The Lover

I picked this up because Maggie Nelson mentions it in Bluets and this was sitting right on the coffee table within reach when I finished the other book. I started off enjoying it but then it began to falter and by the end of it I was well sick of the story and the writing both. Jean Rhys deals with similar themes (socially unacceptable sex, colonies in the tropics, madness, etc.) much better in Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark, and Maidenhead is a contemporary Canadian take on the topic. Set up against those two this book doesn‰ЫЄt stand a chance.

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“Her apartment was the huge top floor of a block overlooking the Seine. People went to dinner there in the winter. Or to lunch in the summer. The meals were ordered from the best caterers in Paris. Always passable, almost. But only just enough, skimpy. She was never seen anywhere else but at home, never out. Sometimes there was an expert on Mallarme there. And often one, two, or three literary people, they'd come once and never be seen again. I never found out where she got them from, where she met them, or why she invited them. I never heard anyone else refer to any one of them, and I never read or heard of their work. The meals didn't last very long. We talked a lot about the war .... Marie-Claude Carpenter used to listen a lot, ask a lot of questions, but didn't say much, often used to express surprise at how little she knew of what went on, then she'd laugh. Straightway after the meal she'd apologize for having to leave so soon, but she had things to do, she said. She never said what. When there were enough of us we'd stay on for an hour or two after she left. She used to say, Stay as long as you like. No one spoke about her when she wasn't there. I don't think anyone could have, because no one knew her. You always went home with the feeling of having experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spend a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers too, of having lived through a space of time without any consequences and without any cause, human or other. It was like having crossed a third frontier, having been on a train, having waited in doctors' waiting rooms, hotels, airports.”