I dropped into a second-hand bookshop last week. Therein I spotted a book that just seemed to jump out at me. A Ballad of Love. The title is awful, genuinely terrible. I don’t know why it seemed to pique my interest. I took it down off the shelf and read the back. Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, W.B. Yeats rated this author that I have never heard of!! I was shocked. How could I not know this man?
The story itself seemed pretty simple: A man has a lasting love for his cousin and they drift around the world together. The woman ‘disintegrates into a close-cropped boyishness.’ And she falls further and further from the pedestal her cousin held her on.
I opened it up, read a few paragraphs and I was hooked. The writing is sensational. Every place is registered precisely with this evocative language that manages to concentrate and distil the environment into sentences that fizz with warmth and playfulness.
Taking it home, I read the first few chapters and I needed to look up this author. After doing so, I bought everything I could find on ebay and amazon. All battered second-hand copies. Mostly hardbacks. All printed before the 60s. I found a new passion for an author and I’m elated. And happy I can share it with you all.
The story isn’t quite what the blurb made me think it was. It is more accurate to say that a young boy, Henry, sees a picture of his cousin when he is just forming the first stirrings of romantic ideas. Formatively, he develops this sort of naive obsession with her that develops into something more as he grows. He moves to America. Meets her in person. They have a very Pip and Estella (Great Expectations) style vibe going on. Which isn’t surprising because her name is Stella. Which means star, yet these are not star crossed lovers. She has an obsession with becoming wealthy, no matter what. Toying with men to achieve her aims. As the story develops it diverges from that template. They drift about the world not so much with each other but bumping into each other improbably. Stella finds no lasting peace. Henry is never reconciled with her. It is a beautifully tragic and very modern novel in that sense.
In the other sense. I don’t see this one being reprinted today. At one point Henry is working as a sort of black-face performer. Other things like that mean that it should come with a little warning if you don’t read a lot of historical works. It’s a pre-war mentality and I will need to read his other works to judge whether it is just a picture of the time of the story... or if the author held this flippant attitude. It isn’t a negative portrait by any stretch. But it is a little fetishistic perhaps.
Even with that little issue... I can’t help but rate this one a five star. It was utterly fantastic to read something so tight yet light in plot, with strong but mysterious characterisation, and descriptions that absolutely send the mind into flights of wonder.
‘She looked me suddenly in the eyes. Her voice sank to a whisper. 'I feel my face turning into a mask. I feel my body turning to sawdust. I feel my heart floating away in the dark like a puff of smoke.'’
‘The crisis of our lives lie dark and buried in the sea of memory, like sea-beasts afloat in a shadowy underworld; while certain small, random incidents lie gleaming like corals, brilliant, precise, bathed in a significance not quite their own.’
‘Stiff little petals, like bits of vellum, appeared on the dogwood. The jonquils and daffodils were beginning to flower. A strange aroma flowed through the park - a dank, reptilian fragrance, like a lingering whiff from some prehistoric quagmire.
And a new uneasiness crept over me. It filled my room like the smell of pine. It hovered in the dusk like a cloud of fireflies; it pierced the dawn like the cry of a gull.’
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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