Studio Saint-Ex

June 3, 2013
Szado (Beginning of Was) crafts the facts of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's life into an engaging tale of youth, power, and longing set in New York City as the country heads off to WWII. Mignonne Lachapelle is a hungry young designer, fresh out of fashion school, searching for Saint-Exupéry to resume the affair she ran from the year before. His wife Consuelo becomes the key to Mignonne's success, her nemesis, and ultimately her muse. The world of haute couture depicted here overflows with backstabbing, design stealing, and credit-robbing injustice. Meanwhile, French-American ex-pats make love, lie, cheat, and steal while the fabric of their world is torn apart by the looming war and their affairs. Neither Szado's shifting points-of-view nor movements through time are seamless, but the love of story within the story is redeeming. Mignonne turns The Little Prince into a fashion show, names her studio Saint Ex, and casts Consuelo as the rose all in hopes of keeping Antoine from flying off to war. But like his fictional creation, Antoine was destined to fly: "It isn't a love story, it's a war story. The Prince goes back to his rose at the end. That's his country. He signs up to die for his pretty, prickly France."

May 15, 2013
Szado looks at the era when Antoine de Saint-Exupery is in New York City working on Le Petit Prince, an era complicated by a love triangle involving his Salvadoran wife, Consuelo, and an apprentice couturiere, Mignonne Lachapelle. The latter is Szado's fictional creation and erstwhile narrator. She originally meets de Saint-Exupery in Montreal, where she tutors him in English, though as an already famous French author, he doesn't see the need to learn an inferior language. A year later, in 1942, they meet again in New York, where Mignonne has gone to see why her mentor, the formidable and vicious Madame Vera Fiche, has stolen her fashion ideas. Mignonne winds up working for Atelier Fiche, in part to keep an eye on its wily and unscrupulous owner. De Saint-Exupery is in a rather deep funk, partly due to political reasons (he remains distraught by the fall of France) and partly since his estranged wife flaunts her American lover so blatantly, demanding they be let into the Alliance Francaise for its social amenities. The author finds himself attracted to Mignonne, whose delicate manner contrasts with that of his flamboyant wife. However, it turns out Consuelo is aggressively charming as well as aggressively bisexual, and she seduces Mignonne. Consuelo is drawn to Mignonne not only by her beauty, but also by her ability to dress Consuelo in the latest style. All of this domestic and fashionista drama plays out against de Saint-Exupery's protracted attempts to work on his allegorical tale of The Little Prince. High fashion and high drama coexist in equal measure in this insightful novel.

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