By Merle Rubin
Why
should two novelists, both born in the 1950s, choose to explore the
shattered world of wartime Europe? "Ania Malina" is the first novel of
a young English writer; "Dara" (winner of the Academic Francaise's 1985
Grand Prix du Roman) is the ninth novel of a prolific French writer.
Each is intent on understanding the relationship between the past and
the present and on finding ways to express the contradictory, but
equally "real" realities of war and peace, love and hate, dislocation
and restoration. Each novel focuses on a woman with a mysterious past
who seems to symbolize or embody the unknown. Ania Malina is a Polish
teen-ager, unofficially "adopted" by a young British soldier who is her
lover and protector. Dara is a Yugoslavian refugee who works as a
seamstress in Paris but whose past no one seems to comprehend
completely.
In both novels, as feminist critics may note, we find the standard
"male" practice of writing about women as objects--not just sex
objects, but objects of knowledge, to be investigated, explored, and
understood. Yet much can be learned from such explorations, even if
what is finally learned is the impossibility of truly "mastering" any
body of knowledge.
"Ania Malina" is a hypnotic, beautifully
written, painterly book that broods on themes from Nabokov (obsession
with a "nymphet") and Thomas Mann (the links between eros and thanatos;
the aesthetic appeal of illness). The story begins in a French field
hospital in 1944, when Jamie Lovecraft, a sensitive young British
soldier recovering from an injury, becomes fascinated by a fellow
patient, a blond girl who reminds him of his younger sister. When the
mysterious Dr. Kessler considers them well enough to be discharged,
Jamie and Ania begin the nomadic odyssey that takes them from
ever-cheaper Paris hotels to the Italian lakes and finally to a Polish
sanatorium.
For most of the book, we see Ania through Jamie's
eyes: She seems passive, unfathomable, like a painting or puzzle that
he tries to unravel. She is first seen as the victim of an air raid,
then as the victim of a lingering malady--and, in some sense, a victim
of Jamie and the doctor, who "define" her as an invalid--later as the
all but immobilized, bandaged victim of the doctor's medical/erotic
interest, and finally, as the victim of something she knows. And yet,
her knowledge of a horrifying wartime experience proves she is not
merely the passive creature she appears to be. Ania is not merely a
pretty girl, poring over the glossy magazines Jamie brings her, trying
to emulate models and movie stars. Beneath the surface are depths that
Jamie suspects but never really sees, depths of memory and imagination
that doom this frail girl, whose nickname "Ania Malina" means pineapple
raspberry, to a knowledge that is more than she can bear. All is
revealed at the novel's conclusion, a tour de force in which horror is
transformed into art, and art enables us to better comprehend horror.
If "Ania Malina" is a novel about universals--war and peace, love and
death--"Dara" is filled with a zest for the particular, with the flavor
and tang of the specific circumstance. If Lawrence Osborne aims (and
largely succeeds) to be spellbinding, Patrick Besson has set out to
surprise, charm and slightly shock.
