Briefly, a delicious life A novel

Nell Stevens, 1985-

Book - 2022

"An unforgettable debut novel from an award-winning writer: a lively, daring ghost story about a dead teen girl who falls in love with a female writer who has no idea she exists. In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in childbirth in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she's been hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on the monks and the townspeople and keeping track of her descendants. Blanca is enchanted the moment she sees George, and the magical novel unfolds as a story of deeply felt, unrequited longing-the impossible love o...f a teenage ghost for a woman who can't see her and doesn't know she exists. As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George's case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involves an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training). Charming, original, and emotionally moving, this is a surprisingly touching story about romantic fixation and a powerful meditation on creativity"--

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Subjects
Genres
Lesbian fiction
Historical fiction
Romance fiction
Published
New York : Scribner [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Nell Stevens, 1985- (author)
Edition
First Scribner hardcover edition
Physical Description
294 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781982190941
9781982190958
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Stevens' (The Victorian and the Romantic, 2018) first novel is a retelling of George Sand and Frédéric Chopin's nineteenth-century Majorcan retreat, with a dash of a ghost story thrown in. Blanca died at 14 in 1473, and in the intervening centuries has spent her time alone, keeping a watchful eye on her descendants, tormenting badly behaved men, and gently haunting the monastery where she lives. She has also discovered an attraction to women. Blanca's world is shaken with the arrival of Sand, her two children, Chopin, and their servant. The locals do not trust the strange woman that dresses like a man or her sickly composer companion, but Blanca is utterly intrigued with George, whose memories she takes the liberty of exploring, often triggering her own reminiscences. Stevens' writing is beautiful and evocative of the Majorcan landscape as she slowly develops the arc of Sand and Chopin's affair and elucidates Blanca's life spent in tantalizing anticipation. While each story suffers slightly at the hands of the other, this is a winner with appeal beyond historical fiction readers.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Stevens (Bleaker House: A Memoir) makes her fiction debut with a smart and haunting outing that immerses readers in Valldemosa, Mallorca, over four centuries. The story revolves around the ghost of a 14-year-old girl named Blanca, who died in the 15th century and is captivated by the appearance of author George Sand and her lover, composer Frédéric Chopin, on vacation in the late 19th century. Blanca is attracted to both men and women, and her playful, sensuous narration describes the centuries she's spent observing the trysts of monks in the monastery where she lives. Sand's masculine dress particularly excites Blanca, though it elicits disgust of the villagers. As Chopin becomes gravely ill, Stevens alternates the lovers' story with Blanca's memories of her own life and death, and Blanca dwells on feelings of blame toward the man who got her pregnant during their affair. Eventually, the stories entwine, as Blanca uses her ghostly powers to intercede in Chopin's fate. Though Stevens's idealized view of Sand can feel a bit Mary Sue--ish, for the most part it credibly reflects Blanca's romanticizing of a woman who "dressed like a man, kissed like a man, smoked like a man." This will entice readers. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Debut Award-winning memoirist and short story author Stevens (Bleaker House) examines the nature of desire and women's fate throughout history with an intriguing, mostly successful reimagining of George Sand's 1838--39 stay in Mallorca with her children and much-loved Frédéric Chopin, told from the perspective of a lusty, impetuous ghost. In 1473, 14-year-old Blanca dies giving birth at the monastery where her baby's thoughtless young father is a novice. She remains there for centuries, learning how to assert herself in the world and prank the licentious monks until the monastery's abandonment. Then Sand arrives with her entourage, and Blanca falls in love, having come to value women after her death; once they represented to her only "comforting boredom." Because she's mastered the art of reading memories, Blanca can narrate not only her life but Sand's; when she senses crisis coming, she resorts to a little-used ability to see the future and diverts Sand and her little family from disaster. VERDICT Unexpectedly light in tone, Stevens's story of patriarchal abuse is sadly familiar in outline. What stands out, aside from the powerful rendering of Chopin's music, is the daring, desire-drenched Blanca. For a historical character, she can sound annoyingly like a contemporary teenager, but readers of all stripes will embrace her.