The Passion Dream Book
by Whitney Otto
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 228
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0061096237
Publisher: HarperCollins
A blending of fiction with history, The Passion Dream Book
is a love story about artists and their tendency to migrate and colonize.
Beginning in Florence during the Italian Renaissance, the novel portrays a
young girl named Giulietta Marcel, who is unconventionally apprenticed to
her artist father. Dressed as a boy, she is engaged to spy on a famous artist
who is at work on his masterpiece sculpture, David. She grows to want the
artist and, at the same time, wants to be the artist.
Four hundred years later, Giulietta's descendant, Romy March, struggles
with similar artistic aspirations in the sheltered comfort of her California
home. For her, to embrace the life of an artist would be quite unorthodox in
the early part of the 20th century. Her love affair with Augustine Marks, a
black photographer, provides the novel's structure: they are together, they
break apart, they reunite, they move on as they drift to various artists'
colonies - a movie studio in silent-era Hollywood, the Harlem Renaissance,
the end of the twenties in Paris, London in the thirties, and San Francisco at
the start of the Beat Generation. Although Romy's devotion to Augustine
remains constant, her artistic progression as a photographer grows at a
different rate from her lover's and she must pursue her vision. She does not
have her first show until she is forty-one, and is not recognized as an
"important" photographer until her fifties.
The Passion Dream Book examines the time- honored dilemma
of how an artist, a female one in particular, can reconcile her need to
work with her personal desires. The most abstracted love triangle there
is involves the artist, the work, and the lover.
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1. Why is the prologue set in Renaissance Florence?
2. Does it matter that Romy never understands the events behind Giulietta's Renaissance box?
3. Why do artists tend to colonize or otherwise congregate?
4. In the Renaissance section of the novel, art is funded by private patrons, the church, and the government. Can artists make a living from their work today? Should the arts be funded? How?
5. During the Depression, the government created an agency that employed out-of-work artists. Should a society pay artists to contribute their art to the public? Should there then be controls on what the artist creates?
6. Is there a conflict between love and work? Can it be resolved?
7. Romy and Augustine never have children. How hard is it to have a career and a family? Can a career stand in for children?
8. Do you think that the desire for immortality propels most artists?
9. If Romy and Augustine had never broken up, would they still be together in later life? Or are they together because they spent so much of their lives away from each other? Is love from a distance easier to sustain than love with someone who shares your day-to-day life?
10. How realistic is the manner in which Romy and her father finally comes to terms with each other and the past?
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"Whitney Otto keeps the promise of her first novel. ... The Passion Dream Book incorporates actual figures and events in its fictionalized world, yet it wears its historical research lightly. ... A rare pleasure."—Seattle Times
"Otto has created something wonderful - a book about art and ambition that is intelligent, romantic and beguiling."—The Tennessean
"Exhilarating - much like life itself.."—Marie Claire
"The Passion Dream Book is a thrilling achievement."—San Francisco Chronicle
