Still Life With Books
By Simon Lane
Bridge Works Publishing, 160 pages, $17.95
`Still Life With Books” is just that, a still life. It contains a story but no plot. It has a subject but no moral. It expresses feelings but no revelation.
From the beginning, there are few secrets. The cards are all laid on the table, and author Simon Lane shuffles them around in brief chapters as if they were part of a magic trick or a tarot reading. The British writer’s second novel may be a slim book with few characters and scant excitement, yet somehow it prevails as a quietly charming and cerebral amusement about love, writing, Paris and more.
The story is this: Aldo and Azadina meet accidentally and have a passionate two-week love affair in Paris in 1981 while Aldo is on break from his American university. Aldo goes back to America and does not return for 10 years; he and Azadina start up again, only to be cut short when Aldo is fatally stung by a wasp hovering around his glass of beer. We learn from Leonard, the narrator and Aldo’s cousin, that when Aldo left for America in 1981, Leonard betrayed him by sleeping with Azadina.
Aldo is “an ectomorph, a thin, unrounded person . . . a man resolutely stuck in the subjunctive . . . that state in which action is always subordinate to intention.” He was orphaned at puberty, and, though we learn a thing or two about his parents to fill in the outlines of his sketch (Argentine father, American mother), he remains vague and mutable. He seems to bring little of his own distinguishable charm to the love affair, save his desire.
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Of Azadina, we know even less. She’s from Egypt; she’s beautiful. Beyond that, “she lived beyond time, in that space reserved for her in the hearts and minds of countless men, young and old, who have seen her, perhaps only briefly, entering and exiting the Metro at Maubert Mutualite or rubbing shoulders in a windswept line leading to `Zorba the Greek.’ ” To further mythologize her, Leonard claims that she has a tail, and that he has seen it: “It was long and thin and dry to the touch, despite its snakelike appearance.”
Leonard-unreliable narrator, “creative writer,” rake, ironist, dilettante, follower of Hinduism-says his own “deformation takes the form of an obliqueness toward life that borders on the existential.” The story of Aldo and Azadina seems to pale for him in light of his real interests: fate, reincarnation, craniology, X-rays, the nature of memory, and Van Gogh (who painted the original “Still Life With Books”).
Aldo and Azadina form the skeleton on which the narrator fleshes out his various conceits and pet peeves, many of which are about writing and reality. The emphasis is almost always deconstructionist, that is to say, questioning the accuracy of language and the validity of storytelling as we know it.
Jorge Luis Borges and Oscar Wilde are engaged as the guiding spirits of “Still Life With Books,” occupying the epigraph page as well as appearing as drunken ghosts who linger around Azadina’s apartment building, “standing in the street, waiting for the hall porter to let them in after an evening together at the Moulin Rouge.”
Invoking the experimental fabulist and the ironic satirist, Lane has written an odd little love story, full of detours that please and edify his readers but leave us wondering just the same-what’s love got to do with it?