LIGHT

by Eva Figes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1983

A day in the life--and the light--of the aging (but still far from aged) Claude Monet. Figes (Waking) builds this impressionistic, rather studied novella from a series of merry-go-round vignettes, moving throughout the Monet household at Giverny circa 1900 (never explicitly identified as such). The initial early-morning closeup features a woman in bed--depressed and grieving (""I am an old woman, she whispered, moving her hand across her eyes, shutting them, I have begun to outlive my own children""), regretting the sins of the past (""God was punishing her now""), wondering how her husband ""Claude"" has the energy to set off to work before dawn every day. Then, when Claude himself appears beside a lily pond with paint and canvas, the identity of the subject becomes clear, the artist musing on his veil-of-light technique: ""Now, before the sunrise, no bright yellow to come between me and it, I look through the cool bluegrey surface to the thing itself."" And, as the day progresses, with visitors at lunch and snatches of conversation, the revolving focus fills in information on each member of the extended Monet family: the woman in bed is Monet's second wife Alice, an eternal malcontent now shattered by the death of daughter Suzanne; her daughter Marthe, fat and dependable, seems doomed to spinsterhood, to taking care of her mother and stepfather; daughter Germaine is madly in love, about to reveal this to her parents; son Jean-Pierre is about to leave the family for studies in the city; the dead Suzanne's husband, a painter determined to maintain his tie to the great Monet, is about to propose marriage to Marthe; and his motherless children play around the house-and-grounds, with little Lily ""overcome by the newness of everything in the world"" and bursting with Monet-ish perceptions about the nature of light. (At book's end, in a moment that presumably foreshadows the late water-lily work, Monet now realizes that ""nothing is solid,"" that he must look through things ""to show how light and those things it illumines are both transubstantial, both tenuous."") Too sketchy as narrative fiction, too busy to cast a true prose-poem spell--but an often-elegant literary exercise, with a different evocation of light for each character.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION