This Sweet Sickness: Patricia Highsmith

In Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness, a novel of obsession and one man’s descent into madness, David Kelsey appears to have a decent life and a good future in front of him. He lives in a small town, and as a bachelor he rents a room in a boarding house. According to the landlady, he is the perfect tenant. He’s quiet, neat, pays his rent on time and never brings a woman back to his room. David’s workmate, a unhappily married man named Wes, certainly envies David his solitude. Wes complains abut his wife Laura constantly; apparently, according to Wes, she’s a cleaning fanatic, neurotic and prone to violent bursts of temper. Wes constantly wants David to visit hoping to ameliorate Laura’s anger. A new tenant at the boarding house, Effie Brennan, tries to strike up a relationship with David. She gets nowhere, but she becomes friends with Wes.

David is consumed with what he calls “the Situation.” He moved to this town and took the job for its large salary (1959, 25K), and he left behind, Annabelle, a girl he had just met in California. Even though he never made formal promises to Annabelle, he assumed she would wait for him, but Annabelle marries suddenly and moves to Hartford Connecticut with her new husband, Gerald Delaney. David, obsessed with Annabelle, refuses to move on. He’s written to Annabelle a few times telling her he loves her and she replied a couple of times. Undeterred by her marriage, he buys a remote cabin, furnishing it to what he imagines is Annabelle’s taste. He goes every weekend to the cabin, which he bought under the name William Neumeister. The name Neumeister may have initially been created as a means to buy this cabin with no one’s knowledge, but over time, it’s as if David is Neumeister–a more ‘confident’ man, perhaps a version of the self David would like to be. David tells everyone at the boarding house that he spends his weekends visiting his ailing mother in a nursing home (she’s actually long dead), but in reality, he spends that time at the cabin imagining that Annabelle is by his side, enjoying wine, enjoying the meals he cooks.

I don’t think that we can imagine David’s behaviour is healthy by any stretch of the imagination, but when the novel begins, David is still functional. He decides it’s time to press Annabelle to meet him in New York and when that doesn’t happen, and Annabelle tells him she has had a baby, he goes to her apartment to make her change her mind. …

Annabelle’s marriage to another man and then having a baby should be clear hints that she will never be David’s wife, but when reality hits David, instead of accepting it, his fantasies become more elaborate. To an outsider, David’s actions seem bizarre, but David’s actions are sealed with his own logic–a logic that underscores his desire to ‘spring’ Annabelle from her husband. This is great fiction, but at the same time, with David as our increasingly unreliable narrator, this is terrifying real. David’s first foray into violence increases his spiral into total insanity.

There are some cruel ironies to this tale. Effie Brennan is a lot like Annabelle in many ways, but David rejects her tentative attempts at friendship. David fails to realize that Effie loves him and finds her annoying. Here is this very nice, sweet, available girl, and she is arguably more interesting than Annabelle, but David only finds Effie “draining” and sees her as a nuisance. When it comes to Effie, he thinks it’s “easier to get rid of a bulldog with its teeth sunk in his wrist.” While he finds Effie intrusive, pushy and annoying, he never grasps that Effie’s behaviour and questions about his private life pale when compared to his single-minded insane pursuit of Annabelle. Life could be very very good for David, but his obsession controls all.

This Sweet Sickness easily makes my best-of-year-list. Highsmith follows the tense, claustrophobic trajectory of David’s terrifying descent into madness with bitter detail. David has led a double life for the past two years, lying about visits to his mother, while using the weekends to indulge in fantasies about the non-existence relationship with Annabelle in a non-existent life. When it’s clear that David’s imagined future with Annabelle will never materialize, he sinks into madness. The lines between David Kelsey and his alter-ego William Neumeister blur as the two identities blend into one.

David shut his eyes, lifted his glass and took three big swallows. Neumeister. He hadn’t thought of him in days until tonight, and there was little Effie keeping his precious secret. Neumeister had served his purpose, sailing serenely victoriously over tumultuous waters, up and down riding the waves, a strong ship in full sail. Neumeister had never lost. It was too bad Annabelle had never known Neumeister, even though Neumeister had in a way lived with her

The Miranda: Geoff Nicholson

“It sounded like flattery. I never liked or trusted that.”

In Geoff Nicholson’s novel, The Miranda, Joe, a divorced psychologist whose work in cognitive behavior therapy led to employment with a government agency, buys a house solely for its 100 yard circular pathway. He intends to “act out a script that in some form or other, I’d had in my head for my entire life.[…] I would walk around the world, and I would do it without ever leaving my own yard.” He appears to be removing himself from society, but all of his neighbours begin to pester him in various ways.

Joe is no longer employed but in the not-so-distant past, he started treating torture survivors for PTSD and then that gradually morphed into becoming a torturer who prepped “volunteers” for torture. No pictures, diagrams or slideshows: Joe actually did the torturing.

I won’t go into the precise details of what I did. For one thing, I’m not allowed to, but the fact is, I don’t believe I did anything to the volunteers that would surprise you. I was going to say I did everything you can imagine, but that couldn’t possibly be true. Any of us, even the most innocent and vanilla, can easily imagine forms of torture that are far, far beyond anything that I did, that I was allowed to do, to the volunteers. I stayed within limits. I was constrained by laws and decency, and to an extent by my own inherent squeamishness.

