A great deal has been said about Beside the Sea. The English translation of Véronique Olmi’s Bord de Mer – translated by Adriana Hunter for Pereine Press, who kindly sent me a review copy – has been received very warmly. And the warmth is quite understandable given the novella’s clear artistic merit. dovegreyreader, the Independent, the Guardian, Reading Matters and Savidge Reads have all enumerated Olmi’s virtues better than I could.
The only significant technical disagreement I have with any of them is in my impression of the translation; I don’t think Hunter’s choice of a rather too thoroughly applied British slang really conveys the feel of idiomatic spoken French. But I am in no place to criticise. My own solution to the same problem inevitably involves defaulting to a sort of generic, vaguely Valley Girlish transatlantic voice, which would have been completely wrong here rather than merely slightly odd. Indeed, I’m not really sure how – or if – this informal and increasingly unglued narrative might have better been conveyed.
Overall, though, I thought that Beside the Sea was both well-written and well-executed (ahem). I believe that the critical praise accorded to it is more than deserved. But I am not going to recommend it. I cannot in good conscience do so, because – rarely for me – I rather wish I could un-read it. I have a strong stomach, and a stronger belief in the value of fiction as a safe, free space to explore difficult or disturbing things. But for some reason, this particular work didn’t open up for me – as it clearly did for other readers – new vistas of experience and empathy; rather, I couldn’t help feeling that the violence at its heart was gratuitous, and ten times worse for being gratuitous.
I am not very sure why this is. The best I can come up with is that the narrative is so self-referential, so little rooted in an external reality or even an internal logic, that the nauseating act of violence in which it culminates is effectively left to stand alone, sufficient of itself. We are not to understand it, merely to watch. We are not even party to the narrator’s deluded logic in carrying it out; she tells us a great deal about herself, but little about her motivations. Of course, this device too has artistic merit; it affected me as it did because it works. When the narrative shows us something horrific and repellent, it’s hardly a criticism to say that I was repelled and horrified. However, for me – and I am not trying to generalise my own reaction into some kind of moral stand – the repulsion and horror were overbearing, and I began to wonder what the aim of this book really is. Is it, as it somehow seems it ought to be, an exploration of a tragic set of circumstances? Does it really expand our understanding of the protagonist’s situation, a real situation which urgently needs to be understood and addressed? Or is the experience of “seeing” something terrible supposed to be the point of it all?
If you do decide to read Beside the Sea and find out for yourself, I have a piece of advice. Do read it in sympathetic company – you’ll be glad of that – but don’t read it on a crowded train. Trying to howl discreetly is very undignified.
Pereine Press, paperback, 120 pp, ISBN: ISBN 978-0-9562840-2-0
Oh lordy, Kirsty, sounds quite challenging. Maybe not one for my upcoming Happy Reads series?…
==:O
Axxx
Definitely not one for your ‘happy’ series, Anne. And not one I have the slightest intention of reading, either.
Life is grim enough already without spending good money to be harrowed.
So glad somebody else feels like I do about this book. I too really wished that I could *un-read* it. I suppose it’s a tribute to the quality of the writing/translation that it has lingered as long as it has, but I still wish I hadn’t read it.
Just read a bit in the Guardian about what this book is about, and I wouldn’t even begin to read it. I find I get a real feeling of queasiness when I walk in to W H Smith’s and see that there is, can’t remember the exact words, but something like a Tragic Lifestory section, i.e., it now seems the norm to make money, in the high street, out of other people’s tragedy and also to encourage people to get some kind of kick out of reading about other people’s horrific lives. I know this is a fiction book, but I don’t have good feelings about an author who can sit down and write a book in which she condemns her two innocent little characters to death by someone in whom they should have total trust. This very scenario has happened just recently – it is not too much to wonder whether the mother had read this book.
Great review! I was very impressed by the novel, but I agree that the violence is partly there for its own sake. My reactions to Beside the Sea have changed a lot, and will continue to change I think – which is possibly a tribute to Olmi’s writing. I wouldn’t recommend the book to any young parents, but being childless I was not as horrified as I would have been otherwise.
I’ve looked at some other reviews to find out more about what happens, which was something quite different than expected. But It’s still one I ought to avoid, because I can clearly see my mother in the book’s mother. It would hit way too close to home.
Kirsty, you’re very brave to read this, and it’s a brave review that you’ve written.
I don’t think I could contemplate reading this – it’s not so much that it might ‘tear my heart apart’, more that I’m sure that it would make me rage and despair.
I can entirely understand why you should wish to ‘un-read’ this novel.
Many thanks for the comments; I’m actually rather relieved to find that other readers have the same feeling I do.
Simon, interesting point you make, but I differ with you somewhat; I don’t have children, but I found this book extremely distressing. I don’t think my non-motherhood spared me anything in that respect; I’m trying to formulate this thought without sounding silly, but obviously I have the memory of being a child myself and that creates an instant and strong bond with the victims simply because they are children. (In fact, this goes for pretty much any sad story involving kids.)
