Vivienne

(Hardback)

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Did Vivienne Volker kill Wilma Lang This question has dogged Vivienne ever since Wilma jumped from a window to her death shortlyafter Volker stole her lover, the visionary artist Hans Bellmer, in the 1970s. Once a famous artist and fashion icon, Volker is now in her eighties and spends her days in religious contemplation in rural Pennsylvania alongside her daughter Velour Bellmer, her granddaughter Vesta Furio, her much younger boyfrienda garbageman named Louand Franz, the family dog. Their quiet lives are disrupted when Viviennes work is selected for inclusion in a high-profile retrospective called "Forgotten Women Surrealists" at the prestigious NAT Museum. However, when rumors of her past misdeeds begin to circulate and she is dropped from the show, a gallery curator enters the picture hoping to capitalize on the buzz generated by the controversy, sending the family's tensions, hopes, and dreams to a dizzyingpeak. Set over the course of a fateful week, Viviennedeftly weaves surreal prose with a Greek chorus of internet comments and text messages, to ask the question: what is the cost of vision, what is the price of art