FICTION
Rich canvas
PRIYA KRISHNAN
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Evocative and lucid, the novel is let down by its weighty concerns.
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The Seine at Noon, Susan Viswanathan, IndiaInk, Rs. 275
This is a visually rich novella. With a title reminiscent of an impressionist canvas, Viswanathan paints Paris and its very ordinary denizens. Lucid prose and evocative images are her primary colours, which she uses with brushstrokes of empathy and c
ompassion.
Sensitive touch
She captures the subtle moods, intense moments and the fragility and promise of relationships.
Her characters are everyday men and women, whose footfalls we hear through the turmoil of daily existence, in a city that’s as much a home of the anonymous “others” as it is of the well heeled.
The immigrant, Stefan, is a crippled Jew from Kerala, racked by guilt for abdicating filial duties. His parents’ ghosts haunt him relentlessly. “…Their fear gorging on his bland consciousness…accompanied him everywhere, continuing their daily tasks as if they had aged as Nature intended rather than died prematurely in a ditch.” Jacques is a native, the poor son of a rich lady, estranged from his wife, sharing a distant yet affectionate bond with daughter, Bianca. He lives in a boat on the Seine as “an Orpheus of the Underground”. Their friendship seems to defy the intolerance towards the “other”, at a time in French society when people are required to blend in.
As their unlikely yet poignant friendship unfolds, you are privy to remembrances and angst, the nuances and very real moments in the Stefan-Sheba (Esther) marriage. And you watch happiness and love get defined and redefined through life.
Central character
Paris bridges the divide of their geographies and unites them in their struggles. In the process, the city becomes a pivotal character. It gets the attention it deserves but too much of it. Viswanathan is clearly besotted. There are very few unflattering references to the city — its disdain for underachievers — but a profusion of lush images and an overdose of similes in praise. While these imbue the novel with a picturesque quality, they frequently distract from narrative cadence.
Since many big themes spin off from the relationships — fear, poverty, death, identity, alienation, acceptance and hope — the novella has a lot to handle. I had to make leaps of imagination. Whether it’s Stefan and Jacques as “fathers”, sitting on the beach at Tengapalli, Kerala, Bianca’s inheritance of Esther’s home there or the tsunami. The action then shifts to the U.S. as Bianca moves across the Atlantic. This facilitates a tongue-in-cheek look at academia, a critique of U.S. hegemony: “Often drawn into other people’s wars, they split the world into ‘For Us and Against Us’. War was an eagle swooping with its talons.” Deftly crafted words but the situations are rather contrived. The need to say so much alters the pace of the novella, which acquires a visibly hurried tone from page 90 on. A pressing need to draw things to a close?
About The Visiting Moon, her other novel, she says, it “looks at the existential vacuum in which many of us are forced to live …in the daily shuddering of the cosmos people find small spaces of fulfilment and identity &#
8212; friendship is perhaps the most complex of these spaces”. The Seine at Noon, an intermittently elegant novella, traverses the space of friendship convincingly but is weighed down by its weighty concerns.
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