nL. Stevens’ two works of nonfiction, bleacher house And Mrs. Gaskell and Me, respectively, are about his efforts to write a novel and a Ph.D. The young writer travels, falls in and out of love, and studies 19th-century writers as he tries to both understand and escape the uncertain present. His own prose is clear and accommodating, clever and witty, capturing the privileged peripatetic grind of the collection’s plethora and the writers’ return. The narrator navigates a path between an obsessive work ethic and a highly developed capacity for distraction, a disdain for the web of heterosexual marriage, and a desire to settle down.
Stevens’ first novel, Briefly, A Delicious Life, develops many of these themes. It focuses on 19th-century artists – the composer Frédéric Chopin and the writer born Amantine-Lucille-Auror Dudevant, later known by that name. George Sand – and this time organized for a trip abroad from Paris to Mallorca in 1838. The group of unconventional tourists includes Sand’s two children, Maurice and Solange, and Emily, a maid who dreams of a home. They live in the cold, damp chambers of the Charterhouse, a monastery once inhabited by a Carthusian order.
In the role of narrator, Stevens is replaced by Ghost. Blanca died in 1473, aged 14, and over three and a half centuries later discovered a deviant potential stuck on the island. “Once I found my way inside a person’s head,” she recounts, “their pasts were there, beneath the slope and tide of emotion on the surface, and I could see it all for myself, as I was translating a language I didn’t know I knew.” Blanca learns that Sand has survived an unpleasant marriage, which ends when she realizes that her husband “hates her because she is not a normal woman”, codes for her preference for trousers. Blanca enters Chopin’s head and is delighted to see the sand with her sensual gaze: “the dark triangle at the corner of her mouth while she was holding a cigar between her teeth”.
Stevens is brilliant at describing desire. “I start to see things differently,” Blanca says of the moment her 13-year-old became self aware of what could now be called libido. “At first unwilling things are transformed. Court.” She begins a relationship with a young novice from Charterhouse, unaware of what will happen to her body and her life. The horrors of the novel’s most influencing story are compounded by the fact that Blanca alone will live with the burden of that history forever.
Hiring an unlikely narrator is one way to overcome the pedantry into which historical fiction can fall. Yet when Blanca describes herself as “neurotic,” it’s jarring, and it’s not clear why she isn’t surrounded by other ghosts. Stevens is not a writer who cares about mechanics and fidelity to the historical account. Instead, she follows the story and what matters to the characters in it. Blanca, a mouthpiece for the novelist’s method, seeks two things inside people’s minds: “the creative experience and the harsh bits”. However, I was left with the feeling that the heart of the novel is ultimately more related to love or history than art. Chopin has an eye only for his perl piano, which is mired in customs; There is a more sensual allegation in Sand’s solitary nighttime writing, “her skin hiss against the page” than her sex with Chopin.
Much more so than Stevens’ previous books, his novel makes room for the unlimited labor upon which creativity depends. For the famed Raindrop Prelude to exist, Chopin had to see himself playing a bad piano in a Mallorcan storm—and Stevens doesn’t overlook the opportunity to make that moment a delicious sight. But she also adds that the composition of the prologue required a goat named Adelaide, brought from the village to milk Chopin, and a domestic maid to feed. The maid’s daily trials with this gloomy beast are more striking than the familiar turmoil and bloody phlegm of the Amelie musician. With skill and insight, the novel follows Sand’s struggle to maintain his children, his romantic affiliations, and his work, and shows that Chopin has never been faced with equally difficult choices. Explain that the gloves that protect the delicate fingers of the musician are made of the child.