This book makes being old and rich sound pretty awesome. It's about the youngest girl in a family who becomes the longest-living heir to a giant mining fortune that was made entirely from scratch and then handed to her as she came of age and her dad died, spanning basically the entire 20th century and a bit of the 21st.
So what she does is buy a crapton of art and musical instruments (the Stradiverus named after Joan of Arc! For a personal chamber orchestra!) and continuous services for the houses she never actually lives in and like all of the dolls ever and personally commissioned doll houses.
Then she paints and lives in solitude until she has to go to the hospital and then she just doesn't move from her hospital room for like 20 years while giving money to a bunch of people, companions and charities but not the hospital who leans hard on her for it and fudges her medical records so she can stay as long as she (they) likes.
She puts off making a will until the last possible second, which of course invokes the wrath of her exponential extended family, who are all jostling for their fair share, and eventually she starts spending more than she has in actual money but won't give up her real estate even though all of it stands unoccupied and decaying for the
better quarter of a century.
At times, this book's reduced to elaborate lists of possessions bought and building details, but most of those are so baroque they stay interesting. Amounts of money just lose their meaning after a while because they're all so giant.
It's a credit to the writer that he kept a story about a lady growing old alone dynamic, and it's a credit to the lady herself that he didn't have to try super hard. Definitely worth the checkout but I don't know how interesting a re-read would be.
No comments:
Post a Comment