A point came when Joe, after ‘breaking’ volunteer after volunteer “couldn’t stand it any longer,” and he walked away from the job, but it’s the sort of job that gets under the skin. At first he lives in a flophouse motel, but then crawling back from that low point, he decides to buy a house, and that decision grows into a project:

If your garden, by some chance, happened to contain a circular path that was exactly 100 yards long, you would need to walk around it 440,000 times in order to cover a distance equal to the circumference of the earth at the equator. To put it another way, you would need to make 17.6 circuits of your garden path in order to cover a mile. Repeat that 25,000 times and the job would be done. And that was exactly what I intended to do. That was my plan, my grand project.

Joe decides to set a goal of 25 miles for 1000 days, stating that “in other words, my entire journey [around the world] would take just 95 days less than three years.” It is his “grand obsession.” And while Joe spends his days walking, seeking solitude, various annoying neighbors and even the postman find creative ways to pester Joe. Soon he’s employed an eager woman whose bartending ambitions include creating a timeless drink called “The Miranda.” Trouble looms in the form of violent neighbours who move in the rental behind Joe.

In fact, over the next few days, evidence appeared that the new guys were practitioners of various marital arts. An old-school, leather punching bag appeared, hanging from a tree branch, and they set up one of those rubberized torsos on a spring-loaded base that you can kick and punch to your heart’s content and it always bounces back for more, and (probably more important) it never retaliates. There was much shadow boxing and sparring and the whiling of nunchucks. The boy’s training regime seemed undisciplined, though highly enthusiastic, and it required a lot of shouting.

Before long I also noticed that these new inhabitants had spray-painted the abandoned cars in the driveway with various tags, patterns and symbols, and again from what I could see, it appeared the work was more enthusiastic than skilled, though this was by no means my area of expertise. The boys played their music loud, and they owned a number of big, energetic, brutal dogs; about half a dozen of them, somewhere between mutts and monsters.

These new obnoxious neighbours begin a process of intimidation, but they have no idea what they are dealing with.

In general, I’m not one of those people who worries too much about things that haven’t happened yet. Worrying about what might happen strikes me as a waste of time, because absolutely anything might happen and absolutely anything might not. You can’t be prepared for an infinite number of events and outcomes. The skill, as I see it, is not trying to foresee every possible situation in advance, because that’s impossible, but rather be confident that you can handle any situation as and when–and if–it arises.

I laughed and marveled at the way Joe handles his neighbours, the nosy ones and the violent ones. He is, after all, a therapist specializing in cognitive behaviour therapy. Underneath Joe’s grand walking project there’s the idea that this scheme, while admirable, is just a way to pass the time. Joe is waiting for his past to catch up with him. …

In The Miranda, we find the classic elements of Nicholson’s novels: mania, obsessives, collectors, quirky misfit characters and a quest. The novel explores the theme of walking (one of Nicholson’s personal hobbies/obsessions), specifically “walkers who turned their geographical constraints into virtual projects.” Joe describes how Albert Speer “paced out a walking path” at Spandau Prison where he walked seven kilometers a day “virtually” from Berlin to Heidelberg. Later, Speer’s virtual walking goals expanded but he “fretted that any route he chose [to Asia] would involve walking through some dreaded communist countries. He couldn’t face that. Not even in his imagination.”

Joe discusses some famous walkers, walking as therapy, walking as meditation and even compares walking to sex.

Sex and walking are things that some people like to do alone, that some people like to do with just one other person, and that some people like to do in groups of all sizes. Some prefer the company of men while doing it, some prefer the company of women, some are prepared to do it with either. Some will only do it if certain very specific conditions are met. A few require special clothing and equipment. Others are eager to to do it anywhere, any time, in any conditions, at the drop of a hat. A certain number, perhaps a surprisingly large number, really don’t like to do it at all.

Joe’s ex wife and his neighbours find Joe’s project troubling, unsettling and even looney. This witty, entertaining novel mines the idea of neighbours as a special kind of hell. We can’t choose who we live next to, unfortunately, and occasionally neighbours give us insight into our patience (or lack thereof) and what we appreciate and accept as ok behavior. simply to get peace. There’s irony here as Joe knows the intricacies of torture and understands the significance of intimidation and now himself becomes the target of bullying. He craves privacy yet interest in his solo walking in his own back garden makes people curious.

There are several virtual walking sights on the internet. Some cost, some are free, some require membership. Anyway, thanks to The Miranda which will make my best-of-year-list, I have started walking circuits in my back garden.

Virtual walking

In the Garden of the Fugitives: Ceridwen Dovey

“If the person you want can never be yours, what else is there to do but learn to be alone?”

Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives is an epistolary novel between a wealthy dying American man and a 39-year-old woman who originally hailed from South Africa but now lives in Australia. It’s been 17 years since they last had contact, and now the relationship is re-awakened by the imminent death of 70 year-old Royce. Royce’s compulsion to write to Vita is fueled by an admitted “craven need for absolution.” For her part, Vita acknowledges that Royce is “one of the strangest, most significant things that ever happened to me.” It would seem that the novel’s focus will be what occurred between them, and while that’s true, that aspect of the novel is overshadowed by their individual pasts. At first the letters are packed with recrimination and vitriol on Vita’s side while Royce takes a position of humility. Soon the correspondence slips into two narratives with both characters wrestling with demons of guilt, regret and obsession, but this is also a novel about power: the power of youth and beauty, the power of money, the power of class and race, and the power to do whatever it takes to get what you want.

