by Rose, M. J.
Afterword
I love challenges, but to tell the story of Victor Hugo’s experiments with séances in his own voice? What kind of crazy idea had I come up with? Surely it was lunacy to even attempt it.
I don’t have literary illusions. I had just fallen in love with Hugo’s story and wanted to tell it. What fascinated me was how much had been written about his life as a statesman, poet and author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, but how little had been written about a certain part of his personal life: his dabbling with hashish, his preoccupation with reincarnation and the more than one hundred séances he’d conducted during a two-year period while he lived on the Isle of Jersey.
During my research, I hadn’t once stopped to think that in order to tell the story of Hugo’s seduction by the spirit world, I would have to find his voice.
But there I was. Finally ready to write, sitting at a computer in a very twenty-first-century world trying to conjure a mid-nineteenth-century genius. For weeks I was stumped.
Then I had a revelation. I didn’t need to invoke the genius, just the man. I had read Hugo’s letters. I knew that the eloquence and brilliance of his poetry and prose didn’t always exhibit itself when he was writing to people close to him. Sometimes he was an extraordinary man saying ordinary things to his family.
That was the Hugo I needed to try to find. The one who was relating a tale to an intimate. Not writing for the ages. Not trying to be brilliant—just attempting to reason out an unreasonable time in his life that had disturbed him.
But I still couldn’t do it. The cold keyboard, the sound of the mechanical clicking, the icons at the top of the page, the spell-check. All of it was a gulf between me and the man I needed to channel. I decided it was hubris to even attempt to write this novel. Absurd to try. And yet, I couldn’t give up.
Carl Jung said that often coincidences aren’t coincidences at all.
One day in a fit of frustration I got up from my desk in a huff and managed to tip over a jar of pens. One was an old fountain pen. It rolled and fell on the computer. I stared at it for a moment. What if. . . .
I found a bottle of ink. Filled the pen. Then pulled out a simple notebook and started to write. Not the way I write, on a computer, but the way Victor Hugo would have written more than one hundred and fifty years ago. Pen on paper. I began. And as the ink flowed . . . the words flowed.
I don’t remember writing this book. Each day when I sat down and uncapped my pen, I disappeared into the world of the novel. Three notebooks and 122,833 words later, I finished Seduction. Two of those pages are photographed and used as endpapers in this volume.
Seduction is the first novel I’ve written by hand. Perhaps the last. Definitely one of the most fascinating journeys I’ve ever taken.
I do very much hope it proves fascinating for you as well.
Victor Hugo on the Rock of the Exiles, Isle of Jersey, between 1852 and 1855.
M. J. ROSE (MJRose.com) is the internationally bestselling author of thirteen novels, including The Reincarnationist—the basis of the television series Past Lives. She is a founding board member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors: AuthorBuzz.com. She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.
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Also by M. J. Rose
FICTION
The Book of Lost Fragrances
Lip Service
In Fidelity
Flesh Tones
Sheet Music
Lying in Bed
The Halo Effect
The Delilah Complex
The Venus Fix
The Reincarnationist
The Memorist
The Hypnotist
NONFICTION
Buzz Your Book (with Douglas Clegg)
What To Do Before Your Book Launch (with Randy Susan Meyers)
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Melisse Shapiro
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First Atria Books hardcover edition May 2013
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Designed by Jill Putorti
Jacket design by Alan Dingman
Jacket photographs by Arcangel
Author photograph by Pushett Irby Photography
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-4516-2150-1
ISBN 978-1-4516-2152-5 (ebook)
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Afterword
About M. J. Rose