Mawrdew Czgowchwz

By James McCourt
Introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum

Diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced "Mardu Gorgeous") bursts like the most brilliant of comets onto the international opera scene, only to confront the deadly malice and black magic of her rivals. Outrageous and uproarious, flamboyant and serious as only the most perfect frivolity can be, James McCourt's entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.

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Reviews

The reader must be prepared to follow the silver-tongued writer through an outlandish landscape, unquestioning. Reason would be out of place here. She would upset the ecological balance of a rich and delicate world.
— John Yohalem, The New York Times Books Review

A gloriously flamboyant debut. Take it in spoonfuls and you'll find passages to fall in love with. Sooner or later, you may even find yourself reading them aloud to your friends.
— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

Perfect of its kind. Let us be grateful for an aspic masterpiece.
— Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

Mawrdew Czgowchwz is a Zuleika Dobson of the opera world. James McCourt is an ecstatic fabulist, robustly funny and inventive, and touchingly in love with his subject. His novel is both special and precious, in the most honorable senses of those words.
— Walter Clemons, Newsweek

Bravo, James McCourt, a literary countertenor in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov, who makes his daringly self-assured debut with this intelligent and very funny book.
— Susan Sontag

McCourt makes brave comic choices, delighting in mythic celebrity while dissecting the ways it is made and sustained. Bravo! Encore!
— John Lahr

The novel multiplies in-jokes maddeningly. It teases and infuriates as divas do. It puts on airs. It talks in-alt's, in gloriously halting starts, congested with its own expertise.... Mawrdew Czgowchwz is a diva in its own right.
— Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books

Tragic wisdom, we discover, can also be le gai savoir, and James McCourt has made a real specialty of transforming intricate wisdom into no more than discerning frivolity, no less than divine frenzy; as he puts it: a running-neon paradigm of the quintessence of diva-dienst! For the purposes (if that is not too grandiose a word) of such fiction, fun is fun, but folly a kind of fate. How I envy Mawrdew's new readers, though remaining helplessly content as a repeat defender.
— Richard Howard

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