Jewelry Talks: A Novel Thesis

From the iconoclastic author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, a sexy, funny book that is part novel, part thesis on jewelry - on all the ways that jewelry conveys messages and intimates secrets.The narrator, Abby Zinzo, is writing an amusing, erotic memoir to accompany the jewelry he's leaving to his adolescent heir. In it he explains to her what jewelry has meant to him throughout a checkered life lived mostly in Paris and around the continent, in strange ménages - but always with jewelry in view. His obsession is not only with jewelry itself, but also with the great women who have worn it. He writes about its magic, its lore, its attraction - in history and on the streets, in public and in the most intimate scenarios. He can't stop thinking about it, or about the Duchess of Windsor, Elizabeth Taylor, Coco Chanel - women of the twentieth century who have owned magnificent jewelry. He dreams about them and about the pavé diamond ring that Dodi al Fayed gave to Diana. He examines their lives and their philosophies of adornment in order to better understand jewelry for reasons that are intensely personal, reasons that concern his very life and love.An audacious work of fiction, a form of cultural critique, Jewelry Talks is an intellectual tour de force, an erotically delightful concoction of a book, a rare combination that will titillate and satisfy both the most serious and the most sentimental of readers.