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The Alpine Casanovas
A stunning, sophisticated tour de force of sex, drugs, violence, and death, exploring the lives of those caught between East and West
Beat and Quyn share a Eurasian heritage—both are half Vietnamese, half European. Beat is a rock musician and star of Asian action movies who lives in the U.S., relying on sex, drugs, and alcohol to survive. While filming in Vietnam he fakes his own death and then watches the media circus from the refuge of a chalet high in the mountains. Quyn is the product of an adulterous affair between his father, a bootlegger, and the Vietnamese help. Brought up in the family barn, when Quyn’s father self-immolates, Quyn is left itinerant. Returning to his birthplace, he falls in with Benoit, a film director, with secrets of his own. Toni Davidson delivers his most accomplished and mature work to date, a bold, challenging, and violent exploration of the loss of heritage, identity, and community. As Davidson weaves a beguiling and complex web, both men are driven to near madness by the circumstances of their births, culminating in an explosive, shocking climax.
Beat and Quyn share a Eurasian heritage—both are half Vietnamese, half European. Beat is a rock musician and star of Asian action movies who lives in the U.S., relying on sex, drugs, and alcohol to survive. While filming in Vietnam he fakes his own death and then watches the media circus from the refuge of a chalet high in the mountains. Quyn is the product of an adulterous affair between his father, a bootlegger, and the Vietnamese help. Brought up in the family barn, when Quyn’s father self-immolates, Quyn is left itinerant. Returning to his birthplace, he falls in with Benoit, a film director, with secrets of his own. Toni Davidson delivers his most accomplished and mature work to date, a bold, challenging, and violent exploration of the loss of heritage, identity, and community. As Davidson weaves a beguiling and complex web, both men are driven to near madness by the circumstances of their births, culminating in an explosive, shocking climax.
288 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 2015
About the author
Toni Davidson
13 books10 followersToni Davidson was born in Ayr in 1965. He has edited And Thus I Will Freely Sing (1989) and Intoxication: An Anthology of Stimulant-Based Writing (1998). His novel Scar Culture was published in 1999.
Author photo by Ben Dixon.
Author photo by Ben Dixon.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 17, 2015
Toni Davidson’s excellent third novel is both a continuation of the themes and narrative structures he has explored since his debut ‘Scar Culture’ and a bold step into new territory. Where ‘My Gun is as Tall as Me’ dealt directly with war, ‘The Alpine Casanovas’ focuses on those born in the aftermath of conflict. Beat, half Vietnamese half American, is orphaned by the Vietnam war and adopted by a couple who run a surf bar. Quyn is born in Switzerland, the illegitimate child of a local bootlegger and a Vietnamese refugee. When Beat, now a world famous movie star, fakes his own death and hides out in the Alpine resort where Quyn works, their stories become entangled.
At a time when migration and national identity are highly contentious issues, this novel explores the complexities of biracial identity in a globalised world. While Beat, rootless and isolated, living in a gated compound in a hedonistic blur, defines himself through the characters he plays Quyn, his family dead, neither a part of the Vietnamese community nor Swiss society, hides himself in a treehouse and moves like a ghost through the chalets. Both are lost, searching for some way to define themselves, for clues to where they came from. Cut free, they drift in the breeze. In luxurious prose, past and present, memory and fantasy, hope and fear combine in an ambitious spiral to a shocking, dramatic climax.
What I particularly love about this book is the way Davidson manipulates time and memory. Characters are frequently assaulted by waves of nostalgia and regret, two or three memories mixing within a paragraph and playing off the present, building again and again into a swell of internal conflict that is almost Joycean in its execution. This is prose to wallow in.
At a time when migration and national identity are highly contentious issues, this novel explores the complexities of biracial identity in a globalised world. While Beat, rootless and isolated, living in a gated compound in a hedonistic blur, defines himself through the characters he plays Quyn, his family dead, neither a part of the Vietnamese community nor Swiss society, hides himself in a treehouse and moves like a ghost through the chalets. Both are lost, searching for some way to define themselves, for clues to where they came from. Cut free, they drift in the breeze. In luxurious prose, past and present, memory and fantasy, hope and fear combine in an ambitious spiral to a shocking, dramatic climax.
