Poetry brings life to prose

CURT LEVIANT

I read The Gift (Northwest University Press, 2012), a profound and moving novel, three times. First, to get the feel of it; second, to immerse myself in its psychological depths; and third, to read it with pen in hand.

This fictional first-person narrative by Florence Noiville, author of the marvelous Isaac B. Singer: A Life, recounts the relationship between a sensitive daughter and her talented, bipolar mother. When suffering from acute depression, the mother is vulnerable and often hospitalized “for months on end.” However, during other periods, including manic episodes, she works as a pharmacist, meticulous homemaker and botanically sophisticated gardener in a village in France. In either state, the daughter is caught in the web of a strong-willed woman who is dosed with many medications, most of them available in her own pharmacy.

Why is this novel called The Gift? At the beginning, the unnamed narrator is summoned, along with her sister, to the family lawyer’s office and, in the presence of her parents, is read the legal document that gives the two sisters the family estate as a future inheritance: “a huge house with a tower, ground, a poplar grove, horses....”

A day later, at the train station on her way back to Paris, the narrator has the idea of writing a letter to her parents, a thought that releases a flow of memories that begins with her childhood, not unlike the remembrance of things past that engulfs Proust when he tastes the famous Madeleines.

The gift, however, may be two-edged. There is another, darker face to this legacy, for depression seems to be part of her maternal line. The inheritance is not only a house and land but also a multi-generational emotional bacillus. The narrator’s mother reveals that psychological problems run in the family.

As we shall see, more generations in this story carry this invisible but palpable burden. The narrator shares the stresses of her young life. At age 11, for example, she changed her first name (indicating a change of personality, direction and responsibility) and no longer answered to her given name. She says, “I wanted to go into exile from myself. As far away as possible from the hateful ‘real me.’” The new name gains acceptance, says the narrator. “I had succeeded in sneaking away from myself.”

In another chapter, the narrator takes her young daughter who is experiencing a phobia to an analyst. When the mother questions her about what she’s experiencing, the girl coolly says, “I can’t tell you.” The narrator continues: “Her voice was assured, her words detached. Every little silence was like a mountain crevasse, a fault that had to be jumped over with concentration to avoid falling into the seemingly bottomless icy hole.”

Although the word gift is only used in the English version (the title of the French original is La Donation), it’s hard not to associate that word with the German homonym, gift, which means, poison. Here, an insidious heritage has been transmitted.

In Noiville’s novel, scenes are presented in short, potent chapters in poetic prose that demonstrates the author’s ability to slice reality into tiny segments from various angles. Her perspicacious observations enrich the novel and breathe life and multi-dimensionality into her characters.

On the face of it, The Gift, superbly translated by Catherine Temerson, is a simple story of the relationship between daughter and her problematic mother and how the two come to terms with each other. Simple becomes complex, however, with nuanced depictions of temperament and delicately described feelings that enhances the portraits of both women. From the first page of The Gift to its last astonishing line, this novel is a work of compressed poetry.

Curt Leviant’s most recent fiction is the recently published short story collection Zix Zexy Ztories.

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