Over the winter of 1848-9, George Sand brought her lover, Chopin, and her two children to the island of Majorca. She hoped that the climate would benefit the ailing composer, who was suffering from the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. The trip was an unmitigated disaster. They stayed in one of the former monastic cells in the Valledemossa Charterhouse, but shocked the deeply Catholic locals with their unconventional relationship, George’s unconventional dress sense, and their lack of religious observance. And this was before anyone figured out that Chopin was carrying a highly contagious disease. The winter was hard, the kitchen staff ripped them off, the doctors were useless, and the book Sand wrote subsequently was very rude about the Spanish. This history provides the basis for Nell Steven’s whimsical novel, which is narrated by a young female ghost whose spirit haunts Valledemossa.
Blanca, our narrator, died in 1473 at the age of 14 and has been hanging around the Charterhouse keeping an eye on her descendants ever since. Years of practice have given her the ability to slip into the living human minds of those around her, where she can read not only their memories of the past, but their predestined futures. When George Sand arrives, she initially mistakes her and Chopin kissing for two men, but the error rectified she falls in love at first sight with George. This leads her to become fascinated by the whole family, headhopping between strong, pragmatic George Sand, the ever more enfeebled Chopin, George’s loving but neglected son, Maurice, and precocious, headstrong Solange. Chopin is in the middle of composing his preludes and driven half insane by the old and out of tune piano he’s obliged to use, whilst his own is lost in transit somewhere in the Mediterranean. There are already the sparks of affection between Chopin and Solange that will later cause the rupture in his relationship to Sand. George is a wonderful creation here, a woman not always in full command of her restless power, but dedicated to preserving Chopin’s genius while doing her best to fulfill her own, a loving mother if a distracted one. And Maurice is… well, Maurice is just there. Though in fairness he’s a necessary part of one of the most gripping scenes in the novel, in which he and his mother travel to Palma in a winter storm in the hope of bringing Chopin’s finally arrived piano back to the villa.
But this is the problem that real history poses when you want to transcribe it into fiction. It doesn’t always mold itself to the shape of a good story. You get leftover characters and unresolved plot lines. I love a bit of whimsy myself, and this novel has it in bucket loads. The writing is often spectacular and Stevens is at her best when she’s inside the heads of Sand and Chopin, quite brilliantly evoking the creative process. Blanca is a delightful notion, sparky and funny and far too insightful for a 14-year-old, though perhaps it’s plausible in a 375-year-old which is her theoretical age. But what can they all do for one another? I can quite see how Stevens wanted to use the voice of Blanca – it’s a treat – but it’s also notably anachronistic at times. And it’s charming to portray her falling in love with Sand, though this sits oddly with Blanca’s back story, in which a clandestine relationship with a novice monk causes her downfall. And there can be no requiting her love, or exerting agency over Sand’s situation (though Stevens does her best). In fact, no one really gets to have a narrative arc, and the awful anti-climactic ending lays all these structural flaws bare. BUT, I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, which just testifies to the brilliance of Stevens’ prose. It was often a hoot, and at times, poignant. I will certainly check out other books by this author.
What a difficult book this is to write about. It begins with a fragment of a novel that is quickly abandoned for not being the book our narrator feels she should be writing. So she switches into the ‘real’ story, in which she declares it’s time to ‘stop fearing shame’ and ‘tell the truth.’ This story takes place in St Kilda’s in Melbourne, Australia, where our 24-year-old (mostly unnamed until the very end) Sri Lankan narrator is engaged in postgraduate studies on Virginia Woolf. It’s the late 80s and the campus is buzzing with critical theory. So far, so good. Let’s be clear, the writing in this novel is outrageously good and never falters, and the inclusion of critical theory, notoriously difficult to write about, is excellently done. But then our narrator meets Kit at a party, an engineering student already involved with the privileged Olivia although he claims it’s a ‘deconstructed relationship’. Well, I admit my heart sank a little, as the life of the mind is of course now ditched for the life of the clandestine relationship. Will no one ever think a story more interesting if the woman chooses work over sex? Oh well. This is, however, the part of the narrative where the title most readily makes sense, as our narrator fails to condemn Kit for his lack of moral courage in stringing two women along, but embraces instead a lively, even virulent, hostility towards Olivia. So much for the sisterhood.
