Ursule Molinaro

Ursule Molinaro’s work has been published in France, Japan, Italy, and England. Encores for a Dillettante, as well as her latest novel, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy are scheduled to appear in Canada, in French translation. She has also written many short stories and plays, and has translated fiction from French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. She is a resident of New York City, where she paints animal jungles in oil on wood, in a Neo-Haitian Primitive style.

Encores for a Dilettante

Ursule Molinaro is one of the most gifted novelists we have.

Joseph McElroy

Encores for a Dilettante

Ursule Molinaro

Encores for a Dilettante, by Ursule Molinaro (FC2, 1977)

1977

Hardcover
ISBN 978-0-914590-44-6

Quality Paper
ISBN 978-0-914590-45-3

On the morning of his 45th birthday, a youthful-looking Professor of English Literature finds himself sitting cross-legged on an unfamiliar hotel bed. Once again his freckle-faced reddish-haired Irish concert-harpist wife has walked out on him.

Flying faster & faster non-stop against the rising sun, he begins to perceive the imprint he has left in time: backing into his wife-less apartment the evening before into the parting scene one of his many girlfriends made him several years earlier into a brief previous life as a clammy little girl into 17th century England, where he was a printer, leveler, & ladies’ man, about to be hanged into 14th century Rome, where he was a gout-ridden high priest & finally into pre-recorded history, when he was a Happy Hermaphrodite, worshipped as a living symbol of fertility.

A freckle-faced reddish-haired Irish-looking chambermaid intrudes to clean the room …

{

… takes us through wonderfully funny patterns of social observations and ingenious wit … Ursule Molinaro is one of the most gifted novelists we have.

Joseph McElroy on The Borrower (Harper & Row)

{

One happy sign of the times is that the style in which this witty, sad novel is written need no longer be described as “experimental” … Miss Molinaro deserves congratulations and lots of readers for pulling off such a feat …

Sara Blackburn in Bookworld on Sounds of a Drunken Summer (Harper & Row)

{

Molinaro’s new novel is further evidence that the realm of literary art is not determined by national boundary lines.

Kenneth Atchity about Green Lights are Blue (New American Library)