Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens
Review by Trahearne Falvey
After Bleaker House, a memoir about trying to write a novel, and Mrs Gaskell and Me, a memoir about trying to write a doctoral thesis, Nell Stevens continues her playful interrogation of the relationships between life, writing and life-writing with an account of the French novelist George Sand’s time in Mallorca with Frederic Chopin. For the first time in Stevens’ books we’re clearly in fiction territory: in the first paragraph, the narrator and real star of the novel, Blanca, declares that she has been ‘in Valldemossa for over three centuries’. Blanca is a furious, hilarious fourteen year old ghost who lives in the former monastery where Sand and Chopin have come to escape the pressures of life in Paris, along with Sand’s children and a maid. Chopin is sick (possibly with tuberculosis, possibly dead, depending on which doctor you ask), Sand is struggling to hold it all together, and the locals aren’t altogether happy with these ‘godless foreign odd consumptive crossdressers' living near them. Chaos unfolds while Blanca watches, falling ever deeper in love with Sand.
Until the appearance of this unconventional family, Blanca spends her centuries enjoying ‘simple pleasures: making people jump, knocking things over, tripping up passersby’. She especially loves playing the mischievous poltergeist with her enemies, including a certain monk whose role in the mystery of her early death becomes clearer as the text unfolds, and as she describes using her limited powers to tip urine on him, hide octopus tentacles behind his shelf, and shout ‘Mary doesn’t like you!’ while he says his prayers, she becomes an ever more endearing and human character. As a narratorial mechanism, meanwhile, she enables Stevens to combine the personal quality of first-person perspective with the reach of omniscience. Blanca can see both past and future but this is not Muriel Spark’s cruel, God-like narrator, and Blanca is no authorial stand-in. Instead, Stevens draws parallels between Blanca and the reader: like any excited adolescent with a juicy novel, she rummages through people’s memories looking for ‘two things: formative experiences and rude bits’. Through Blanca, Stevens reminds us of the pleasures and consolations reading offers, the way we can immerse ourselves for a while in the minds of others, as well as its limitations. While Blanca can ‘turn the page’ on characters’ lives and see their futures, she can’t control them.
Towards the end of the novel, Blanca uses this ability to see everything that will happen to Chopin and Sand after their time in Mallorca, resulting in pages of compressed narration. It is to Stevens’ credit that this is the only moment the balance between novel and biography is off-kilter, when it all seems too much, but even she acknowledges this excessiveness, describing Blanca ‘gorg[ing] on the future in a frenzy’ in a style that evokes the excitement of a researcher getting carried away. 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. Sand emerges as a fascinating figure, a pioneer who fought to carve out space for her creativity and independence.
Since Blanca is both hundreds of years old and fourteen, Stevens’ prose bursts with the beginnings of erotic excitement. ‘I start to see things differently,’ Blanca says of her adolescent awakening, ‘Courgettes.’ She and her mother find the monks in the charterhouse sexy (‘so much muscle and heft and fat and their lovely broad shoulders under their habits’), but this enthusiasm infuses everything. Blanca’s ability to sink into characters’ bodies - taste what they taste, feel what they feel, hear what they hear - means that a novel by a dead, disembodied character is surprisingly sensory, fat on life: it is about first kisses but also the scents of oranges and rotting pomegranates, ‘the sweetness of a stray sugar crystal’ from an apple tart dissolving on a tongue. A moment when Blanca hears Chopin’s piano-playing exemplifies Stevens’ sensual, synesthetic writing:
‘Imagine you are about to bite into an apple. Imagine never having bitten into an apple before. The fruit at your lips is an unknown thing. It might burst like a tomato! Yield like a peach! Snap like a carrot! [...] This is what it was like for me, the first time I heard Chopin play the piano.’
Stevens tempers this excitement with tragedy, and Briefly, A Delicious Life is also about the ways a body can betray a person, especially a woman. Fundamentally, though, it is that rare thing: a literary novel concerned with pleasure — of sex, and eating, and music, and the pleasures of a narrative, of escaping somewhere else, becoming someone else. Although a local jokes about Sand and Chopin coming to Mallorca for the weather when it is mostly miserable during their stay, the novel itself is sun-kissed, steeped in the senses, and in many ways a perfect summer beach read.
Briefly, A Delicious Life is published by Picador, 23rd June 2022