Promiscuous Unbound

Vivienne Yellow, the unforgettable narrator of this arresting and witty debut, is an American woman who lies in traction in a Parisian hospital, her leg shattered after she was accidentally hit by a truck. Through hazy wormholes of memory, colored by her own morphine-stoked sexual longings, we are drawn into her past: Exactly what happened to her as she tried to cross rue de Cherche Midi, her wildly adulterous marriage to an emotionally distant man, and her relationship with her father, the famously charismatic naturalist Maurice Yellow. Bound to her bed and trapped by her own thoughts, Vivienne's only link to the outside world is a fellow patient, Sonia, an acid-tongued French teenager with a failing heart. Over the course of her musings, Vivienne comes to understand one thing: sex is her refuge, a notion oddly reaffirmed by the stories Sonia begins to bring her about a new patient, an innocent refugee from the Kosovo crisis who had tried to save herself by marrying the first man...