Kirsty, I am very grateful for your review, as I feel very strongly that this is a book which ought to be talked about . My reading of it is of course different (otherwise I wouldn’t have published it), but I understand your point of view and your opinion is extremely valuable in regard to the discussion of this text. Thank you for taking the time reading the book and putting your thoughts into words.
I have to say I’m quite curious about this now. Partly because on Dovegreyreader’s review she mentioned it in the same breath as Lisa Glass’s Prince Rupert’s Teardrop – which was a work that really challenged me due to the sometimes distressing subject matter but that I found incredibly thought-provoking and interesting. I think there is an interesting question about how much you trust the author and the reasons that they are putting you through this experience. With PRT, I know Lisa and so I trusted her and kept going. I am glad I did as I realised what the book was saying and how complex it is and – more than that…I FELT what the book was saying. If you like. Which is very powerful. Of course that is a book that holds multiple interpretations and I am very attached to my own and it’s interesting how others can read it so differently.
It seems like with this book you didn’t know what the book was trying to do. But I wonder – reading this – if our expectations of how harrowing events should be portrayed is fair or true. We want them explained and we want “insight” and yet recently I’ve been wondering if this can ever really be achieved and whether our hankering for that is – in itself – a false comfort sometimes. I don’t know.
Because I’ve been thinking about a few of these issues recently I would be interested to read this and see if I also felt the same as you do or not.
Very interesting review and set of issues. To which I don’t know any of the answers!
Ok, well, I have finally read this book and thought I should come back and comment (as I so often talk about reading some of the reviewed books here and that I will come back with thoughts – but so rarely manage to get round to it!)
I thought this was a beautifully written, strangely quiet and strangely moving book. It is nothing like mislit and – for me – there is nothing gratuitous about it. There is no dwelling on lurid details – you are certainly not invited to get “a kick” on other people’s misery. Rather, for me, this is a very humane and genuine attempt to give a portrait of a very disordered mind of an individual that – as a society – we would normally make little attempt to understand.
I understand what Kirsty means about lack of context and motivation, but again, for me, I felt this was deliberate. The feeling I was left with about the main character was an appaling sense of dislocation and isolation. And that forms the tragedy. Every now and again we get glimpses into how others might see her and how she might seem from the outside and we know she needs help. But what I think the author is trying to do is show us an inner world of someone so extremely cut off from the outside world, whose thinking is so disconnected and disorderered and who is paranoid and full of fear about a “hostile” outside world that – paradoxically – could probably, if turned to, save both her and her children. The character is obviously suffering from severe mental illness, with the occasional reference to treatments and psychiatrists. But the fact that the author does not fully provide this context – in my view – again is deliberate. We can’t just shove this person in a box, a category and push it away from us to view from a safe remove. We are immersed in her world, her mind.
There are so many powerful and thoughtful themes in this novel but this central idea about the distrust of the outside world and other people must be one. We live in a society now where we know most murders take place in the home, and yet we paralyse ourselves with fear about the evil stranger, paralyse ourselves with fear about remote risks whilst ignoring much greater ones right under our nose. The idea of fear is one I can very much relate to also. Her fear is dreadful and part of what makes life and reaching out to other people so impossible for her. And the fact that (in her terribly muddled and paranoid thinking) she wishes to protect her children from both the outside world and fear itself…The extreme fear of the main character struck me very forcefully.
This is a beautiful and poetic book, and – for me – it’s literature really. It is quiet and not full of thrills and spills.
Some of the comments seem to imply we shouldn’t be exploring such harrowing themes in our literature (Kirsty, herself, doesn’t imply this at all in her review, I should add). In which case many of our greatest works wouldn’t exist. (If the author of this book is questionable for allowing characters to die – what on earth is Blake – a literary mass murderer? To suggest that somehow this is reprehensible of the writer makes no sense to me at all and seems like a great misunderstanding of what stories are about. And obviously, in this context, Medea comes to mind – in my mind a great masterpiece, although for many a difficult play). Literature is there to help us think – to ask questions and not always to give pat answers. This book does this, in my mind.
Lastly, what impressed me about this book is its humanity. The main character might be a difficult one to understand and to love, and yet I did feel for her. The children are both superbly drawn – both proper characters in their own right and we occasionally stop and see how they are struggling to care for each other and struggling to negotiate the outside world and that of their mother at the same time. (Things like when she tries to take them to a funfair as a treat and it turns out it is the middle of the night when no other children are there and there are noone but dodgy types and sexually charged teenagers (again viewed with suspicion and distrust by the main character). This depiction of a character trying – and failing – to do “fun” with her children despite the appaling mental state she is in is so very very sad.)
Children are rarely so well-drawn in literature and Hardy and Blake could both sit up and take notice from this depiction. (Err, if they were alive!)
This, of course, makes this book all the more upsetting – because we care about them. But that we care about them is surely right.
For me, this book isn’t flawless (what is?) but it is a genuine work of literature and has immense power. It is a true and genuine exploration of a state of mind and that makes it very sad reading, but I do not share Kirsty’s wish to have “unread” it by any means. It is still pulling at me mentally and emotionally even after having read it.
I think it is a very good book.