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A 15th-century ghost describes falling in love with an oblivious George Sand during her family's stay in Mallorca in this lyrical debut novel. Blanca died at the age of 14 in 1473 and has been haunting the Charterhouse, a once-bustling monastery in Valldemossa, ever since. She's never encountered a fellow ghost and has spent the past 365 years silently observing the living. She's discovered things about herself since passing on--she's attracted to women as well as men, and her spectral powers include the ability to explore people's memories and gaze into their futures--but has also found her afterlife growing smaller and smaller in scope as time wears on. The monks Blanca used to torment with poltergeistlike antics are long gone, and Blanca's last living direct relative, a "multiple-times-great granddaughter," is on death's door when, out of the blue, new tenants arrive at the Charterhouse: French writer George Sand; Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, her lover; her two children; and a servant girl. Sand's masculine gender expression immediately draws Blanca's fascination even as it alarms the locals, who are already wary of foreigners and Chopin's obvious ill health. Stevens' prose is by turns languid and visceral--she manages to capture both the alienation from the normal passage of time that comes with a lonely eternal life and the profound longing for and appreciation of the sensory that comes with lacking a physical body. An entrancing and singular exploration of a fascinating historical footnote and a queer life after death. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1. Two Men Kissing TWO MEN KISSING Of course, it wasn't the first time I'd seen two men kissing. It was 1838 and I had been at the Charterhouse in Valldemossa for over three centuries by then. I had seen hundreds of monks arrive, kiss each other, and die, but still, the sight of these two stopped me in my tracks. The men--slight bodies, bony, both very short, standing amongst rotting pomegranates and flies in the overgrown garden of one of the abandoned cells--were gripping each other's faces, hands like masks. There was a smell of fermentation rising from the ground, and it gave the scene--the lovers, the kiss--a fizzy, too-hot quality. Sweat had worked its way through the shirt and jacket of the smaller one, spreading darkly between his shoulder blades. (It was November but still warm; the weather had yet to turn.) The taller man trailed his fingers along the other's neck, and let them drape over his shoulder. The hand was very pale, as though it rarely saw the sun, and surprisingly broad below a narrow, snappable wrist. Fine bones pressed against the skin, splayed like a wing; thick muscle curved around the base of the thumb. The fingers looked heavy, the way they hung, faintly blue, from rounded knuckles. A bird startled in the tree above them and flew off, dislodging a little flurry of feathers and leaves, and both men looked up as though expecting bad news. Three hundred years earlier, I'd seen Brother Tomás with Brother Mateo in that very same garden, beard crushing against beard and the clatter of rosary beads hitting the paving stones. A decade or so after that, there was the boy from the village who sold bad oranges with the boy in the kitchens who made bad preserves. Around the turn of the sixteenth century there was a complex triangulation amongst Brothers Augustin, Miguel, and Simón. And so on, over the years: countless combinations, differing ages, differing levels of urgency and tenderness, but always more or less the same, the kissing and gripping and so often the very same skittishness, the entirely justified fear of being found out, the creeping sensation that they were being watched. The point is: I was used to seeing habits fall from shoulders, formations of body hair on chests, backs, buttocks, et cetera. I enjoyed it. It was comforting. These, after all, were not the sort of men I worried about. It was the others, the ones who had fewer secrets, that kept me on my toes. What surprised me was the presence of these lovers in the garden at all. There had been no monks at the Charterhouse since the government seized it from the Church three years before and sent them all away. The eviction happened quickly: the news, the tears, the goodbye kisses. There was a scramble for possessions they were not strictly supposed to have, and certainly not supposed to care about. Candlesticks stuffed into sacks. Gold crucifixes protruding from the folds of skirts. And then they clinked and clattered off down the hill, and I was left alone. Even the priest, Father Guillem, found the dead atmosphere oppressive. He moved to a house on the opposite side of the square. I had thought--so funny with hindsight--that perhaps I wasn't needed there anymore. I began to think of moving on, started to fantasize about taking some rooms in the center of Palma, nothing too elaborate, just a vantage point from which I could watch the city happen. I hadn't spent much time away from Valldemossa, the small hillside village where I was born, and the idea of trying my luck in the city was alluring. New smells, new people to worry about and dodge and look out for. But then a sacristan was hired to take care of the Charterhouse in the absence of the monks, and as he swaggered around the place swinging his keys, as he napped in the monks' deserted cots, snoring and smacking his lips in his sleep, as he sold off all the silverware, and then all the gold, as his hands grabbed more and more things that were not his to grab, it became apparent I would have to stay on a little longer to keep an eye on him. In the quiet of the early mornings, I waited for the sound of his heavy footsteps on the tiles. Over time it came less frequently, as the novelty of the job wore off for the Sacristan. Still, I stayed. I was quiet and watchful, became invested in the comings and goings of lizards. I took up bird-watching. Sometimes I threw things. I waited, just in case. 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. I had it all planned out and was not prepared, not prepared at all, to come across unfamiliar, uninvited lovers. Eventually, they stepped back from one another. The smaller one readjusted his jacket and turned his head to the side. My first view of his face: plump lips, dark eyes, long lashes, and glossy black curls pinned back. Cheeks pink in the heat. Sweat on the temples. Which was when I realized that it was not a man after all. It was a woman dressed as a man. Which was the second great surprise of my morning. Excerpted from Briefly, a Delicious Life: A Novel by Nell Stevens All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.