Shadow-Box

By Antonia Logue

Book Overview

A sweeping story of love, art, and boxing, this novel centers around the mysterious Arthur Cravan -- semiprofessional boxer, art critic, con man, nephew of Oscar Wilde. Cravan befriended Jack Johnson, the exiled black American boxer, in Paris; in 1916 they staged a fight to pay for Cravan's passage out of war-torn Europe. In New York, Cravan fell in love with the poet Mina Loy; they fled to Mexico and were married. Soon after, Cravan was lost at sea in a hurricane and presumed dead. In letters between Jack and Mina thirty years after Cravan's disappearance, Shadow-Box sketches this expansive tale in the era of tremendous social, artistic, and political upheaval before and during World War I.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802137229
• ISBN13: 9780802137227
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A beautiful and heartrending tale.

A beautiful and heartrending tale of love, friendship and tragedy. I was at first disappointed at Arthur Cravan, the shadowy subject of the novel, not appearing more frequently; by comparison Jack Johnson`s boxing career occupies a more important place. However the second part of the work, leading to its tragic finale, more than makes up for this initial disappointment. The pain of loss, especially the loss of a soul-mate as important to Mina Loy as Cravan was, is so realistically portrayed as to make this book unforgettable to the reader of any sensitivity whatsoever. Antonia Logue`s fictional conclusion, in which she has Cravan still alive in 1946, his existence unknown to Mina his wife due to the death of Johnson in a car accident (the boxer was hastening to inform Mina of her husband`s existence after his disappearance at sea in 1918), is arguably even more tragic than the doubtless reality of his having drowned in 1918; Mina remaining forever in ignorance of the truth. For someone who has come to love Cravan also for all he represents, this book is a godsend. I recommend it to all who wish to discover more about this remarkable man, the nephew of Oscar Wilde. May readers of "Shadow-Box" resolve to rectify the ignorance of Cravan, still today, in the English-speaking world, when he remains such a well-known and time-honoured name in the annals of French literature!

Shadow Box: Recreating a Certain Past

"Shadow Box" has received quite mixed reviews: some positive; others critical of its reliance on a biography of Mina Loy by Carolyn Burke. It overall "suffers" (if such be the word)from a failing critics find in modern, especially UK (by extension Ireland)literature: a reliance on already-established characters and history. Apart from those possible faults, I found the book interesting and well-written. Being unaware of Loy, and only vaguely having heard of Arthur Cravan, I found their characters believable;their epoch and milieu in which they lived colourfully-drawn. I do know something of Jack Johnson. The boxing scenes, the hostility Johnson received when entering the ring, were strong. The author has, apparently, never been an actual boxing fan. Her descriptions of the sport's technical aspects were thus impressive. Boxers fought differently then.

Logue lets you read aloud someone's mail

I never liked epistolary romances but I found myself fully immerse into this one. I know Carolyn Burke's biography is a lot deeper than Logue's but here, and only here you find yourself completely involved in this intimate exchange. I cought myself reading in a different internal voice Mina and Jack's letters, a rare feeling of guilt and curiosity as if I had found someone else's mail, I could not stop reading it.

Transcendently brilliant prose

Ms. Logue makes a spectacular debut with this novel, which grabs the reader in the first few pages and pulls him/her along in the swift flow of the most compelling prose. That the author did her meticulous research in fashioning this tale is icing on the cake. First rate in every way.