Marie Susini: Je m'appelle Anna Livia (1979)

Marie Susini (1916-93) is a surprisingly little known writer. She was born in Corsica, a place that had a very profound impact on her, although most of her life was spent in mainland France. Jean Daniel (1920-2020) of the Nouvel Observateur was a very important man in her life.

Je m'appelle Anna Livia isn't easy to understand: the time sequence is very scewed, personal pronouns are frequently used in place of actual names, the first person mixes with the third (especially with Anna Livia), but perhaps most of all the language is often just not quite within the grasp of comprehension: as I've mentioned before, I'm reminded of E. M. Forster's comment in Arbinger Harvest of Virginia Woolf's writing seen as a pen lodged in a coat lining: 'So near, and yet so far!'

The first sentence is 'Ainsi.', suggesting that the reader has missed what hadn't gone before: 'Thus'?, 'In this way'?, 'So'?, etc. The first paragraph, as I translate it, reads: 'So it was always there. It was there before it existed. As if drifting towards the surface of a black dream. Even before she could think. One day perhaps.' The back cover suggests a Greek tragedy, and this beginning seems to back that up: everything has been set up, there's an inevitability written into the text.

Gradually, the reader pieces together the characters and the elements in their story, which I briefly mention here in chronological order. The setting, the back cover suggests, is in Italy, although Corsica could also fit into this dreamy, anguished, timeless novel. A young girl from a modest but large family is chosen by a moderately more wealthy man at the age of 16, the bride price is paid and they live together for a short time until the wife leaves the family, leaving a small child behind. This is Anna Livia, who will live on her father's farm and mix with his employees Josefino, his wife Madelena and their son Francesco, who is the same age as Anna but will die at an early age. At 16 Anna Livia has sex with her father, and such an act seems so unstoppable that she first draws the curtains and undresses for him. He later hangs himself and her mother Elizabeta visits her as a ghost.

The fourteen cypress trees close to the horizon are almost characters in the novel, and are constantly counted by Anna and Francesco, and they often fail to reach the same number, which recalls Anna's grandmother counting her children as they sleep. Cypress trees can represent death. Here, Anna and Francesco see the trees frequently merge into a haze, wonder what lies beyond, and envisage a timeless future, the unknowable, the oneness of it all.