Briefly, A Delicious Life

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That morning, I had gone into the garden to try my hand at swatting fruit from the branches of one of the taller trees, and after that to sneak up on the starlings and howl, which would send them into the air together like a single giant bird. 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. He told her not to give him bread, and I noticed that whenever he had any, he was overcome with pains and gas.

Though Blanca is attracted to George partly because of the way she dresses, she is still appalled when George goes into the village in a suit. Blanca has had centuries to learn to rebel against those limitations; Sand assails them on a daily basis. And there are so many novels that have done an incredible job retelling historical figures' stories, Little by Edward Carey being a chief example. It's not that there's nothing redeemable about Briefly, A Delicious Life, but rather that it never does anything with its redeemable parts.

The basic problem of this novel as far as I've been able to narrow it down is that its narrative never feels like it's moving towards anything in particular; it just flits from scene to scene, from character to character. She mixes historical fact with the fantastical in her account of Chopin and George Sand arriving at a Mallorca monastery in 1838, only to be met by Blanca, the centuries-old ghost of a teenage girl who died cruelly young, who makes Sand confront truths about gender and sexuality that she might have preferred to ignore. The children and servant looked astonished to find themselves there—kept looking around at the walls and ceiling, at their feet on the floor—as though this was as unexpected by them as it was by me. It is as though I am watching my soul, she thinks, walking around in clothes and boots, outside of my body.

They were routinely ripped off by the locals, The Charterhouse was damp, and the climate hideously cold and stormy. Which, when you think about it, is one way of describing love: recognizing where another's loveliness resides. This delivers what I hoped Lauren Groff's 'Matrix' was going to last year; it does what 'The Flames' by Sophie Haydock failed to do earlier this year; it does what 'The Language of Food' by Annabel Abbs did last autumn, only better, and more gorgeously; more 'deliciously'. A stomach-dropping, blood-fizzing, breath-stopping, knotted lurch-and-swoop that I recognized, by then, as the first faltering step towards falling in love. She placed the glass on the floor beside her left foot, as though that was where she intended to keep it, but as soon as she did so the little girl leapt forwards and carried it off to examine dust in a crevice by the window.

Stevens imagines that the monastery where they stay is still haunted by Blanca, a teenager who died in childbirth (having been impregnated by one of the trainee monks) there in 1473.

In 1838, author George Sand travels to an abandoned monastery in Mallorca to spend the winter there with her children and her lover, the musician Frédéric Chopin. To put it more plainly, then: this book feels like it has no narrative arc, nothing you can point to and say "that was a real turning point in the novel" or "that was an important moment in the plot's trajectory. He pointed at the portraits of the Madonna that lined the walls of the Charterhouse corridors: canvas after canvas of broad, white foreheads, beatific smiles, occasional exposed breasts proffered to babies with the faces of old men. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. Blanca’s outspoken, feisty, and her language rather breathily, disconcertingly modern, I liked the concept behind her creation, but I was far less certain about its execution.Briefly, A Delicious Life is a novel that should, by all accounts, be good; it has so much potential.