So how did these two seemingly disparate characters establish a relationship in the first place? Vita’s family (her father was an activist) left South Africa and moved to Australia. Vita attended university in Boston and very quickly latched onto a desire to be a documentary filmmaker. This goal seemed within her grasp when she won a Lushington Foundation fellowship. This is how she met Royce. The Fellowship was his to give, and it was founded in memory of Kitty Lushington a woman he loved and followed to Pompeii. She died in an accident on Vesuvius.

As the exchanges unfold, the two correspondents may occasionally answer some issue in a previous letter (actually long e-mails, but don’t let that put you off), but mostly they tell their own stories. Royce’s story is painful, and also unreliable. As for Vita: she struggles with identity, displacement, guilt, a stalled career, and finally an obsession. Where did her documentary film making career go? We know she lives in the small town of Mudgee working on an olive farm. What went wrong?

As we try to nail down the truth of exactly what happened to both of these people, the book is, at times, a slippery read. Royce admits:

We can fill in each other’s gaps and somewhere between us may lie the truth of ourselves. Our memories are always imperfect, Kitty used to say. We have to leave ourselves clues-photos, scrapbooks, journals–or our very own pasts become inaccessible, though we lived through every moment. What hope, then, of deciphering somebody else’s past, let alone the history of an ancient civilization.

We follow Royce as he recalls, through his letters, how he tagged along to Pompeii, puppylike at Kitty’s heels. At first he professes that it’s enough to just be in her presence, but later, he hopes to catch her when, and if, she falls from another relationship. Through Royce’s letters, we see the ephemeral Kitty obsess on the plants found in Pompeii’s Garden of the Fugitives, and underlying the archaeological aspects of the novel is a delicate thread concerning the dangers of placing our own narratives onto others. We also begin to see why Royce was attracted to Vita in the first place as there are definite similarities between the two women, and it would seem that Royce who lost Kitty, perhaps hopes that he found someone to replace her.

While Royce’s letters are packed with details about Pompeii, Vita’s letters are full of details of her attempts to make documentaries. Vita’s films say more about her life than she realises, and while she films landscapes and various processes of production, she struggles with putting people into her films. Vita’s struggles ultimately reveal how the male-female dynamic enters her career:

In a class on feminism my second year at college, the teaching assistant a woman in her mid-forties, had asked all us peachy-faced girls in her study section if we’d ever felt discriminated against as women. Not a single one of us put up a hand, and we refrained defiantly, with a hit of swagger: things had changed, the world belonged to us, we had always been treated as equals.

The assistant, who had been raised in a commune set up in permanent protest outside a weapons factory in Sweden, looked at us sadly. “Mark my words,” she said, “the doors will start to slam shut in your faces the day you are no longer considered youthful. Only then will you see how misguided you were to equate being young and female with being empowered. You may turn  your back on feminism now, think you don’t need it, but by god you’ll need to once you start to age. The opportunities you thought were based on merit will dry up just as you do.”

I’d looked around the classroom and seen on the faces of my fellow female students no alarm, nothing but the pity  I too was feeling for her. We all believed that her prediction was the product of personal disappointment and we felt safe in the conviction that for us it would be different.

The archaeological details about Pompeii were fascinating, but I didn’t quite connect with the massive national guilt felt by Vita (perhaps you have to be South African to understand), but Vita’s feelings of displacement, “caught between identities,” were powerfully conveyed. Vita’s displacement, which was buried when she lived in America, floats to the surface when she returns to South Africa and she finds herself “still outside the country looking in” despite being incorporated into a white South African family who’ve managed to morph with the new political reality.

This is not a fast read and requires patience as the stories unfold. I mentioned in the first paragraph that this is a story about guilt, obsession, and regret, but it’s power that connects Royce and Vita–he has the money, the position, the influence, but she also has power which she has yet to understand. The thread concerning the power of placing our own narratives on to other people (easy to do when they are dead), is amplified through the stories of the dead at Pompeii, but it’s also a potential hazard when making documentaries which include human narratives. In one scene, two female student filmmakers naively film a BDSM segment in which the subject subverts their power and control, but conversely, there’s a scene in which Vita hesitates to place a black worker in the frame when making a film about wine-making. On some level, I suspect, she understands that making a film in which workers feature steals a certain power from her subjects. They participate, but do they choose to participate? And interestingly Vita’s relationships all seem to pivot on power.

This is an exquisitely written, cerebral, intelligent novel, bitter-sweet in its exploration of how we discover truths about ourselves when it’s often too late.

Review copy

The King of Fools: Frédéric Dard (1952)

“Poor Ivanhoe,” she sighed. “You have no idea what fools heroes can be.”

In Frédéric Dard’s novel of nightmarish obsession, The King of Fools, Jean-Marie Valaise is on a solo holiday in Juan-les-Pins. It was a holiday he’d intended to take with his long-term girlfriend, the elegant, self-contained and uber self controlled Denise:

I should have been with Denise. but we had broken off just two days before leaving, on some petty pretext. For a moment, I had considered cancelling my trip, but then decided the Côte d’Azur would be a timely distraction, and left anyway. I regretted it now. Holiday resorts are best approached in a happy frame of mind, or they can seem more depressing than all the rest. Truth be told, my sorrow was not acute. Rather, I experienced a feeling of intense disenchantment that left me weak and vulnerable. I felt the nagging torment of physical regret too. With Denise, the act of love had been easy, and reassuring. 

