Emmalea Russo’s novel Vivienne is both innovatively told and unrelentingly engaging, and one of the year’s most impressive debuts.
Sarah Gerard wrote of the book:
“Stylish, satirical, and inventive, contemporary yet timeless, Vivienne takes place where urgent and unanswerable questions reside, at the intersections of art, love, and the immortal soul. It is surprising, mysterious, and delightful at every turn of the page, an utterly singular story circling the life and legacy of a fascinating and larger-than-life figure.”
In her own words, here is Emmalea Russo’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Vivienne:
Vivienne moves between dreams, rural Pennsylvania, New York City art spaces, memories of 1970s France and Germany, the slippery terrain of internet comment sections like choirs of angels and beastly stampedes, and the desert. The novel is filled with smoke, screens, trancy driving scenes, and wintry mixes. Set mostly during the shortest days of the year, the ones with the last light just preceding Christmas, many of the tunes I listened to while writing the book and which Vivienne may induce are oneiric, eerie, nocturnal, and mystic. Vivienne sounds like the scent of Angel by Thierry Mugler (which once outsold Chanel No. 5 in France): musk, cotton candy, hay, tobacco, carnival vapor…..
Eine kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Everything about this berserk manic lullaby screams VIVIENNE. Written by Mozart in the summer of 1787, a little night music reminds me of how Versace described his clothes as being a “happy-black.” Also, I believe Eine kleine Nachtmusik is the only song directly referenced in the novel.
Love Streams by Scratch Massive
I looped this while writing certain dark, iridescent-feeling scenes in the novel. Its mix of quietly trancy and dramatically euphoric both focuses me and provokes an uneasy, queasy feeling.
I’m obsessed with this song. The term spirit ditch encapsulates something of what I was trying to do in Vivienne. Gruff, druggy, and whispery, this song has serious hometown energy. Horse laughter, metal hands, and waking up in foreign-familiar places.
This one is for a particular nighttime New York City gallery scene in Vivienne. You’ll know it when you read it. Eerie yet innocent voices sing me and you know this is love…I listened to this while I wrote, and it has transportive, clandestine capacities. A crooked soundtrack for rugged and sleek big city secrets.
Lemon Incest by Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg
The book is filled with flashbacks to Vivienne’s days in France in the 1970s, plus a string of strange familial relations. This controversial but chart-topping song, a father-daughter duet, feels Viviennesque.
This song is all things Vivienne: creepy-sweet, poetic, dreamy, dirty, and a little French. I once saw this band in concert at the Bowery Ballroom and it felt, like this song, both childlike and spooky. Grotesque and carnivalesque, the song leaves behind a dizzy, cough syrupy residue.
Past Lives (slowed + reverb) by sapientdream
I was thinking of something like this song, or maybe I was even listening to it, while writing the ghostliest, most ecstatic driving scenes the book’s got. “Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated,” wrote Jean Baudrillard. Don’t wake me I’m not dreamin,’ goes this song.
For the book’s occasional flashbacks to Velour’s hard-partying 1990s days and daze. Plus, I looped this song as a kid.
Ave Maria (Remix) by Franz Schubert + Brian Burrows
Churchy moments, Hail Marys, and prayers to the Virgin run through the novel. This one feels right: an angelic salutation remixed.
Emmalea Russo is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, Wave Archive, Confetti, and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books.