What Disappears,
an historical novel by
Barbara Quick, is an ambitious work populated with such
larger-than-life personalities as the prima Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, the
superhuman Polish ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky, the groundbreaking choreographer
Sergei Diaghelev, the innovative French fashion designer Paul Poiret who
released women from corsets but then put them in his hobble skirts. The Dresser
will pause this list for now and say that writer Quick with these characters
alone and the events
around them has seeded
her novel for a spectacular cinematic rendering.
The heart of What Disappears is the quest of a Jewish
Russian born and bred young seamstress named Sonya to find her identical twin.
This non-linear novel opens in 1909 in Paris backstage in the heady rush to get
Pavlova on stage with Nijinsky for a performance of the Ballets Russes, but
this “young savage,” as Pavlova refers to Nijinsky, has accidentally during a
morning practice ripped the bodice of her costume with a ring gifted to him by
Diaghelev. She screams at her maid to find her seamstress. The maid grabs and
brings to her boss a woman who she thinks is the seamstress just as Sonya
rushes in behind them her youngest daughter Baila in tow. When Sonya looks into
the face of her long-lost twin, she faints in shock upsetting little Baila.
Hereby, Quick roots the saga of Sonya who suffered successive losses—her father
who was imprisoned and tortured for ten years by the Tsar’s strongarms only to
die within months after his release, her twin sister when their desperate
mother parks the twins in an orphanage so they would be fed only to have an
unknown French couple snatch her twin, the young man who loves her but moves
away with his family to Argentina, her mother who reveals on her death bed that
Sonya’s twin did not die in childbirth, her husband Asher (an arranged marriage,
father of their two daughters Naomi and Olga) who is killed in a pogrom that
destroyed their thriving tailor shop.
For a novel delivered in just under 300 pages, the scope of
Quick’s story is huge. How does the author handle so many characters and three
major geographic locations (Russia, France, Argentina)? Certainly, skipping
around in time allows for some things to go unsaid. More remarkably, Quick has
many scenes that focus on in-depth character portraits that evolve from the
complicated relationships and situations that Quick creates.
Take for example Sonya’s 1903 arrival in Paris by train. As
a result of meeting Pavlova at a party her brother Daniel holds in his Saint
Petersburg home, Sonya unexpectedly travels to Paris to scout out new fashion
designs. Pavlova is a client of Daniel’s law practice, and she is intensely
jealous of another Russian ballet star whose seamstress is copying dresses of
Parisian designs. Awash in guilt that her husband Asher stayed in their village
of Kishinev to fill their client orders, Sonya reflects on Daniel’s “tiresome
lecture, that Latin men were all unconscionably flirtatious—and that she had to
take care not to encourage them in the slightest way.” Daniel has also sent a
Monsieur Blum to collect her from the train. However, the first person to greet
her and help her from the train is Paul Poiret, one of the fashion designers Pavlova
has told her about who is scandalizing the industry with designs that are in
demand. The twist in this scene is that Poiret thinks Sonya is Jeanette Dupres,
his mistress and Sonya’s missing twin. When Sonya does not recognize him and he
never introduces himself, Poiret thinks she is pranking him, after all Jeanette
is a stage performer. Quickly the fraught encounter ends as Monsieur Blum
presents himself to Sonya and a porter pulls Poiret’s attention to the just unloaded
trunk of special fabrics the couturier has come to retrieve.
Monsieur
Blum, René Blum, who speaks in Yiddish to Sonya when he first meets her at the
train station is an interesting minor character. In real life, he was a friend
of Marcel Proust, helping Proust get the first novel of his master work À
la recherche du temps perdu
(In Search of
Lost Time) published. Quick gives us a cameo appearance of the
“lavishly mustachioed, frail-looking” Proust in a vignette where Blum, who has
been teaching Sonya’s daughters Naomi and Olga about Judaism and other
subjects, admonishes them that lost learning is a theft of time. However, Olga,
already an intellectual, is lost in her own thoughts about 1910, the year that
she and her mother nearly died because of the devasting Paris flood, the year
that brought her family the combative Aunt Jeanette into their lives, and the
switch from the Paris Meridian to Greenwich Mean Time resulting in nine minutes
and twenty-one seconds of lost time. The look on her face makes Proust ask Olga
what she is thinking about. Of course, she answers, lost time, an answer
that is both mortally serious for this character and inside-joke hilarious for
a reader like the Dresser who studied modern French literature as an
undergraduate. Seriously?—little Olga, who is maybe ten or eleven years old,
gets to say to Marcel Proust that she is thinking about lost time? Maybe Quick
identifies with Olga and What
Disappears is the author’s study of lost time.
Quick also
uses the presence of Monsieur Blum to say something shocking about Jeanette
Dupres. In real life, René Blum came from an assimilated Jewish family and was
the brother of Léon Blum who played an advocacy role in the Dreyfus Affair and
was the first Jewish head of state in France. While the fictional René Blum is
rumored to be in love with Sonya, he nearly marries Jeanette. Jeanette in
many ways stands in opposition to Sonya. Raised by a French Catholic couple,
Jeanette has been taught to be an anti-Semite.
While the revelation that Jeanette is Jewish unsettles her
and simultaneously explains certain puzzling behaviors and comments from her
French family, Jeanette, as a character, seems less understandable than her
twin. Except for Paul Poiret saying Jeanette did not support Dreyfus, the young
Jewish army captain wrongly accused of being a traitor, it is unclear how
Jeanette’s anti-Semitism manifests. Does Blum Learn she is anti-Semitic? Not
clear. We do know, however, that she has a mean streak, and we see her slapping
Olga in the face. Why is this woman who has had three abortions and desperately
wants a child fathered by Poiret so unrepentantly cruel to her niece? Is Olga a
stand-in for Sonya, who Poiret seduced? Guess who the father of Baila is, much
to Sonya’s shame.
Barbara Quick is
exceptionally agile at blending real life events with her fiction. Favorite
among these blendings is the Thousand and Second Night fashion party
Poiret threw at his home. The fictional Poiret hires all three of Sonya’s
daughters to help with the party’s pageantry. Olga reluctantly participates
until she discovers she (dressed as a barefoot merchant’s boy) is paired with a
charming man who is selling tiny monkeys.
“They stroll past pink ibis, flamingoes, and a screaming
white peacock wandering over the lawn. Parrots and macaws fly in tiny bursts of
color past their heads, making the marmosets whimper in fear. …Carved wooden
tables throughout the garden are loaded with every kind of delicacy, which Olga
would have felt much better about sampling if the monkeys weren’t constantly
clambering down onto her head, into her arms, and then jumping back onto Gaston
again.
“Several different orchestras are playing softly, also
hidden behind the shrubberies, the music growing louder and then fading away
again as Olga and Gaston follow the maze of pathways. Here and there they come
upon throngs of braziers with blue smoking incense, tended by bare-breasted black-skinned
girls. ‘Really, it’s too much,’ Gaston says, reaching down to turn Olga’s
wide-eyed gaze away as he and she pass by.”
Barbara Quick’s What Disappears from Regal House
Publishing will undoubtedly please Francophiles, balletomanes, history buffs,
and women of every persuasion from traditionalists to Feminists. Even in its
uncorrected proof, this is a novel rich in subject matter and well-turned
phrases. Look for the launch of What Disappears in May 2022.
