Alexander Alexeieff’s illustrations for Adrienne Mesurat by Julien Green, 1929:
From the collection of Richard Sica
I think I’m going to have to read this one. I’ve dipped into Green‘s Diary (note he goes by both Julien and Julian, perhaps as a gift to proofreaders), but haven’t read the fiction, recently recommended here by Franz Rottensteiner.
Adrienne Mesurat was published in English as The Closed Garden, and later under its original title. (Not sure if these are the same translations.) A Publishers Weekly review has survived on Amazon, so we can actually know what this book is about:
Ah, to be young, beautiful, wealthy and living in the French countryside . . . take it from Adrienne, it’s hell. In this reissue of Green’s 1926 novel (winner of the Femina Prize and a BOMC selection that year), his heroine has spent all of her life in the Villa des Charmes, a neurasthenic household dominated by her father, a wildly suspicious old man whose only concern is the sanctity of his daily routine, and her bitter older sister, who nurses both a chronic illness and a closely held secret. In Adrienne’s oppressed and isolated life, the summer tenant of a neighboring villa becomes the unwholesome focus of the girl’s need for friendship, and a passing glance from a middle-aged doctor develops into a romantic obsession with murderous consequences. As he notes in a revealing new preface to this edition, Green was only 26 when he wrote the book, and some of his descriptions are themselves rather callow–the “sturdy stock” from which Adrienne springs seems made up largely of stubborn brows and vacant eyes. On the other hand, the unremitting detailing of the Villa’s stultifying routine is very effective–so much so that when Adrienne helps remove both sister and father (she to a hospital, he to his death), the depiction of her obsessive guilt over these pathological acts pales by comparison.
A tantalizing quote from “Aural Imagery in Adrienne Mesurat” by Kathryn E. Wildgen:
However, Green does employ several thematic devices to suggest suffocation and imprisonment. One of these devices is a deliberate, endless repetition of banal, innocuous sounds, sounds that surround the young heroine and contribute to her ultimate madness by reinforcing her innate incapacity to escape from what tortures her. The girl’s feelings of unhappiness, claustration and insanity grow in intensity throughout the story and are both symbolized and provoked by sounds (shrieks, nervous laughter, sharp cracks, groans) with which Green suggests the atmosphere of a madhouse. Even silence is used to heighten her fear and loneliness. The final stage of Adrienne’s folie, and ironically the only true escape open to her, is an “anaesthesia of the senses of sight and hearing.
Previously:
