The early decades of the 1900s were particularly intriguing fashion and style-wise. When the first silent films started being released, the glamorous life of the actors and actresses generated a new passion - stardom - that made many ordinary people dream.
At the beginning of Beatrice Hitchman's debut novel Petite Mort Or, A Little Death, her protagonist Adèle Roux is just one of the many young girls struck by the impossible beauty of an unreachable film star.
Convinced she can make it in the industry, she runs away to Paris and obtains an audition at Pathé studios.
The results of the audition aren't as expected, but Adèle is rescued by André Durand, film producer, creator of spectacular cinematic illusions and husband of beautiful actress Luce, better known with her screen name, Terpsichore. André lands her a job as a seamstress in the costume department, then offers to become his wife's assistant in their household while being also his mistress. But things take an unexpected turn for André when Adèle and Luce start a relationship that is put at risk when the young girl is offered a role in the silent film Petite Mort.
The story is intertwined with brief flashbacks and with a personal investigation carried out by a journalist in the '60s researching the reappearance of the presumed lost Petite Mort, saved from the 1914 fire at the Pathé studios, but mysteriously missing a key scene revolving around a doppelganger.
Doubleness and duplicity are in many ways the main protagonists of Hitchman's story: Adèle has a younger sister, Camille, who follows her to Paris hoping to work as a make up artist at Pathé; Luce is a loved film star, but also a decadent and revengeful heroine; André is a brilliant inventor and an impenitent womanizer; Luce and André's Parisian mansion is not just a beautiful and lavish house, but it also hides terrible secrets behind its many locked rooms.
Hitchman worked as a film-maker and documentary video editor, and this explains her passion for action cuts, well-researched elements (details referring to optical effects and illusions in early silent films, but also to Thomas Edison and automata may have been inspired by another well-researched volume, Gaby Wood's Edison's Eve) and for her style, a sort of combination of twists and turns with clever references that interconnect the text together (Luce means "light", also the first word in the opening chapter).
The most interesting thing about this novel is not just the story or the way it is told, but the fact that it can't be filed under a specific genre: it has indeed got a complex plot with elements borrowed from historical novels (readers will visit not only Paris in the early 1900s, but also the late 19th century American south), pages in which erotic literature prevails (the title of the novel refers to the eponymous film that goes lost, but also to the euphemism for the post-orgasmic state of unconsciousness that may define some of the love scenes in the book and the awakening of sexuality in the main character) and a second part that is suspended between noir and thriller.
At the very end readers will discover that in this story – just like in the best filmic illusions à la Méliès – not everything is exactly as it looks, and even the "petite mort" of the title from fictitious silent film turns into that pleasant state of which Roland Barthes writes about, that blissful condition that grasps the attention of the reader captivating it forever.
Petite Mort by Beatrice Hitchman is published by Serpent's Tail.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and PhotosMember of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments