Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys, 1966

I’m not completely sure what I think of this novel. It didn’t grab my interest particularly, although I’m interested in the themes around colonialist influence on England and English literature and I can enjoy a novel that explores grand passions. But the storytelling here is a bit abstracted, leaving a lot to be inferred. And the shifting narrators – it sometimes takes pages to identify who is telling the story – further distances the reader.

The novel explores the way racism and colonialism destroy the possibilities of a loving relationship between the Caribbean heiress Antoinette Cosway and the English landowner Edward Rochester. Both seem to have lost the money that supports them: Antoinette’s family lost its wealth when slavery was abolished in the British Empire; Rochester’s English estate is agricultural and his family has not caught on to the industrial revolution. Antoinette’s mother marries the wealthy Mason, who arranges her marriage to Rochester with presumably a rich dowry. Antoinette initially refuses Rochester, but comes to love him after he reveals his vulnerability. He hates the colonial isles and their history, but comes to accept Antoinette’s beauty and spirit and wants to resettle her in England. Rochester’s mistrust of islanders and his inherent racism lead him to jealous resentment when Antoinette’s mixed-race half-brother tries to undermine her. In her frustration at his growing coldness, she turns to rum and magic potions. This goes badly and leads to violence. Eventually Rochester convinces Antoinette to come to his estate in England. She hates the unfamiliar land and the cold, and he has her confined to an attic suite. And this is where Antoinette becomes Rochester’s mad wife Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

The somewhat disjointed narrative reflects the disorientation that Antoinette and Rochester feel. They are pulled by emotional, social and economic forces that they can’t withstand or even recognize. Antoinette loves the sensuous richness of the islands, but the racist and colonial tensions isolate her from the divided island communities, except for a few long-time Black family servants. In the end she has no one except the husband who has been poisoned against her. Rochester is drawn to the beauty of the Jamaican country, but fearful of the forest he doesn’t know and people he doesn’t trust. He thinks the England he knows will be a refuge, but his wife cannot live there and becomes increasingly delusional. This makes sense of the book’s title, which I didn’t entirely understand until I looked it up. The Sargasso sea is a patch of the Atlantic between the Caribbean and Britain that forms a gyre driven by four Atlantic currents. It’s actually clear and productive, but has a reputation for tying ships up in pools of seaweed. Like the Sargasso Sea, Antoinette and Rochester are pushed in different directions by forces beyond them, which pull them under and drown them.

Rhys doesn’t fill in the details of these stories. Instead, she leaves it to the reader to imagine the confusion, misunderstanding and resentment that Antoinette and Rochester feel, in spite of a love that seems to develop between them. But the love is short-lived when Rochester feels uncomfortable in Antoinette’s Jamaican household, especially when dealing with black servants whom he does not trust. His isolation and discomfort make him easy to manipulate by Antoinette’s half-brother. Her intimacy with her black servants, her love of the tropical forest that he finds foreign, and her inability to meet the English social customs that he knows play into his mistrust. His English reserve increasingly turns into a cold distance, which she does not understand. When she turns to her black servant Christophine for extra-normal help, he thinks she is trying to poison him. And it’s not entirely clear whether Christophine is trying to help or hinder their relationship.

Because so much of the novel is left to inference and interpretation, I found that I did not feel for the characters and their evident tragedy. Perhaps I’m just not drawn to the plight of the slave-owning colonists and their inability to find emotional satisfaction. I may be more sympathetic to the fires that the Jamaicans set to Antoinette’s family home and to the one she later sets to Rochester’s home.

Vienna

by Eva Menasse, 2004

I liked Menasse’s Darkenbloom earlier this year, but I was less taken by this novel. The characters in Vienna seemed less vivid, less dramatic and they don’t come together to form a compelling story.

My sense at first was that the story wasn’t coming together because there were too many characters and no clear focus. But Darkenbloom also dealt with a wide variety of characters – a whole village rather than a family – meandered through their stories and ended in an inconclusive note. However, Darkenbloom had an underlying mystery, and the stories all bring some light to the mystery. It also had a sardonic tone from the narrator which added another layer of interest to the novel.

Vienna, in my reading, has none of these. The characters are mostly dull, they exist in a static society, and the narrator has a flatter tone. The characters make up a complex family dynamic, but there’s nothing especially interesting in the staid middle-class family.

Objectively, some of the characters should be more interesting. Father’s curious trading business, Uncle Ferdinand’s criminal enterprises, Aunt Gustl’s eccentricities could be elements in a colourful family epic. The way the Jewish side of the family survived the Nazi regime by using its ambiguous German relations is an intriguing line, although an undeveloped one. Their later lives in a marginal country on the edge of the Soviet sphere has an interest, but not much of a story. The family tells its stories from the past, but they are tired anecdotes and even the family finds their retelling a bore.

When Father returns to England where he spent the war, he seems to want to connect to his memories, but at the same time treats them as practically insignificant. And when the narrator’s brother causes a sensation by exposing the Nazi past of a national football star, the family – and the country – react by questioning the value of the story. Some members of the family question whether their Jewish past is even relevant in modern Austria.

Is this the point of Menasse’s novel? She seems to be saying that families have plenty of stories that they tell and argue about because they define the family members’ roles to each other and to the broader society, but the stories are a bit boring to outsiders. The narrator tries to bring the family together over its shared histories, but the final family meeting breaks into a fight as different factions within the family identify with different religious and national identities, stories, legends, what-ifs, with no solution, no way out. In the end, the narrator says, everyone talks with circumspection to avoid upsetting anyone else, and the younger generation finds it all irrelevant. This is probably the way with most families, especially large families with diverse branches.

And perhaps this is a metaphor for Austria, a small not-very-important country that has been part of some key histories, with branches and ties into other countries. But to avoid upsetting its more powerful neighbours, it deliberately downplays both its left- and right-wing political factions, its religious and cultural divisions, and strives to present a bland picture of itself.

This may all be an insightful presentation of a contemporary Austrian identity, but I don’t find that it makes a compelling story.

Darkenbloom

by Eva Menasse, 2024

From the first paragraph, Eva Menasse presents a foreboding picture of a tangled, overgrown garden, hiding corruption and secrets, with shadows peering out of darkened windows. She describes it with wry irony and sharp wit. It’s an excellent introduction to her dark and tangled story.

The storyline jumps from place to place and from time to time, with multiple layers and multiple points of view. In spite of the helpful table of characters, a reader has to pay attention to keep track of how the characters fit into each others’ lives, although that gradually becomes clear as the novel progresses.

It tells the story of the town and many of its residents. A town on the periphery of the second world war and on the border with Hungary (which Darkenbloomers choose to call “Over There”), it’s become a backwater village from which young people leave and return only for family obligations. Some residents want modern economic development like centralized water works, but they are held back by those fearing what it might dig up. A winemaker moves forward with crafted quality wines, while his parents cling to their old customers who have ordered the same wine for decades because it is cheap. Characteristically, the acting mayor seeks guidance from his mentor who is lying comatose in a hospital in Vienna.

In many ways, the novel reminded me of Middlemarch, where George Eliot uses the residents of a small town to represent a changing wider world, both describing the action and commenting on it with a clever wit. But where Eliot comments on the scene with warmth, Menasse uses a dark tone to describe a far nastier scene. She visits many of the households in the town and notes the silences and deceptions that have deformed the relationships between people and within families. They all have secret resentments and histories that go back to childhood, or to past generations. To them, the danger is the contemporary characters who threaten to break through the façade that covers up the stories people don’t want to know. When a body is found in a field, the sense among the locals that “you don’t want to get involved in anything, not after all we’ve lived through, on the border.” Being on the border, keeping outsiders away and protecting themselves from danger, is at centre of their psyche.

The townspeople don’t know the whole truth (they don’t want to) and describe the unpleasant stories from the past as “rumour.” But the travel agent (naturally, the one who crosses borders) who is putting together a town history, finds the stories don’t line up. People leave out details that might put them in the wrong place, and say it wasn’t as bad as the rumours claim. The bad things were the fault of a few Nazi thugs – who sanitized their history and ran the town with the support of the Russian army after it overran their feeble defenses. When one former Nazi leader candidly describes his story, the locals say that you can’t take the old guy seriously. Some surviving victims of the violence don’t want to live with the pain that the past brings up.

The story takes some curious turns and ends on a lighter tone, when the old Nazi youth welcome refugees from Eastern Europe, perhaps as a joke against the modern state. When more of the story comes out, it feels like a weight has been removed, But the novel ends on an ambiguous note – an old farmer enters a church expecting quiet meditation, but little devilish voices around the Messiah chirp away saying this is not the end of the story.

This was a totally engrossing story, leaving me trying to understand the various characters and their perspectives on the town and its history. It examines a dark, painful history, but Menasse’s sharp commentary keeps it from feeling heavy, and the imperfect attempts of several characters to find the truth allow some light to break through. Menasse seems to be calling on Austria to stop hiding from its history and face up the need to repair the damage it has inflicted on contemporary society. Although drawn in a particular place, this lesson applies to many countries, including here in Canada with our colonialist past.