Paris: Home and Away

Susan Visvanathan’s new novel offers a skilful uncovering of loneliness, says Mitali Saran

The Seine at Noon Susan Visvanathan Roli 133 pp; Rs 275

Short novels, if they’re good, are rarely easy. It takes barely a couple of hours to read The Seine at Noon, Susan Visvanathan’s new novel, but the gentle, disquieting aftershocks of that reading continue for much longer. Like many other short novels, it’s the sort of book that rewards a second reading. Visvanathan chronicles the friendship between Stefan, an immigrant Keralite Jew, and Jacques, an unemployed aristocratic Frenchman in Paris. Stefan’s wife Esther, and Jacques’s wife Tatiana remain peripherally drawn characters, one an alluring social butterfly, the other an artist who leaves her husband to worship Dali in the streets of Montmartre. Both women drive the narrative through their impact on their husbands, whose love for their wives is of the undying sort.

One day Stefan, owner of a curio shop, is limping along on his crutches through the streets of Paris, and encounters Jacques who inhabits a boat anchored on the Seine. Stefan has just annoyed his tempestuous wife and Jacques is, as always, by himself, trying to quell the restlessness left by the loss of his wife. The friendship between the men, in a sense, anchors them more than their respective marriages. The narrative spans three quarters of a lifetime, from the day the men meet by accident, to well into their senescence, and the death of one. It ends with the story of Bianca, Jacques and Tatiana’s daughter, whose life closes a strange loop of coincidence.

One of the strengths of The Seine at Noon is its utter disinterest in suspenseful plot points. Major events are given away on the jacket, which should be an indication to the confused reader who resents a spoiler that this book is interested in something else. That something else is the layered and nuanced heart of identity: what makes an Indian Jew a Parisian? What makes a Parisian move to Kerala? What makes Paris, Paris? What are the anchors of identity? Visvanathan writes, “The heart of Paris was like a cabbage and... layered in such a way that each fold protected that inner space. Like a cabbage or a rose it floated in the concreteness of history and lived out its moment in the scurry of feet, never accounting for the intensity of the life that went along with it. It opened and closed itself to those who went past according to its delicate filigree sense of memory and time and longing… there was no sense to be made of it.”

That applies just as well to the characters. Stefan revels in the anonymity of Paris, but is haunted by the memory of his parents whose lives were snuffed out in the war. Jacques, the wild-card in his family, is cared for only by his daughter Bianca. There is Bianca herself, a companion to the old ‘fathers’ but excluded from their deep and peculiar bonding. She inherits Esther’s family home in Kerala, and is finally bride to a Keralite man. The novel drifts between the intense relationships that define each life, and the isolation in which each is ultimately immured. That drift is played out by a narrative which implacably consumes lives within a sentence, swallows lifetimes within a chapter, and shifts viewpoint with a fluidity that makes nonsense of traditional notions of identity.

Visvanathan’s stark, intelligent prose is of a piece with her themes of isolation and anonymity in the midst of bustling life and constant contact with people. Her writing sticks to ideas rather than adjectives, but it is also studded with lyrical expressions of those ideas, such as a woman who feels like a flute without apertures, unable to make music. The Seine at Noon is a captivating novel; it creates an intriguing sense of unease that demands further exploration and thought. Read it for its strangeness, its uncompromising intelligence, and its unique voice.