One day, Jean-Marie sees a woman getting into his car. The incident turns out to have been a mistake, but the woman, who didn’t leave a wholly favorable impression, left a bag with a thousand francs inside. That night, Jean-Marie spots the woman at a local casino. She seems, for this second meeting, to be almost a totally different person, elegant, beautiful and cultured. Jean-Marie, normally a cautious man when it comes to money, throws discretion to the winds, gambles and loses, but no matter, soon he’s chatting and half in love with Marjorie Faulks, the Englishwoman he met earlier that day.

Jean-Marie meets Marjorie a third time when she invites herself into his hotel room while he’s in the shower. While Jean-Marie’s awkwardness is smooched over by Marjorie, still the incident seems bizarre. She breaks the news that she’s married, but Jean-Marie, who’s decided that Marjorie is bitterly unhappy, pulls her in his arms for a kiss. They part, but promise to write….

Denise shortly shows up at the resort and quickly sniffs out Jean-Marie’s mood. After all they’ve been together for years, and they have a strong commitment to each other as friends but not as lovers. They break up a couple of times every year, and yet always get back together. Jean-Marie’s feelings for Marjorie are different: it’s intense, an obsession he can’t control.

After a letter from Marjorie, Jean-Marie dashes off to Scotland where he sinks into an abyss of deception, but not before Denise warns him that he thinks he’s some sort of hero leaving to ‘rescue’ Marjorie, and that it will end badly.

While I wasn’t entirely convinced by the character of Marjorie (she’s a cipher), I was convinced that Jean-Marie, a man whose passions up to this moment had been tepid and controlled, could totally lose it on holiday. Passion unexpectedly overwhelms him; it’s a new feeling, and although there are plenty of warning signs, he doesn’t pay attention. Jean-Marie’s life, a life in which passion takes a back seat to common sense, is completely derailed when he meets Marjorie. This largely happens because his guard is down, and Marjorie has a sly way of trespassing without seeming to do so.

Most of the action takes place in a dreary Edinburgh, with the weather matching the atmosphere of the novel. There’s a large cat-and-mouse section, and Jean-Marie’s life descends into an almost surreal kind of hell, with the novel’s great, ironic twist, in common with many titles in the Pushkin Vertigo line, arriving at the end.

For those interested, here’s a list of Dard books read so far in order of preference

The Executioner Weeps

The Wicked Go to Hell

Bird in a Cage

Crush

The King of Fools

Review copy

Translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie

Hotel Iris: Yoko Ogawa

In Yoko Ogawa’s novel, The Hotel Iris, run by a mother-and-daughter team, is a third-rate hotel in a dull seaside town. The mother manages the shabby hotel which has been in the family for over 100 years with a rod of iron and more than a streak of mercenary nastiness. Daughter Mari, upon the death of her grandfather, was forced to leave school and begin working at the hotel. With long hours and the nonstop demands of the hotel guests, Mari is almost a slave to her domineering mother.

The Iris came into being when my great-grandfather fixed up an old inn and turned it into a hotel. That was more than a hundred years ago, In that part of town, a restaurant or hotel was either supposed to have an ocean view or to be right on the beach. The Iris didn’t qualify on either count: it took more than half an hour to walk to the sea, and only two of the rooms had views. The rest looked out over the fish-processing plant. 

There are corners of darkness in Mari’s life: a kleptomaniac cleaner who can be blackmailed, the excruciating death of her grandfather whose agonising groans heard by the guests were explained as caused by cats “in heat,” and a pedophile sculptor who “nearly raped” her. There’s no life beyond the hotel for Mari, so perhaps that partially explains why she’s fascinated when a scene occurs at the hotel involving a prostitute and a male guest “past middle age, on the verge of being old.” There’s something about his voice, “giving an order,” which strikes her as beautiful, and the ugly scene provides Mari with a memory she can’t get out of her head. Months later, she spots the man again, follows him, and they strike up a relationship. …

The man, a widower, who later becomes known as ‘the translator’ translates commercial material for a living, and is translating a Russian meganovel in his spare time. He lives alone on an island, and it’s rumoured that he murdered his wife. The translator represents many things to Mari: perhaps he’s a father figure, perhaps the air of mystery which surrounds him intrigues her, perhaps his tenderness towards Mari fills a need, but whatever the reasons behind the attraction, before long the translator and Mari, who sneaks away from the hotel with various excuses, engage in a relationship that begins with a little B&D and then morphs into the very dangerous territory of S&M.

For those interested, there are some B&D/S&M details here, and while the story is told through Mari’s eyes, the details are precise but not overly salacious. The hours Mari and the translator spend together are catalogued so that it’s easy for the reader to see a steady progression of pain and humiliation told with almost clinical care. What’s so interesting here is that while Mari is definitely under the spell of the translator, she never loses sight of his aging body, the wrinkles, the sagging, and his ears “no more than a limp sliver of dark flesh.”

