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The Vintner's Luck, by Elizabeth Knox
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One summer night in 1808, Sobran Jodeau sets out to drown his love sorrows in his family's vineyard when he stumbles on an angel. Once he gets over his shock, Sobran decides that Xas, the male angel, is his guardian sent to counsel him on everything from marriage to wine production. But Xas turns out to be a far more mysterious character. Compelling and erotic, The Vintner's Luck explores a decidedly unorthodox love story as Sobran eventually comes to love and be loved by both Xas and the young Countess de Valday, his friend and employer at the neighboring chateau.
- Sales Rank: #936849 in Books
- Published on: 2000-08-05
- Released on: 2000-08-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .65" w x 5.50" l, .67 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Amazon.com Review
"A week after midsummer, when the festival fires were cold, and decent people were in bed an hour after sunset, not lying dry-mouthed in dark rooms at midday, a young man named Sobran Jodeau stole two of the freshly bottled wines to baptize the first real sorrow of his life."
The year is 1808, the place Burgundy, France. Among the lush vines of his family's vineyard, Jodeau, 18 years old and frustrated in love, is about to come face to face with a celestial being. But this is no sentimental "Touched by an Angel" seraph; as imagined by Elizabeth Knox in her wildly evocative and original novel, Xas is equipped with a glorious pair of wings ("pure sinew and bone under a cushion of feathers") and an appetite for earthly pleasures--wine, books, gardening, conversation, and, eventually, carnal love.
The fateful meeting between man and angel occurs on June 27. After an evening during which Sobran spills all his troubles and Xas gently advises him, the angel promises to return on the same night next year to toast Sobran's marriage. Thus begins a friendship that will last for 55 years, spanning marriages, wars, births, deaths, and even the vast distances between heaven, earth, and hell. In addition to the wonderfully flawed Sobran and his mysterious angel, Knox brilliantly limns secondary characters who are deeply sympathetic--from Sobran's unstable wife, Celeste, and his troubled brother, Leon, to his dear friend and confidante, the Baroness Aurora. Love, murder, madness, and a singular theology that would make a believer out of the most hardened atheist all add up, in The Vintner's Luck, to a novel that will break your heart yet leave you wishing for more. --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
This imaginative story of the lifelong love between a man and an angel is the first of Knox's five books to appear outside her native New Zealand. In Burgundy one midsummer night in 1808, Sobran Jodeau, then 18, climbs to the ridge of his father's lands with two freshly bottled wines to lament his love troubles. Stumbling drunkenly, he is caught by the angel Xas, who smells of snow and describes himself "of the lowest of the nine orders. Unmentioned in Scripture and Apocrypha." They share the bottles, and Xas promises that this night next year he will toast Sobran's marriage?leading Sobran to believe Xas is his protector and guide. Sobran marries the woman whose family strain of insanity his father fears, marches with the Grand Army to Moscow, inherits his father's vineyards and begins to prosper under his angelic "luck." However, Xas proves far different from a guardian angel, and as years pass (the meetings on midsummer eve continue, with some exceptions, to 1863) their attachment shifts, severs then mends, as Xas's complicated relationship with God and Lucifer gradually unfolds. Each year's meeting constitutes one chapter, titled with the name of a wine, from 1808, Vin Bourro (new wine), to 1863, Vinifie (to turn into wine). This by-annum structure makes possible a number of intriguing plot turns but prohibits a smooth narrative flow. Most intriguing are the glimpses we get of Hell, which Xas reveals is entered through a salt dome in Turkey, and Heaven, accessible through the lake of an Antarctic volcano. In Hell there is one copy of everything ever written, but in Heaven angels are the only copies God tolerates?copies of man, who is in turn the copy of a woman. And Heaven, we learn in a clever epilogue dated 1997, looks like the Titanic. While this conception of an alternate universe is the novel's significant achievement, Knox's failure to convey a fully realized narrative voice (except in the portions where the characters write letters to each other) may leave the reader feeling impressed but not totally enthusiastic.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
This American debut by a veteran New Zealand novelist is a wonderfully imaginative tale, set in the 19th-century French countryside, of the long enduring, loving relationship between a man and an angel. The former is 18-year-old Sobran Jodeau, scion of a family of winemakers, who while drunk and unhappy in love encounters Xas, the celestial being who will thereafter visit him annuallyuntil the angel's intimacy with his human lover propels him headlong into Sobran's complicated family and romantic life. The story is arguably overplotted (especially in later sequences that detail Xas's masquerade as tutor to Sobran's children or that explore the unconventional triangle formed by man, angel, and the younger noblewoman who eventually becomes Sobran's mistress). But a ferocious display of inventive power redeems and enlivens even the books more extravagant convolutions. Knox's flexible, image-driven sentences effortlessly evoke the lush plenitude of Clos Jodeau and environs, as well as Xas's ineffable strangeness (sleeping in Sobran's bed, ``He looked comical, like a young man sharing his bed with two large dogs, the humps his wings made under the covers''). ``Fallen angel'' Xas, rejected by both God and Lucifer for his intellectual curiosity as much as for his dalliance with a mortal, is a formidable creation. And Knox equals it with her searching portrayal of Sobran: an intelligent, perceptive man who passes through astonishment at the visitation that becomes the love of his life, through furious despair when he learns of Xas's fallen state and fears he has committed blasphemy, to a resigned old age in which he knows he can neither keep nor relinquish the vessel of grace (if indeed it be such) granted to him decades before. A one-of-a-kind novel. It's not for Touched by an Angel watchers, but many readers may respond as ecstatically to Knox's brilliantly original book as they did to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
enjoyed
By Sadie Forsythe
I have a confession to make. I have a secret soft spot for trashy novels. You know the sort—shallow, not particularly thought provoking, usually cheesy enough to make me short-laugh—the literary equivalent of late night, B-grade sci-fi. The problem with such books is that they so often overlap with books I would call trash—poorly written, weakly plotted, the cheese isn't purposeful or snort inducing. Lately, a disappointing percentage of my reading has fallen into that latter category and I decided I needed, NEEDED something with some substance. This book came highly recommended and boy did it fill the bill.
