The Price of Water in Finistere
Unsentimental 'bewildering happiness'December 18, 2005 Edition 1
Andre Brink
Bodil Malmsten (Random House)
R95
The much-praised Swedish writer Bodil Malmsten has made her name as the author of children's stories, television plays, seven volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and three highly acclaimed novels.
Her latest work, The Price of Water in Finistere, is unlike anything she has written before, although - depending on where one views it from - it may be read as a novel, a collection of short stories, or indeed a volume of poetry.
This quiet, wise and exquisitely funny book is an account of her first year as a newcomer to Brittany, specifically the peninsula of Finistere: "My place lies where the land comes to an end in Europe - fin des terres, finis terrae - Finistere."
In some respects it reminds the reader of Peter Mayle's reconstruction of his first year in Provence; but whereas, particularly in retrospect, Mayle thrives on the French stereotypes he encounters in plumbers, truffle-hunters, neighbours, human pests and other larger-than-life exemplars of Gallic humanity, Malmsten, with her small, wry, often almost imperceptible smile, illuminates the very heart of the phenomenon of human imperfection, most specifically in its French variety.
Having left Sweden, where she has lived for 55 years, she arrives in Finistere "in that blessed state of mind in which everything is possible, everything can be constructed, everything repaired". It derives from the awareness that "I knew what I was leaving but not where I was going".
In a moment of rashness she confides in her new-found acquaintance, Madame C, that "It's so wonderful here that one should write a book about it." And Madame C responds, "So do it!" Which causes Malmsten to react with "Woe is me".
The book is, then, the consequence of a double vision: the experience of living in Finistere (with all the accompanying despair about words and things: "What I want to write is happiness, not to go around being happy"), and the awareness of observing herself and others in the act of living it.
Her reinvention of herself is vested in gardening: never having been much of a gardener, or even a person vaguely interested in gardening, her garden now becomes her universe; all her perceptions of life and death, of a self in which to shelter and others to whom one can or must reach out, are expressed in terms of the failures and the rare but sweet successes of her achievements in the garden.
These perceptions are invariably painfully humorous, sometimes hilarious; but they are imbued with the discovery and rediscovery of human frailty and folly and transience.
Whether she describes French bureaucracy as manifested in the post office, or her guilty attempts at stealing stones from the roadside for her garden, or waiting for a builder who never shows up (and who is therefore dubbed Monsieur Godot), or relishing her ingenious and disingenuous schemes to save money (either by buying things she doesn't need at give-away prices at sales, or by visiting expensive stores without buying), or even warding off the amorous advances of the "Rosenkavalier", who turns out to be a rabid racist, her real concern is the way in which we all, including most notably herself, feed on delusions and false expectations, on make-believe and faulty communication and white (or scarlet, or very black) lies.
Some of the most wonderful moments of self-deprecation are concerned with her inability to speak French properly, which results in exchanges like these: "Hello, Mister M, I ask if you have very strong glues. Myself I'm only usually sticky." Or responding to someone's offer of a cigarette: "Sight others smoking yes please no."
Or complaining about a staggering bill for water: "Look you! I am an enormous bill, look you, Monsieur. I am an enormous bill of water." But once again her focus is not the momentary hilarity or fun: instead, it is our inability to communicate or to make ourselves understood to one another.
This is very pertinent to her endeavour to write down, give shape to, her first year in Finistere. What underlies it is the near despair at discovering that "You don't have to die to kill your world, all you have to do is to write it down".
To which is linked, inevitably, the attempt to write down her most personal experiences and perceptions without weighing it down, as books of this kind so often do, with an exaggerated sense of self: "It isn't me or my feelings that are of interest. I'm interested in what is happening, not that it's me it's happening to. Even though the book will be told in the first person 'I', it isn't 'I' who will be at the centre. Not my 'I' and not my body... It is Finistere and what happens, it's the events themselves, the changes."
A book of changes, indeed: all the changes that come with gardening - and living - through the changes; all the changes within the observing mind itself. And all the changes in the wide world surrounding it. It is a book that could all too easily have become whimsical, sentimental or smug.
As it turned out, it is a moving and living and loving book, inspired by the small, simple, miraculous fact of life itself - a celebration of life and new beginnings, and an ode to it - a "bewildering happiness" elegantly poised between memory as deceit and memory as identity.
"If this is a dream," Malmsten writes near the end of this year of momentous change, "I'm the one who is dreaming, this single self in the great dream; the dream, this solitary self."
And in the end there can be no conclusion: everything is still very much happening; life is still unfolding like a mystic rose:
"I'm in my garden in Finistere. It's an afternoon at the end of July 2001, a soft haze over the countryside. The Atlantic is breathing tides and seaweed, the reassuring sound of the warning buoy like an owl."