This is a deeply disturbing, yet fascinating novella about obsession and a twisted relationship that, with its escalating violence, can only end one way. It’s fascinating that Mari, who at 17 could be in the power seat here, instead abdicates that power to a much older man on the teetering point of frailty. And yet…  does Mari abdicate that power or does she subtly remain in control?

For readers and animal lovers: a warning about the fate of an unfortunate mouse who inadvertently becomes a witness to one of the more unpleasant scenes between Mari and the translator.

Translated by Stephen Snyder

A Cage in Search of a Bird: Florence Noiville

In French novelist Florence Noiville’s A Cage in Search of a Bird, successful television journalist and author Laura Wilmot’s act of kindness towards an old friend backfires and leads to a terrible psychological game of cat-and-mouse. By a strange coincidence, I read this book around the same time as reading Delphine de Vigan’s novel, Based on a True Story. While Based on a True Story is the story of a writer whose life is gradually taken over by L., a woman who professes to be an old schoolmate and friend, in A Cage in Search of a Bird, Laura’s life is wrenched apart when C., an old schoolmate and friend declares that they are meant to be together and that nothing will keep them apart.

Here’s how the book opens:

That day I became convinced that something was wrong.

‘Look! I’m dressed as you!’

C came into the room where I was working and made that statement, her voice filled with joy.

Even today I hear her throaty voice stressing the you. I should have looked up, but I let the words sink into my brain. There was something strange about them. Why ‘as you’, and not ‘like you’? And the stress on you.

Laura and C were best friends in school, and at the time, C’s star was rising, but after losing touch for years, Laura meets C at a book signing. Laura is a television journalist in a solid relationship, and she’s doing well. C,  a freelance writer, asks Laura to help get her a job at the television station, and Laura, who feels guilty for having poached many of C’s ideas along the way, offers to give this old friend a helping hand.

Soon Laura’s life is a nightmare; C insists that they love one another, are meant to be together, and that Laura is denying the inevitable. C calls at 2 in the morning, she creates a facebook account in Laura’s name, and she undermines her at work. At first Laura, who’s skilled at getting into the heads of the people she interviews, sees the situation with C as raw material for a new book, and she wants to “enter C’s delusion.” She consults a therapist about C, and he basically tells Laura to run, that C has de Clérambault syndrome and that this situation will end either in death or suicide. …

A Cage in Search of a Bird is a psychological thriller, and its strengths include several cases of de Clérambault syndrome patients (including Johnny Hallyday and Patrick Bruel). These cases show just how hopeless (to cure) these obsessions, with built-in-fantasy protection, are. Also how very dangerous. Here’s a man who can’t shake off a woman who obsesses about him

We are in the realm of the unpredictable. The only thing I know is that every week I receive a letter from her. Often she brings it herself and leaves it with my secretary. She’s there in person, she wanders the halls of the university. It’s a very destabilizing situation. You control neither the beginning nor the end. You don’t know where it comes from, what triggered it, and how it might end. You don’t know what kind of fantasy you might be the object of. And you are completely outside the rational world in which you’ve existed since childhood…

On the down side, the novel became increasingly elliptical as the pace picked up, and at a couple of points, some things weren’t clear. Some paragraphs are a sentence long, and at times, the story read like an outline to a novel: in other words not fleshed out yet.

After reading A Cage in Search of a Bird,  I understand some of these celebrity “stalking” murders that make the news. Also how A list celebrities who have the $$ to have good security can haul de Clérambault syndrome stalkers into court while B list celebrities are more vulnerable and can end up dead. I’ll emphasize though that some of the people Laura talks to about de Clérambault syndrome are just regular people (like her) who unfortunately and inexplicably become the object of erotomania.

Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan

Based on a True Story: Delphine de Vigan

The title of Delphine de Vigan’s latest book, Based on a True Story is a bit of a teaser. Is this book fiction or not? The book’s inside flap states that “this psychological thriller blurs the line between fact and fiction, reality and artifice,” and you can’t help but wonder what is ‘true’ and what is imagined when you read the book. After all, the author writes “autobiographical fiction,” and the main character is Delphine, an author who’s just written a book about her mother (Delphine de Vigan’s book about her mother is reviewed here), and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that there are elements of the book that are true with imagination taking flight at some point. But frankly, I’m not interested in how much is real and how much is fiction; after all, I’m sure many writers use personal experiences, in one form or another, for inspiration.

The book begins with Delphine (the character) describing how she became friends with a woman she identifies only as L. They meet at a party, and “profoundly, slowly, surely, insidiously” L enters Delphine’s life and, over a two-year-period, gradually takes it over. When the two women meet, Delphine is at a low point in her life, and the publication of a book about her mother has had unexpected, mostly negative results. So here’s Delphine, a successful writer who meets L, a ghostwriter of various biographies and memoirs. To Delphine, L appears to be everything she will never be, immaculate:

How much time does it take to be a woman like that? I wondered as I looked at L., as I had observed dozens of women before, on the metro, in cinema queues and at restaurant tables. Coiffed, made up and neatly pressed. Without a crease. How much time to reach that state of perfection every morning and how much time for touch-ups before going out in the evening? What kind of life do you have to lead to have time to tame your hair by blow-drying, to change your jewellery every day, to coordinate and vary your outfits, to leave nothing to chance?

