Reader’s Diary: Catherine Texier’s ‘Russian Lessons’
It’s so hard to read a friend’s book without prejudice.
It’s so hard to read a friend’s book without prejudice. Some might ask, “Why try?” True enough: there’s no objectivity in reading anyway, but the pleasure of reading a friend’s book is not necessarily the pleasure of reading a good book — even when the friend’s book is a good one. In this case, I think I’ve enjoyed it both ways. I’ve heard Catherine read from her new novel in her inimitable voice, the voice of the person I know; but reading Russian Lessons silently on the page, my experience is different: What I get now is the art through which she has conjured not the “real” voice but the fiction of one. And it’s that fictive voice I appreciate. This isn’t the kind of novel you read for the plot — which is minimal: fiftyish woman, recently divorced, meets much younger man; he’s a self-absorbed, emotionally volatile, sexually magnetic undocumented immigrant who’s desperate for a green card; she can’t assimilate him into her life, nor can she give up the physical intensity she experiences with him. “I can’t love, I can only desire,” the nameless narrator of this quasi-diaristic account reflects. The conflict of needs escalates until the blow-up that was always inevitable. A banal episode, in other words, except in the telling, which is quietly gripping. The tone is wonderfully sec, and the narrator retains a core of irony and lucidity even in the midst of physical passion or fear — and more than that, an emotional intelligence that never fails to register equal empathy for (and equal irony toward) two people who can’t help using each other and can never fully understand each other, yet at least some of the time feel a tenderness for each other that only hurts them the more. Reading Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels a little while back reminded me why I don’t read very many contemporary English-language novels; reading Russian Lessons — a quietly penetrating book I might not have thought of picking up if I didn’t know its author — makes me think I should really give more of them a chance.
Catherine Texier’s Russian Lessons (2016) is published by Rawmeash Books and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
