Lili is Crying by Helene Bessette and Kate Briggs (translator)
| Lili is Crying by Helene Bessette and Kate Briggs (translator) | |
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| Category: Literary Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Heather Magee
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| Summary: The story of a girl navigating her desires which delights and devastates, but mainly the latter. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 192 | Date: June 2025 |
| Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1804271674 | |
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First published in 1953 in French, this novel is a timeless text which wrenches the hearts of its readers just as Bessette wrenches words and sentences from their proper position on the page and positions them elsewhere, disjointed, truncated. Like the lives of her characters, they are often left tragically incomplete.
Lili is crying because of this sense of fragmentation. Her life is never full; always lacking something. Her relationship with her mother Charlotte is draining and venomous, her relationships fail because of it, and she craves the image of romantic love so much that she does not know what it looks like in reality anymore.
Bessette's writing has a cinematic quality in the way that scenes occur simultaneously, like a screen splitting the action. This quality is even expressed explicitly by Lili's friend Élise when the melodrama of the moment culminates: that's proper cinema [...] just like at the pictures. The novel is replete with these self-conscious references, like when Lili laments, my life, it's a whole novel, or in its denouement when Bessette writes that the novel is gently taking its leave.
There is theatrical language throughout: after dialogue, between parentheses, it is not uncommon to read the note (the women together), like a stage direction. Elsewhere, Élise lists the roles played in the tale: the killer, the victim, the cuckold, the suffering wife, the jealous lover, like archetypes. Echoes of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet surface as well as shimmers of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the oneiric, hazy estival setting of rural Provence, punctuated by recurring motifs like the plane trees, the pink garden, the window shutters, the gravel path, the roadside inn. Ironically, this idyllic setting cannot constitute a space for joy, unfortunately for the mother Charlotte, who says for me, happiness needs an elaborate setting, a staging that I can control. Again, we see theatrical language emerging.
An interesting moment is when Lili's husband goads Pagliacci to go ahead and laugh at his misfortune, one which mirrors that of the jealous man in this opera. In fact, the climactic point of the novel is operatic in its nature. The reader is suspended in this tension like an opera singer clings onto a note, seemingly running out of breath and yet maintaining a sumptuous vibrato.
In our position as Lili's awestruck, suspended audience, Bessette reminds us finally that it's better to be spectating, to look out over the great drowning, devastating, destructive spread of a blinding sadness, than to experience it ourselves. The pain is simply too much to bear.
Drawing on the separations created by class, origin, jealousies and toxic maternal love, Bessette constructs the kind of arid, cracked landscape destined to be flooded by Lili's tears. The portrayals of maternal control and extreme heartache are difficult to endure, but as Bessette consoles, at least we remain mere spectators. Lili is still crying, and we watch on. I found this book to be filled with wisdom, agony and small blessings. I highly recommend it.
I would like to thank the publisher for sending a copy of this book to The Bookbag. A book which may appeal based on this recommendation is Midnight Blue by Pauline Fisk.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Lili is Crying by Helene Bessette and Kate Briggs (translator) at Amazon.com. (Paid link)
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