cover image Duchess's Dragonfly

Duchess's Dragonfly

Niall Duthie. Trafalgar Square Publishing, $24.99 (176pp) ISBN 978-1-897580-30-1

The narrator of this exotic first novel is a pet monkey whose owner, the pampered, gregarious Dutchess, is having an affair with a deaf court painter modeled on Spanish artist Francisco de Goya. In each chapter, the acidly observant monkey describes one of 42 engravings that the nameless artist created for the young Dutchess before all were destroyed in a fire set by an arsonist. The copper engravings survived, however, and the monkey, who himself appears in all 42 pictures, describes them, contrasting his own memory of each incident or scene with the artist's rendition of it. Through the monkey's commentary, we see humans as a cunning, hypersexed, fickle, treacherous species. In precise, seductive prose, Scottish writer Duthie, who lives in Spain, unreels a playfully elegant meditation on the ultimate futility, and necessity, of art; in the end, art is a creation as evanescent and unmistakeable as the dragonfly depicted in the final painting. Although the alternately subservient and assertive painter never fully comes to life, this metaphorical review of his work is quite amusing, besides being a searching exploration of art, imagination and the nature of perception. (Jan.)