Within a short time, L. is in contact with Delphine on a daily basis. Meanwhile Delphine is receiving anonymous hate mail, and having difficulties writing. While L positions herself as Delphine’s friend and staunch supporter, in reality, she’s subtly undermining Delphine’s confidence and influencing her behaviour with negative and positive reinforcement. The  gradual decline of Delphine’s confidence is in direct proportion to L’s control over Delphine’s life. Yes, a friend in need is a friend indeed, unless she has your destruction at heart–in which case you’d better beware.

The problem is that Delphine doesn’t catch on until so many things have occurred and she has had several serious warnings that L is a psycho. L is slick, but her mask occasionally slips, and there’s really no reason why Delphine doesn’t see this. For example, at one point, L is snarkily raving on about her theories of Delphine’s writing:

I sometimes wonder if you shouldn’t be suspicious of the comfort you live in, your little life that’s ultimately quite comfortable, with your children, your man, writing, all carefully gauged.

Of course, L has partially achieved this control by gradually isolating Delphine and slowly eradicating her confidence, but it’s hard not to wonder why Delphine, who is a successful writer accepts the writing advice, constantly, of a woman who make her living as a ghostwriter? Or why Delphine abdicates her personal responsibilities repeatedly? Why doesn’t Delphine punch back?

At the heart of the matter is the idea that L tapped into Delphine’s deepest insecurities, but this wasn’t entirely achieved–especially when Delphine is given a warning that cannot be ignored, but goes back for more. … Again, perhaps that says more about Delphine’s needs than L’s occasionally sloppy methodology, but if that is true, the book’s thesis isn’t quite convincing.

While I eagerly turned each page of Based on a True Story, I wished that Delphine would wake up and smell the psycho, and I felt no small amount of frustration that it took so long. However, this an interesting read and a cautionary one. Writers are, after all, on the celebrity spectrum, but they are accessible to the public, fans and, yes, even haters.

And here’s Gert’s review

Review copy

Translated by George Miller

Mona Lisa: Alexander Lernet-Holenia (1937)

Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s playful novella Mona Lisa from Pushkin Press capitalizes on the mystery of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic painting by focusing on the facts and then cleverly blurring the details. The result is a delightful little tale centered on the alluring Mona Lisa smile, obsession, and the human desire to build a narrative around any mystery.

It’s the dawn of the 16th century, and we’re in the middle of the Second Italian War. King Louis XII sends one of his marshals, Louis de la Trémoille to Milan where he is supposed to raise an army, go to Naples and offer relief to the French governors who are fighting the Spanish.  There’s a big speech, full of pompous grandiosity from King Louis XII which boils down to the fact that the only thing Louis de la Trémoille is getting from the king is his blessing. The king stares “for a while into the indeterminate middle distance past the Marshal with the vacant expression of one who at all costs refuses to talk of money.” The Marshal is supposed to finance the campaign somehow:

“I trust that you will also take the opportunity of recouping the cost of this campaign. Be sure therefore that you levy from the territories for whose sake we are making such sacrifices all necessary and fitting reparations, be it in the form of direct payments or precious objects, jewels, costly tapestries and suchlike things. For this is my express wish and command. And so,” concluded the King, “goodbye and may god go with you!”

So Trémoille leaves for Italy with just a “few inconsequential counts and minor noblemen.” The First Italian War was a very lucrative affair, but the Second Italian War isn’t a booty-filled operation, and poor Trémoille  “was barely able to send to Paris anything of note.” He has to “content himself with fleecing the smaller towns” and decided to “concentrate on the purchase of objects of art.” This is how Da Vinci enters the picture.

Da Vinci is portrayed as a distracted genius, far more sophisticated and intelligent than Trémoille. While trying to catch a fly inside Da Vinci’s workshop, one of Trémoille’s entourage, a certain Monsieur de Bougainville, discovers the painting we know as the Mona Lisa. He falls in love with the woman depicted in the portrait and is determined to track her down….

The book plays into the mythology that’s grown around the painting, and at the same time, the narrative creates mystery and mythology of its own. Bougainville, dangerously obsessed and determined to discover the identity of the woman known as La Gioconda, takes Leonardo da Vinci’s words and builds a whole story around the woman who posed for the portrait. Da Vinci is frustratingly vague about his model:

“Oh,” Leonardo said, raising his eyebrows, “I knew her only fleetingly, and the picture of the woman before you is neither her nor anyone else. The truth us, even had I wanted to paint her, it would have immediately turned into the likeness of someone else. After all, one always paints women who never exist, and the same goes for women one really loves.”

This is a very light, bubbly read, and although there are some very serious consequences to Bougainville’s obsession, the story never deviates from its comic stance. De Vinci seems mystified by the French soldiers, their desire for booty, and Bougainville’s determination to create a palatable narrative regarding the model for his painting. The novella is written in such a way that readers connect with the rather bemused and distracted Da Vinci. Why is this Frenchman so determined to ‘save’ the woman who may or who may not have been the model for painting? After all, according to Da Vinci, the portrait is of an idealized woman. What is all this fuss about?

