The flap copy calls this a “Romantic novel in every sense of the word,” which it is: it’s a romance, a love story, and also a story set in the Romantic era, with protagonists who are part of the French Romantic literary/musical/dramatic scene. It’s the story of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, first an actress, then a poet, and it’s the story of her loves: her ill-fated affairs, her marriage, and her great love for the writer Henri de Latouche. It moves back and forth in time, starting in 1821 and moving ahead but also looking back, in alternating chapters, at Marceline’s youth and early adulthood, and it has its poetic moments, but it’s mostly straight first-person narration, which I found less compelling than I thought it’d be.
Not that I wasn’t reasonably interested in Marceline and her story, particularly her dual love for her husband and for Latouche, but the narration struck me as so inward-looking, so centered on Marceline’s emotions and her story, herself as the actress and writer of her own life, with comparatively few scene-setting details, comparatively few descriptions of the world. The narrator of the novel is an “I” that loves and feels and moves through the world; I could have done with more description and less feeling; I would have liked for more of the story to be told indirectly, with the description of a time or a place creating a mood, and letting the reader infer more about the emotion of the story from that. At one point in the novel, Marceline talks about how critics berated her performances for having “an excess of sensibility,” and that’s sometimes how I felt about the book as a whole (p 54).
That said, I like how the book starts right with Marceline’s voice, with the emotional heart of things, with this: “I spent the afternoon with Henri. Again the same vertigo, as though walking an exposed ridge and not knowing which side to fall on, a wild commotion in my chest.” (p 1). And there are some lovely bits of detail: the “orange-colored bergère” in Henri’s apartment, by the piano and the window, his tall windows and their view of the Seine, the sand strewn on the floor in the Flemish fashion in Marceline’s first childhood home, the bits and moods of the cities she sees as an actress, from one city to the next. I liked this a lot:
Rochefort was tiny, and oddly laid out. It was a port, or more accurately a shipyard, differing markedly from the three towns I had previously known, casting all my points of reference to the winds. The sight of masts suddenly rising at the end of a street astonished me. I could never get used to seeing a ship between two houses. I was intrigued, charmed, and vaguely frightened. (p 60)
And this:
Bordeaux appealed to me. With its medieval aspect, its tree-planted alleys, its big, red-tiled, white-stone buildings, its high, clear windows, its sumptuous townhouses, its wrought-iron balconies, it looked something like the Spain that was so much talked of. The air was soft, the sun generous. As a girl from the north, I felt every morning as though I were entering a veil of light. (p 66)
I wanted more of that, more about place, more about light, more about streets and buildings, which isn’t quite to say less of Marceline herself. I do like the idea of self-invention and self-reinvention, telling stories as a way to make sense of things, Marceline saying, of herself at a young age, “already I was learning to retell my life” (p 89). But though I would say I enjoyed this book well enough, it didn’t really resonate with me as much as I thought it might.
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