Sara and Gerald Murphy were the wealthy intimates of Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Don Passos and the rest of the avant-garde set in 1920s south of France, and here they lived hedonistically, languishing over cocktails on the coast by day and holding extravagant costume parties by night.
Villa America was the name given to their magnificent home near Antibes.
The Murphys were particularly close to the Fitzgeralds, and writer Klaussmann loosely bases the escapades at Villa America on those in Fitzgerald's classic Tender is the Night, on which she wrote her master's thesis. However, this is but a starting point in this extensive work, which weaves historical figures and details with the odd piece of pure fiction.
American Klaussmann and her researchers have collated great detail around a fascinating moment in time.
We gain a sense of upper-middle-class antics in interwar Europe; of creations in the world of art; of the emerging Ballets Russes, Cubism, and modernist literary masterpieces by those such as Hemingway.
She uses real examples of lives lived in a bubble of self-obsession, such as when Sara employs a pilot to fly to the Caspian Sea to source caviar for a party in Hemingway's honour.
Yet her novel is lengthy and a firm edit would not go amiss.
The novel has two main time frames: Gerald and Sara's privileged childhoods in the 1890s, much of which we could have done without, and their life together with all their friends and associates on the Riviera, where they were considered no less than to have established its summer season.
Klaussmann's writing is strongest when depicting the tenderness between Gerald and Sara, and that between Gerald and the (fictional) Owen and their love affair.
Other detailing of secondary characters and action drags in places, with writing that is not challenging or deeply memorable.
Despite such reservations, Villa America is to be commended for its research and its sympathetic portraits of hugely inventive yet troubled souls.
This novel whets the appetite for further reading, biographical, historical, and fictional, around this topic and the literary masterpieces of its time.
• Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