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Translated by Ignat Avsey

The Refuge: A Confession by Kenneth Mackenzie

“This thought brought my mind back to the vision of night stretching ahead, as certain and as mysterious as a wet and unknown road stretching beyond the delimiting headlights of a car driven by a stranger. It led somewhere”

Kenneth Mackenzie’s novel The Refuge, set in post WWII Sydney, is narrated by middle-aged crime reporter Lloyd Fitzherbert who is working late one evening, reluctant to go home because he’s expecting a call from the police regarding a body that will be found in the harbour. While the body will be identified and thought a suicide, Fitzherbert knows the truth; as the murderer, post crime, pre-discovery of the body, he tells us he “had waited for that hour, with, as I thought, no feelings whatever.” Fitzherbert with cold calculation, has murdered a young woman he loved named Irma–a refugee from war-torn Europe who sought ‘refuge’ in Australia. Recalling the crime, he “felt again the terrible emotion of triumph mixed with and outweighed by black and utter despair.”

There’s no small amount of irony that Irma, a very slippery, beautiful and exotic young woman who joined both the Communist and the Nazi parties pre-WWII, making deadly enemies of both, should find a different type of final ‘refuge’ in an Australia which proves to be more deadly than the Communist agents that pursue her. This is a tale of an unhealthy bond between two people who appear to be in perfect control of their emotions, and yet when it comes to passion and love, there is something dead or missing in both Fitzherbert and Irma’s emotional make-up. He’s opted, after the tragically early death of his wife, to lead an emotionally sterile life and devote himself to his only son, Alan, who’s raised by his grandmother. Fitzherbert carefully maintains a distance from his son, but his devotion towards him includes morbid thoughts. Here he worries about 8 year-old Alan  growing up in a world at war:

how profound had become my mistrust of a world in which wars could still come into evil flower, and in which individuals could play with and brutally alter the myriad personal fates of whole nations of men and women. In such a world I thought I could find plenty of cause to be concerned for Alan; in such an insane, dangerous world, where the very soul, unawares, was vulnerable, I could impersonally imagine a father willingly and painlessly ending the life of a son before that life should fade and fray into the common background pattern of greedy passions and deliberate violence which is also the pattern of inevitable self-destruction.

Irma, part of the chaotic detritus of pre-WWII Europe floats into Fitzherbert’s sterile existence and he falls in love with her. Irma is a very young woman who’s led a life using her body for political gain and also for survival. When she meets Fitzherbert, he’s the next male stepping stone, and while common sense should tell him to tread cautiously, there’s a magnetic attraction which he cannot resist even though he’s initially repelled:

What I did feel was a sense of shock and disappointment, that so much youth and vitality and feminine beauty should have been so well-schooled in the mouthing of spiritless clichés; for I could not then and cannot now believe that the passion for their maggot-eaten homelands which these people so readily put into words is a real passion of body and mind and spirit, and not largely a guileful parade of perfected artifice. What I did believe is that they were profoundly glad Australia did exist and was there unguarded for their exploitation.

The Refuge is Fitzherbert’s confession, and that leaves the reader as the judge and jury. The tale moves backwards from the discovery of Irma’s body, back ten years before when Fitzherbert met Irma for the first time and, as her savior of the hour, became involved in her life. Neither Fitzherbert nor Irma are particularly sympathetic or attractive characters, and once involved, it’s clear that they are both out of their depth. In spite of warning signals, Fitzherbert plunges deep into this relationship with a much young woman who trades her body for favours, and Irma treads dangerous waters when she begins a relationship with Fitzherbert, a type of man she’s never known before.

In the introduction, Nicholas Rothwell addresses the novel’s flaws and asks, “Can a work of genius, a masterwork–a classic–be imperfect, flawed in its essence? Can a great book be made from unbalanced or ill-fitting parts, and can those flaws and quirks actually be the crux of its strength?” These are good questions which ultimately, each reader will ask as they read The Refuge. It is a stunning book, full of the most incredibly beautifully written sections in which Fitzherbert’s lonely, painful observations ooze through the pages. While I found myself highlighting quote after marvelous quote, I also experienced no small amount of frustration with Fitzherbert’s wordy, unfocused confession/justification of his crime. In the final judgment, however, the power of Mackenzie’s heart stopping writing overrides the novel’s flaws, and his narrator’s meandering approach towards his confession grants insight, arguably more than Fitzherbert intended.

The novel’s structure is unusual–presenting a crime committed by the narrator who then proceeds to languidly detail select parts of the ten years before the murder and the events that led up to this act. Fitzherbert is in no hurry to wind up his tale, so, for example, he’ll spend pages describing the structure of his son’s face, and pages recalling discussions he had with a workmate–although that may seem to have little to do with the tale. But Fitzherbert is telling his tale his way, and explaining, with painfully long detail at times, his emotional justification for his crime. Fitzherbert’s idiosyncratic method of telling his story allows the reader glimpses inside the mind of obsessive man whose morbid thoughts dominate his actions. Fitzherbert methodically builds his case that his actions are justified and ultimately the only option available, but the reader knows that that simply isn’t true. Of course, one intriguing question must be asked: Is Fitzherbert, always in control of the narrative, as honest with himself as he appears to be? When the book opens, he presents himself as a man who has adjusted to the brutal nature of the world, but there are some vital components missing, and this absence floats to the surface when he falls into a one-sided love affair with Irma:

No one would describe me as a nervous man. Years of police reporting give necessary control of all emotion, not merely a command of the show of it. I have seen men hanged, and the raped and mutilated bodies of young women, and children’s bodies that fire has burned, and drowned people on whom fish have been feeding; and for such sights great calmness of spirit is essential One does not even allow an inward weeping for pity, or for shame at being oneself a man. One looks, and makes notes, and forgets. Nervousness does not come into it.

