Goya's Glass

In her first novel to be translated into English, Prague-born writer Zgustova masterfully reimagines the true stories of three inimitable women%E2%80%94the Duchess of Alba, the lover and muse of 18th-century Spanish painter Francisco Goya; Bo%C5%BEema N%C4%95mcov%C3%A1, a Czech writer and nationalist living in the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian empire; and Nina Berberova, a Russian exile residing in Paris during the former's revolution. Readers learn of the Duchess' passionate encounters with Goya through her 1st-person accounts. Likewise, through intimate reflections, telegrams, and reports propagated by the protectors of the "Austrian fatherland," Zgustova diagrams the surveillance and attempted repression of the tenacious N%C4%95mcov%C3%A1's voice and spirit. Nina Berberova fled from the newly installed Soviet regime in 1922 with poet Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich, whose amorous musings on their relationship are interweaved with Berberova's sentimental letters detailing the plight of their home country. For Zgustova and her triad of women, the experience of exile%E2%80%94so delicately rendered in Berberova's letters%E2%80%94is as palpable as the struggle to survive beneath the weight of a repressive regime, as documented in N%C4%95mcov%C3%A1's life story. Inhabiting the crossroad between history and imagination, Zgustova's new novel is a tantalizing and powerful effort. (July)