Along the French Riviera, an illustrious family in thrall to classical antiquity builds a fabulous villa—a replica of a Greek palace, complete with marble columns, furniture of exotic woods and frescoes depicting mythological gods. The Reinachs—related to other wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis—attempt in the early 1900s to recreate “a pure beauty” lost to modernity and fill it with the pursuit of pleasure and knowledge. The narrator of this brilliant novel calls the imposing house on the Cote d’Azur “an act of delirium, above all an optimistic act, proof that one could reset time as one could reset a clock and resist the outside world.” The story of the villa and its glamorous inhabitants is recounted by the son of a servant from a neighboring estate—one belonging to Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower. As a youth, the son is adopted by the Reinachs, initiated into the era of Socrates and instructed in classical Greek. He joins the family on a pilgrimage to Athens, undergoes another initiation after falling in love with a married woman, and survives the confiscation of the house by the Nazis and the deportation to death camps of Reinach grandchildren. Author Adrien Goetz illuminates the best and worst of humanity: our never-ending quest for perfection, boundless ambition, curiosity about the past, and capacity for love and evil. This is a Greek epic for the modern era.