The narrator’s studies are faltering, too, run aground on an ugly sentence in which Woolf describes a Ceylonese barrister as a ‘little mahogany-coloured wretch’. The poster of Woolf that she has on her wall is demoted to a lowly spot, and when it falls onto the floor and is accidentally trodden on, the footprint on Woolf’s face speaks volumes. Equally problematic is the narrator’s relationship to her mother, who intrudes into the narrative by means of plaintively affectionate letters full of impotent desires to care and coerce. The narrator at times realises that the reproaches she makes against her mother – most notably for assimilating into Australian culture – are a kind of double-bind in which their differing tastes are weaponised to no useful outcome. But she’s young, and trying to separate, and her resentment is just too strong.
This novel has been widely reviewed and praised for its innovative structure, envisioned (as we are told in the text) as a modern day take on Woolf’s failed intentions with The Years to create a book in which fiction and essay sit side by side. There are interpolated stories here, most notably a brief foray into the narrator’s childhood when she was quietly sexually assaulted in a piano exam, and a longish disquisition on the Australian artist and pedophile, Donald Friend. But for me, the choppiness of the text didn’t work. There is, I suppose, an underlying concern with power dynamics throughout, though this is something that has only occurred to me a week or so after reading it. At the time, I just didn’t understand how the different parts of this novel were supposed to work together, how they reflected on one another. And, if I’m absolutely truthful, I found the bitterness and resentment that infuse the writing rather depressing. Towards the end of the novel we skip forward several decades to find our narrator now a successful author. She’s giving a book event when she’s approached by a woman from her past who has something shocking to tell her about Olivia, and the narrator must finally realize that her perceptions about her rival were flawed. Just as the story was getting interesting again, the narrative swerved into the account of Donald Friend, and it felt to me as if the hatred that had been lodged in Olivia simply had to go somewhere else. It couldn’t be processed, it couldn’t be absolved. This is of course a damning indictment of the effects of racism and all the other despicable things that people across time can be relied upon to do to one another. But hatred keeps us enmeshed with all the wrongdoing, it’s a continuation of it, not an answer.
It’s only writing this review that I wonder whether the mention of ‘shame’ at the start refers to the narrator’s feelings about her relationship to Olivia. But I didn’t want her to feel shame. I wanted her to stop wasting her energy hating people and to find instead something to love and enjoy and be just plain old pleased about. Ultimately, it felt to me as if no amount of innovative structure was able to jolt the narrator out of her sense of oppression. And much as that probably isn’t at all the point of this book, I did sincerely wish it might happen.
A completely different novel to the other two, and one to park under the heading of utterly charming and foolish fun to read when the world seems a tough place. Though on the quiet, it’s also a rather salient satire of the publishing industry. Once upon a (recent) time in France, Jean-Pierre Gourvec is inspired by the (real) Richard Brautigan to start his own library of unpublished manuscripts in his hometown of Crozon, Brittany. It’s a place where unloved literary works can come for preservation and live out a blameless forgotten life. By the time Parisian book publicist, Delphine Despero, visits her parents in Crozon, Gourvec has died, leaving the care of the library to his assistant, Magali. Delphine visits with her new boyfriend, Frederic (whose own literary novel, The Bathtub, has just been published to resounding silence), and there among the shelves she comes across an abandoned masterpiece. The book is called The Last Hours of a Love Affair, and the author’s name is Henri Pick. This is odd, because a little digging informs them that the recently deceased Henri Pick used to run the local pizzeria, and the idea that he might have been a closet novelist is quite astounding. Delphine and Frederic visit his widow, Marianne, who is initially astounded, but slowly won over to the possibility, as is her divorced daughter, Josephine. And they give Delphine the permission she needs to go ahead and publish the book.
The story surrounding the discovery of the manuscript is such a good one, so enticing, that the book becomes a huge success. The success has reverberations of its own, affecting all the characters who have come into contact with it and changing their lives. Then along comes literary critic Jean-Michel Rouche, whose glory days are behind him, and who can only beg for invitations to minor book world events. He can’t swallow the story of Pick’s unlikely authorship and in the hope of a coup that will place him center stage in the French world of letters again, sets off to discover who the real writer was.
There are two strands to this tale; one is a heartwarming comedy concerned with sorting out the lives of lonely people; the other is a sneaky snigger at the way publishing PR works, and how books require buzz to elevate them into the ranks of bestsellers. Because there are two strands, there are two endings to the story and Mr Litlove and I (we read this one together) felt that was perhaps one ending too many. But we couldn’t really be cross about it. This is a beguiling literary chase among bookish people and broken hearts that just wants everyone to end up happy.