Rothwell describes The Refuge as a tragedy, and if we accept it as such, then Mackenzie’s approach to what may seem like a crime novel, makes much more sense. Fitzherbert is a murderer–an Othello without Iago, and he’s murdered the woman he loves. Now, in the lonely post-mortem of his crime, he explains and dominates the back story of the rocky, fateful path that led, inevitably, to this point.

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Bleeding London by Geoff Nicholson

After reading several novels  written by Geoff Nicholson for  a Year of Geoff Nicholson (which is extending into a Year and a Bit), I’ve thought a great deal about obsession. The driving force behind Nicholson’s characters is obsession in one form or another, and  I’ve begun to wonder if being an obsessive is necessarily a bad thing. After all if nursing an obsession saves you from going around the bend or blowing your brains out, then what’s the problem?

The three main characters in Nicholson’s brilliantly funny novel Bleeding London are all obsessives, all people on a mission for one reason or another. There’s Mick, a bouncer whose stripper girlfriend, Gabby, a hard-as-nails, “taut redhead,” claims she was gang-raped by six men, “in-bred toffs,”  following a performance for a private stag party in London. Armed with a list of names, Mick travels from Sheffield to London on a mission to hunt down the offenders and deliver painful, humiliating punishments. Sounds fairly straightforward, right?

Then there’s Judy who works in a bookshop and is obsessed with having sex in every London location possible. She has a map hanging on her wall marked for each event, and after quizzing each of her lovers, she creates their maps of past sexual adventures for comparison. The men in Judy’s life have a range of responses to her enthusiasm for sexual geography: they find her hobby exciting, erotic, and puzzling. Judy relentlessly pursues her obsession, and yet at the same time feels an emptiness. No wonder she calls late night radio chat shows to discuss her sex life.

Then there’s Stuart who founded a walking tour business called The London Walker. Business was limp at first until Stuart met and married Anita. She’s transformed the business into a phenomenal success, but in the process Stuart has become superfluous. Anita calls Stuart’s tours  “a little recherché,” and he’s eventually moved to a management position while Anita creates London walks designed to appeal to tourists.

At first he continued to lead walks. But Anita had been right. His knowledge of London was detailed and profound, his love of it real, yet as the years went by he had an increasing distaste for the obvious. He genuinely wanted to reveal London to the people who came on the tours but he was bored with its more obvious features. He wanted to show its eccentricities and unknown quarters. Rather than take them to the Tower of London he’d have preferred to take them to the abandoned Severndroog Castle near Oxleas wood. For Stuart it increasingly wasn’t enough to tell a few old anecdotes and point out a few sights and locations. He felt the truth was more profound in the obscure corners than in the grand sweeps. And on a good day he would find these corners, even while ostensibly showing the punters the more orthodox aspects of London. His tours became increasingly abstract, free form, improvised, often turning into a sort of mystery tour. A crowd that had signed up for a canal walk might be treated instead to a tour of sites connected with leprosy. There were a few complaints, some dissatisfied walkers who demanded their money back.

If pressed to tell the truth, Stuart was happy with his small business, but that’s swept aside by Anita’s drive, efficiency, and emphasis on “cash-flow forecasts.”

For a while he conceived of his consultative role as thinking up new and original ideas for tours, but this was not an area where novelty and ingenuity were particularly welcomed. The Henry VIII walk and the Jack the Ripper Walk were always likely to do better business than Stuart’s fancier inventions such as the Thomas Middleton Walk, the Post-Modernist Walk, the Anarchists’ Walk. In fact it was a guide in her first week with the company who came up with the idea of the London Lesbian Walk, which for a while was one of the most popular tours.

Driven to despair and a feeling of uselessness, he falls into an affair that is now over. Depressed and withdrawn, Stuart, decides that he needs a “Big Idea” as a “reason for being.”

Once it had arrived there was an inevitability about it, something undeniable. he was sitting in the coffee bar of the Museum of Transport in Covent Garden thinking how much he disliked buses and tubes when the idea finally struck, and the moment it was there he couldn’t see why it had been so long coming. It felt so completely right. What he had to do was utterly clear. He was going to walk down every street in London.

Armed with a A-Z book of London, Stuart takes off every morning exploring London in a way he’s never explored it before, and we get some of the stranger less-well known episodes of the history of London with an emphasis on sexual tourism.  Naturally, since this is a Geoff Nicholson novel, all three characters, each with a different version of London, collide with tangled connections of sexual obsession. Bleeding London is a very funny book with Mick delivering his creative, humiliating punishments to the men on his hit-list, Judy trying to find meaning in her life by plotting geographical markers of sexual encounters, and poor Stuart who is dazzled and amazed by London even as he realises that it’s a city that is greater than a sum of its parts. Once again Nicholson explores the pathology of obsession in this story of characters whose raison d’être is obsession–characters who finally understand that obsession, a harsh exacting mistress, can never be satisfied. Once down that rabbit hole, you’re a goner.

Geoff Nicholson, by the way, has a blog called The Hollywood Walker.  Which makes perfect sense if you think about it.