Briefly, A Delicious Life

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Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. Simultaneously, we watch the stories of George Sand Frederic Chopin and Blanca unfold in a poetic prose that conveys an ever present sense of intimacy. I love how this book gives Blanca the chance to 'live again' and explore further than she has done before. The bucket the Spanish girl had used was still in Cell Three, and whenever I saw it I liked to imagine her and her baby, wherever they were, together and alive and unmolested.

Much more than Stevens’s previous books, her novel makes space for the uncelebrated labour on which creativity depends. The floor stayed cool in hot weather, its cracked tiles plugged with the dead skin of all the monks who had paced them.I was left with the feeling, however, that the novel’s heart ultimately belongs more to art than to love or to history. Where a more interesting and dynamic novel will have highs and lows--some sort of climatic moment, even if it doesn't follow a traditional three-act structure-- here we have a series of plot progressions that are less "progressions" and more "things that happen.

If Bleaker House was about the failure to find a story it is ironic that there is an abundance of narrative here, but for the most part Blanca’s memories and the events in Mallorca are expertly woven through with Sand’s life story. Nell Stevens’s hugely accomplished debut novel evokes a sense both of place and time with a confidence that augurs well for her future career. But the A-flat was running through it now, at first barely noticeable beneath the right hand’s melody, and then louder, increasingly insistent. A magnifying glass, which she held to her face, turning a giant, augmented eye upon the room, owlish and black. As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George’s case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involved an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training).

Having laid out all my issues with A Briefly, A Delicious Life, I think its fundamental lack of dynamic narrative and character arcs stems from the fact that it's a novel based on real historical events. A haunting, dazzling tale of all the good stuff: love, sex, music, literature, death, and what happens after.