a sculptor, burdened by her femaleness, and increasingly serious about making art, Lara is extraordinarily poignant. By internalizing and then transcending her sources, Maum has created a brilliantly arch and haunting novel of privilege and deprivation.
Maum’s third novel...is a rich and delectable tale of art, love, and war ... The highlight is Lara, whose searching intelligence and insightful observations anchor the story. This is a fascinating, lively, and exquisitely crafted novel.
...[a] spare enchanting novel ... Lara makes for a fine narrator—young enough to be both enchanted and annoyed by the strange collection of adults that surround her and old enough to explain her frustrations with heartbreaking clarity ... A lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly told by a narrator you won't be able to forget.
