Author: Elizabeth Berg
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Not to be confused with half-a-dozen other novels which use this same title, this is a fictionalized story set in the world of real-life writer Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, more popularly known as George Sand. Starting in January 1831, it features George embarking upon a stagecoach ride to Paris where she will try to interest a publisher in her novel Aimée (a fictional novel as far as I'm aware since Sand never published any work with that title).
This novel has no numbered chapters, just chapter headers. I skipped the prologue as I habitually do (prologues, forewords, introductions, prefaces, etc). If the author doesn't consider it sufficiently worthy for incorporation into the body of the book, I don't consider it worth expending my time upon.
The novel is also first person PoV, a voice which I detest because it's the most selfish voice: all 'me', all the time, and it didn't work here. Few writers can honestly make it work, quite frankly. It all-too-often comes off sounding inauthentic, or really irritating, and I wish writers would avoid it unless they have a really, truly, honestly compelling reason to go there.
Chapter '2' consists of a huge historical info-dump which I skipped since it seemed irrelevant to me, and more like the author was simply showing-off how much research she'd undertaken. Chapter '3' was the same. Finally, in the next chapter (after a bit more flashback) we get back to the current story. Unfortunately in the very next chapter after that, we get another huge flashback to 1805.
It was then that I realized that I was being told two stories, only one of which I had any interest in. The first was of George's childhood, and the second was what was happening now (now being 1831 in the novel). I had whiplash by this point. Can we not tell the current story? If we're obsessed with flashbacks, why not write that story first, then make this the sequel? I rather suspect that the answer to that is. "Because it wouldn't sell". If that's the case, then that alone ought to tell you that it, perhaps like George Sand on occasion, oughtn't to be there between those covers!
So the next chapter went to 1808, and it the chapter after that where we finally got back to 1831, and we learn that George's novel is considered inadequate by an older male writer who tells her to quit with the writing and go make babies instead, but right when I really wanted to see how she reacted to this, we're suddenly back in 1808 in the next chapter. Seriously? I was beginning to detest this switch-back method of story-telling at this point.
I honestly did not care about her childhood. I wanted the 'now' story. If I'd wanted to read of George Sand's childhood, I would have read an autobiography. I thought, hoped, that this story would tell me something inventive, unique, and interesting. It didn't. It was at this point that I looked at the page count and it showed 48 out of 374, and I did not want to read even one more of those remaining 320+ pages. I really didn't.
I could not continue reading this because what I'd read so far had convinced me thoroughly that the real George Sand had to be far more interesting and arresting than was this limp, passive, and rather schizophrenic (am I a child or am I a grown-up acting like a child?) character which was all we had available to us here.
The story was far too dry and passionless, far too info-dumpy and in the end, pointless. There was nothing to draw me in and make me want to read. Unless you're going to use your fiction to take the character in some new direction, why not just write a biography? If you're interested in writing a biography, why the fiction?
I don't know how this writer feels about George Sand and actually, that's the problem in a nutshell. I felt no passion coming through from the author to the character, and if she feels so cold about it, why should I feel differently?
The novel made no sense, and didn't offer me a thing to feed on. George was presented (unintentionally, I hope) as this self-centered, self-obsessed narcissus who basically has no time for anyone but herself (hence her leaving her husband, no doubt). People like to talk about how scandalous George was but she really wasn't that different from a host of other women in that era (Mary Shelley was one, for example). This novel could have made a difference to my feeling that, but it didn't.
Admittedly I didn't read it all, but I was given no incentive to do so, and based on what I read of it, I cannot honestly recommend this.