What I particularly love about this book is the way Davidson manipulates time and memory. Characters are frequently assaulted by waves of nostalgia and regret, two or three memories mixing within a paragraph and playing off the present, building again and again into a swell of internal conflict that is almost Joycean in its execution. This is prose to wallow in.
July 8, 2025
Only six ratings and three reviews on GR (as of July 2025) for this unbelievably great novel published over ten years ago, could nobody else in that time tear themselves away from the meretricious pap that is published and look at the truly extraordinary, the life transforming, the revelatory, the sort of writing that makes you feel alive!? Of course not because no one, or not enough people are reading - Gore Vidal was bemoaning the loss of the intelligent reader in the 1960s - well things haven't improved.
'The ambitious embroidery of this novel consists of many threads, including identity, war globalisation, hedonistic yearning, the vulnerability of the human soul and body caught in immeasurably powerful political forces. In lesser hands this would be chaotic, but Davidson has created something compelling, crystalline, compact, and deeply moving. It is a superb piece of story telling.' Niall Griffiths author of 'Runt'
The above is as good a summation of this incredible novel as anything I could put together. The interesting thing, you might think, is the way an author from Scotland has captivated a reviewer from Ireland with a tale about two deracinated orphans of the Vietnamese diaspora. Well think again the Celtic fringes of the 'UK' are orphans of cultural, linguistic and territorial destruction in the same way that the lost boys of this novel are. The power of this tale is its universality - the loss of home and culture goes back to Aeneas fleeing Troy.
There is nothing obscure in this novel except the obscurities of exile. If you have read the author's 'Scar Culture' - and you really should - then this narrative is without obscurities though you will find here no narrative conclusion to tie together disparate tales of Beat and Quyn. This is life as it is led and lived. Something we can only dip into, not know.
A really great novel by an author sadly unknown and better then any on best seller lists.
'The ambitious embroidery of this novel consists of many threads, including identity, war globalisation, hedonistic yearning, the vulnerability of the human soul and body caught in immeasurably powerful political forces. In lesser hands this would be chaotic, but Davidson has created something compelling, crystalline, compact, and deeply moving. It is a superb piece of story telling.' Niall Griffiths author of 'Runt'
The above is as good a summation of this incredible novel as anything I could put together. The interesting thing, you might think, is the way an author from Scotland has captivated a reviewer from Ireland with a tale about two deracinated orphans of the Vietnamese diaspora. Well think again the Celtic fringes of the 'UK' are orphans of cultural, linguistic and territorial destruction in the same way that the lost boys of this novel are. The power of this tale is its universality - the loss of home and culture goes back to Aeneas fleeing Troy.
There is nothing obscure in this novel except the obscurities of exile. If you have read the author's 'Scar Culture' - and you really should - then this narrative is without obscurities though you will find here no narrative conclusion to tie together disparate tales of Beat and Quyn. This is life as it is led and lived. Something we can only dip into, not know.
A really great novel by an author sadly unknown and better then any on best seller lists.
May 15, 2016
This is a book about two half-Vietnamese men. One (Beat) seems to be a fairly successful movie star, the other (Quyn) a reclusive caretaker in the Alps. We learn about them mostly through a series of flashbacks. And I'm a bit lost what else to add really. Let's try another approach.
The first couple of (very short) chapters of this book didn't grab me. They didn't put me off, but I felt underwhelmed. Then we met Beat properly and something clicked. The writing fell into place and I was happy this was the book I was going to be reading. Quyn's introduction followed and, although he seemed to have less impact he still had something about him - my hopes for the book soared as I wondered how these two threads would come together. I was excited at the rich writing style that came with these characters and felt I would devour this book hungrily.
And then the flashbacks started. Some of them offer real insight into our protagonists. Some of them essentially repeat half a dozen others. We leap from childhoods to young adults life to adolescence to last week and loop through those eras in a multitude of routes. It is disorienting at times, especially when we are dealing with Beat and Quyn's parents since there are few clues where in their life these things are taking place. Sometimes it took over a page to work out if one of them was a young and innocent pre-teen or a wise near adult ready to become his own man. And the core points of these flashbacks do loop. I know that Moose and Silvio both like a drink. That Clay and Tina were hippies. Points that are stated explicitly multiple times. Not hinted at or built upon, just laid out to remind you something you read twenty pages earlier. It sounds harsh said like that because the author does have a good way with words and it's not as blunt and painful as that may seem, but it doesn't help move the story forward. And that's the point, it doesn't flow, it meanders. The constant loop backs made me feel I was getting nowhere, and I was doing it slowly.
I can praise the use of language, something that will often put a smile on my face. There's huge skill in that side of things and I liked it. But there was nothing that made me feel I wanted to read that extra page. That one more chapter before turning in for the night that signals you're hooked. It wasn't bad, it just felt lacking in purpose, and it didn't have that magic touch to make that click for me. Maybe if I were camped out in an alpine chalet cut off from the world I'd buy into it. Maybe stretched out on a sun soaked beach. But in a stormy Britain? It just lacked that indescribable something that turns good writing into a great book.
I wonder if I am being harsh because I expected more after those early chapters. I saw so much in those early words, and yet I feel I ended up trudging through. I was determined to rediscover that early promise. And I think the conclusions manages it actually, it's just at this point I was weary. It was hard to get as excited as it deserved after the journey it took to get there. There is something in this book, but I came away feeling that it had ultimately eluded me - possibly apt given the book.
I received a copy of this book through First Reads.
The first couple of (very short) chapters of this book didn't grab me. They didn't put me off, but I felt underwhelmed. Then we met Beat properly and something clicked. The writing fell into place and I was happy this was the book I was going to be reading. Quyn's introduction followed and, although he seemed to have less impact he still had something about him - my hopes for the book soared as I wondered how these two threads would come together. I was excited at the rich writing style that came with these characters and felt I would devour this book hungrily.
And then the flashbacks started. Some of them offer real insight into our protagonists. Some of them essentially repeat half a dozen others. We leap from childhoods to young adults life to adolescence to last week and loop through those eras in a multitude of routes. It is disorienting at times, especially when we are dealing with Beat and Quyn's parents since there are few clues where in their life these things are taking place. Sometimes it took over a page to work out if one of them was a young and innocent pre-teen or a wise near adult ready to become his own man. And the core points of these flashbacks do loop. I know that Moose and Silvio both like a drink. That Clay and Tina were hippies. Points that are stated explicitly multiple times. Not hinted at or built upon, just laid out to remind you something you read twenty pages earlier. It sounds harsh said like that because the author does have a good way with words and it's not as blunt and painful as that may seem, but it doesn't help move the story forward. And that's the point, it doesn't flow, it meanders. The constant loop backs made me feel I was getting nowhere, and I was doing it slowly.
I can praise the use of language, something that will often put a smile on my face. There's huge skill in that side of things and I liked it. But there was nothing that made me feel I wanted to read that extra page. That one more chapter before turning in for the night that signals you're hooked. It wasn't bad, it just felt lacking in purpose, and it didn't have that magic touch to make that click for me. Maybe if I were camped out in an alpine chalet cut off from the world I'd buy into it. Maybe stretched out on a sun soaked beach. But in a stormy Britain? It just lacked that indescribable something that turns good writing into a great book.
I wonder if I am being harsh because I expected more after those early chapters. I saw so much in those early words, and yet I feel I ended up trudging through. I was determined to rediscover that early promise. And I think the conclusions manages it actually, it's just at this point I was weary. It was hard to get as excited as it deserved after the journey it took to get there. There is something in this book, but I came away feeling that it had ultimately eluded me - possibly apt given the book.
I received a copy of this book through First Reads.
May 10, 2016
I won this book in the Goodreads First Reads giveaway.
This book was much to my surprise, more enjoyable than I thought when I first started to read it. It is not a book that I would normally read, but it does make a change to read something different. I rarely write what the story is about for fear of spoiling for others, but I do recommend.
This book was much to my surprise, more enjoyable than I thought when I first started to read it. It is not a book that I would normally read, but it does make a change to read something different. I rarely write what the story is about for fear of spoiling for others, but I do recommend.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews