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Book Reviewed by:A gripping novel about a seemingly charmed marriage and a mysterious disappearance at sea.
In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn't what he seemed.
Originally from Belgium, young Armand de Potter comes to New York without a penny in his pocket. With cunning ambition, he quickly makes a name for himself as both a worldwide travel guide and a trusted - if illegal - antiques dealer. After marrying, he moves the family to a luxurious villa in Cannes and embraces an aristocratic life. But as he grows increasingly entangled in the antiques trade and his touring business begins to falter, Armand's control starts to fray. As the world closes in, he believes he only has one option left.
Told with masterful narrative agility, De Potter's Grand Tour is a tale as grand as the tour guide at its center. Drawing on real letters, legal documents, and a trove of diaries only recently discovered, Joanna Scott points delicately toward the story's historical basis and unfolds a detective tale of the highest order.
Constantinople
HE LEAVES EARLY on the morning of June 10, descending the carpeted stairs to the lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel. He rings the bell at the front desk. He is about to ring again when a clerk appears from the dark interior of a back office, looking freshly scrubbed, smelling of soap. The bill is settled swiftly, and the clerk is most obliging, despite his limited French, when Armand hands him two last letters addressed to Madame de Potter, care of the Hotel Royal in Toblach. The letters are to be held and posted, he specifies, on the twelfth. Does the clerk understand the instructions? "Oui, monsieur," the clerk says, setting aside the letters and motioning to a porter. He hopes Monsieur de Potter's most recent stay has been pleasant. The coach, he adds, is already in the drive.
Outside, Armand notices that the gas lamp above the entrance to the public garden is still lit, though the sky is already beginning to glow with dawn. He removes his spectacles and rubs the ...
De Potter’s Grand Tour is based on author Joanna Scott’s own family history — her great-grandfather also disappeared mysteriously. Even if the text is punctuated with pictures (one assumes they are of the great-grandfather and his charmed travels), it is unclear how much overlap there is between reality and fiction. Regardless, the novel is touted first and foremost as a detective story, but the mystery at the heart of the book is transparent enough to have the narrative’s charms lie elsewhere. De Potter’s Grand Tour succeeds brilliantly in its evocation of world travel at the turn of the twentieth century — the romance of a bygone era of managed leisure really shines through...continued
Full Review
(591 words)
(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and Ship Fever
Joanna Scott's writing is always a wonder, but this, with its hints of Hawthorne's 'Wakefield,' is her best yet: a wizardly dialogue between fact and fiction, the known and the unknown. I'll be haunted by her elusive, touching, and deluded hero for a long time. Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner's Tale
Like some exquisite and mysterious tapestry that Armand de Potter himself might have admired on one of his journeys, Joanna Scott's new novel masterfully weaves an irresistible story of love, secrecy, ambition, and devastating folly. Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule
Only one of our wisest, deftest, most knowing prose stylists at the height of her powers could have invented the utterly beguiling experience that is De Potter's Grand Tour...One of the most delightful books I've read in years. Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
Joanna Scott is a writer to treasure and her beguiling new novel is an intrepid exploration of the world, of the past, and of the human heart. Steve Erickson, author of These Dreams of You
Scott charts here one of her grandest tours yet, one more utterly singular story only she could have written.In De Potter's Grand Tour, Armand de Potter uses his tourism business as a front to amass a large private collection of illicit antiquities: "You could say that he had become a spy of sorts, on a self-contained mission to gather antiquities instead of secrets, with his travel bureau providing an excuse to visit places that were out of reach for other collectors," Scott writes.
While Armand's collection stems mostly from Egypt, the trade in illicit antiquities spans the globe, including Iraq, Peru, Cambodia, Afghanistan and more. In terms of sheer dollars generated, the business is next only to the trades in drugs and weapons. In 1970, 70 countries signed a UNESCO agreement intended to ban the trafficking of stolen antiquities, but ...
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