Diary of a Djinn Book

Diary of a Djinn takes the narrator and her alter ego, the playful and watchful djinn, on a series of adventures from the glamorous rigors of a Milan fashion house in the 1980s, where the narrator is a reluctant muse to the designer, to 1990s Manhattan. In a humorous flashback, she revisits the cloistered life of a Florentine boarding school filled with the daughters of bluebloods and industrialists - a time of comic/catastrophic infatuations with improbable men. In New York, she finally meets Hare - perfect, as the djinn comments, "because he was not 'free'...a way for her to get used to the idea that people are not possessions." She is befriended by his mother, the indomitable octogenarian Princess who wears Givenchy and Courreges, swears by Leopardi and Shakespeare, and believes that art should be left to geniuses but otherwise discouraged. In sickness and in health, as Diary of a Djinn reveals, the body is a magic bottle that can sometimes fall into the wrong hands, until the all-knowing djinn comes to the rescue.

Book Magazine

The narrator of this debut novel is a chic young woman working in the fashion industry, first in Milan, then in New York, who leads a stylish but austere existence. After a brief, wounding affair with a well-dressed perfectionist, she finds intermittent bliss with a married Italian nobleman. Throughout the book, the narrator cultivates an emotional minimalism. Just as an aesthete might place a single jade vase in an all-white room, her relationships are few and carefully shaped, bright patches in a whiteness of solitude. The narrator's greatest attachment, it emerges, is to her lover's mother, the Princess, a woman much like herself. Nearly ninety, and flawlessly dressed in "Courrèges, Givenchy, Saint Laurent," the Princess has equivalently impeccable "mental furnishings" of Shakespeare, Leopardi, Chekhov and Pound. Although the Princess is dying and in pain, her motto—that life should be amusing and free of self-pity—gives her final days a sense of gaiety, even triumph. Alhadeff's book mingles spontaneity and precision in ways that give its simplest moments the trembling brilliance of an unshed tear.