British author Jennie Rooney, who studied history at Cambridge, was first inspired to write this story of spies within Britain’s top secret atomic research labs when she read a newspaper article in 1999 about Melita Norwood, age eighty-seven, who was revealed to have been the “most important and longest-serving Soviet spy of the Cold War era.” After her unmasking, Ms. Norwood’s interview with the press and her appearance on television, in which she was “rather economical with the truth, and not hugely remorseful,” according to Rooney, energized Rooney to investigate further. At the same time she began to imagine the circumstances under which a seemingly innocuous worker for several British labs doing atomic research could have willingly passed documents and research notes to Russia for use in their own frantic race to develop nuclear weapons – all this without coming to the attention of MI5, the British Security Service until fifty years later. Just as importantly, Rooney also wanted to understand why and how Norwood – or anyone else, for that matter – could betray her own country and be able to live with herself, quietly and comfortably, in the very country whose secrets she had so treacherously revealed.
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Published in Spain in 1999 and just translated into English for the first time by renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa, Paris plumbs the depths of emotions, memories, and thoughts of the main character – as a schoolboy at the beginning and as an adult in the conclusion, twenty-two years later – as he tries to understand and reconcile serious issues about his father and mother, nearly all of which his mother keeps secret from him. The boy and his mother share an intensely interdependent life since his father is absent for most of the novel, and though the boy accepts the little his mother does say about his father, he also explores on his own and discovers nuggets of additional information about his father which make him question everything he already “knows.” When, later in the novel, circumstances arise which his mother could never have predicted, he begins to question her whole story and all its mysteries. Though some of the mysteries of the novel remain mysteries even in the conclusion, there is one revelation, so tucked away that anyone who skims the final pages will miss it, which changes every aspect of the main character’s life.
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In this truly unique novel, so surprising and so exhilarating that I read it twice during the past week, I came to know, in a very real way, an author whose currently unwritten new novels I can hardly wait to discover in the future. Valeria Luiselli, a debut novelist, left me stunned the first time I read this novel, though I was excited by her daring approach to writing and awe-struck at her ingenuous and totally honest inclusion of herself, for better and worse, in all phases of the narrative. By the time I had read it a second time, I was even more impressed by her ability to jump around and make herself at home within three different time periods while telling multiple, somewhat connected stories from four different points of view – that of her contemporary self, of her earlier self before her marriage, of her architect husband, and of Gilberto Owen, a virtually unknown Mexican author-poet from the late 1920s whose work the unnamed main character is trying to have published. None of these points of view are static, and the author sometimes merges characters and the details of their lives as she plays with reality and imagination, which she sees as both an outgrowth of reality and as an influence on reality. Fact and fiction become charmingly and often humorously combined in this novel about all aspects of the writing process as the author recreates herself both within her characters and within her own life. It is an amazing journey for the reader.
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Though I have read and reviewed both My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name (with the new Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay scheduled for release in early September), it is this novel by Elena Ferrante which remains my favorite, and for that reason I am reposting a review which I posted on another site in January, 2007. Ferrante impressed me then for her concentration on real life and for her insights into the relationships of mothers and daughters. I was impressed, too, by her ability to compress – to use images and scenes which subtly revealed far more than would be obvious on the surface. Troubling Love, an intense psychological novel, translated into English and published in the US for the first time in 2006 , tells of a daughter’s efforts to understand her mother following her mother’s death. Delia, a comic strip artist and the oldest of three daughters, receives three strange phone calls from her mother, just before her mother disappears on her way from Naples to Rome to visit Delia. When the body of Amalia, Delia’s mother, is ultimately discovered floating near a beach, she is nude, except for one piece of underwear, an elegant designer creation completely different from anything Delia has ever seen her wear.
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The sardonic comment at the end of the opening quotation says all that needs to be said in establishing the tone of Voorspoed, a small rural “dorp” in the center of South Africa in 1994, which is the setting of this novel. A whole new way of life has just begun for the residents, both black and white, since white rule has just been abolished with the election of Nelson Mandela as the new President of the country. The long conflict between the British and the Boers, both of which sought dominion over the blacks generations ago, have been officially resolved for years, but eighty percent of the country’s residents, its blacks, are still poor and still have little to say as far as the government is concerned. In this novel from 1994, the tensions and the uncertainty are palpable, but they run in the background of the novel and only rarely intrude directly on the action. Newly translated into English by Iris Gouws and author Ingrid Winterbach, The Elusive Moth captures a unique period in a small rural community in which no one can be quite sure who is really in charge. Whoever thought he was in charge, especially among the police, made sure that everyone else knew it, whether or not it was true. Like her two later novels available in English, To Hell with Cronje, and The Book of Happenstance, this novel deals with clear themes of life, love, and death, analyzed on a grand scale and shown in an equally grand evolutionary context.
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