It isn't a book you just fall into. It's choppy, whole years sometimes covered in a page or one single event representing an entire year, as the narrative flies through Sobran's WHOLE life. (But I have to add that the prose is stunningly beautiful.) It's often confusing. It's sad. It has a dubiously happy ending. But it's also heart-felt and evocative. I teared up more than once. While I didn't love the book until about 2/3 of the way through, by the end it had me wholly wrapped around itself.
I'll admit that the narrative style made the characters feel distant and the large gaps in time that the characters spent apart made it difficult for me to feel their love, but I never doubted it. It just took on a form I had to think deeper to grasp. And I don't just mean the love between Xas and Sobran. There are several types of love shown between different characters in the book, though often subtly and unremarked upon. Also, because so many chapters are presented as mere vignettes, I often was left scratching my head at the significance of certain events.
Most unusual of all, I rather enjoyed the religious aspects of the book. Xas' relationship to/with God and Lucifer, as well as his purpose between them was intriguing. I never felt preached at, as I don't think anyone ever preached.
All in all, I needed the 'See, I can read smart books too' reboot and had the added bonus of truly enjoying the read. I'm well up for more of Knox's writing in the future.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Evocative, Thought Provoking Literature
By Michael Lima
About two-thirds of the way through the book, Xas declares that "Complete symmetry is an insult to God." It is at this point that the reader realizes that many of the key elements in the book have been marked by cases of symmetry. From the two murders committed by a key character in the book to the results of the relationship once Sobran takes a male lover as a complement to his wife, the evil that is manifested in the book is caused by "complete symmetry." On the other hand, "incomplete symmetry" brings much of the "good" portrayed in the book. For instance, Aurora loses one breast to cancer, and lives. Also, the characters regain their luck once Sobran takes a second lover to complement the relationships he has with his wife and his male lover.
So, what is the author trying to say? Is she saying that only God can be perfect, and therefore He tolerates no attempt by any lesser being to achieve perfection? If that's so, then is God purposely inciting chaos in order to keep humans from attaining symmetry? And finally, is she saying that for humans to strive to attain what is the province of the divine is pointless because God will never give up that feature that defines Him?
As always, there is a danger of reading too much into a book. But, the fact that this book can spark such introspection and debate makes it stand out among the countless other collections of words filling the bookstores. Even if these qualities are not appealing, The Vintner's Luck offers many other charms. The characters are solidly written and the dialogue is superb. It is our luck that The Vintner's Luck has come along. It makes us realize that literature of this caliber still has a place on all of our bookshelves.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Ingenious story of an angel who craves love
By Pretty Sinister
The end of this decade and the approach of the new century has given rise to an explosion of angel stories, novels and TV series. Elizabeth Knox's novel chooses to take us back in time rather than place yet another angel in 20th century in a remarkable and imaginative (at last) vision of a friendship and love between human and 'superhuman.' The 19th century pastiche-like prose takes a while to get used to, but the characters and their interactions are the real hook and what keep the pages turning. Xas, the fallen angel, is one of the more original creations I've come across. At last angel who isn't goofily adorable or full of God's piety come down to Earth to preach to humans: 'Please love each other.' In fact, Xas, as it turns out, wants a little of that human love for himself and it comes at a terrible price. Dreamy and erotic at times, The Vintner's Luck is a novel of daring, irreverence and wonder. And you learn a bit about wine and winemaking while reading.
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