ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Angela O’Keeffe’s debut novel Night Blue (2021) made quite a splash… it was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing and for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.  As you can see from my review it featured an unusual narrator: Jackson Pollock’s iconic painting ‘Blue Poles’ tells the story of its own creation and the political storm over its purchase by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, while also interrogating the purpose and commodification of art.

Angela O’Keeffe seems to have a fascination with unusual narrators drawn from the world of art.  The Sitter is narrated by the ghostly presence of Hortense Cezanne, hovering over a writer’s shoulder as she writes the story of Hortense’s relationship with Paul Cezanne.  But this is not quite another in the genre I have christened Rescue-A-Woman-From-Oblivion, novels about women who had larger-than-life husbands whose fame overwhelmed and obliterated them.

What stymies the writer’s project about Hortense is the pandemic.  She arrives in France, taking pleasure in the respite from the bushfires that ravaged Australia in the summer of 2019-20.  She has time to go down to Aix and do some of her research, but she returns to Paris on the cusp of Covid’s arrival in Europe and the sudden shocking images of its overwhelming impact in Italy.  There are frantic calls from her daughter in Sydney: the government is about to close the borders so she must bring her flight home forward.

The streets of Paris itself are a warning:

From the window of a hotel room in Paris: a view of rooftops, the brown river, a cobblestoned street, one corner of a scaffolded, burnt-out church.  It is a morning in March 2020, and the air holds a breath of warmth.

Normally on such a morning, a morning that is chilly but nevertheless heralds the first hint of spring, the street would be almost crowded, the mood bordering on flamboyant, as if the first hint of spring is more a cause for celebration than spring itself. But this morning, from this window, just three people can be seen in the street.

Two women walk side by side, each carrying brown paper bags of groceries, each wearing a blue surgical mask.  A small child strides out ahead of them, stopping every now and then to gaze with curiosity at the cobblestones… (p.34)

(Yes, I know, I swore I wasn’t going to read pandemic novels. This one got past my defences.)

People will argue endlessly about the Australian government’s decision to close the borders and the use of hotels as places for quarantine.  (I received a Very Long Trumpian Tirade in comments the other day about how we were all duped because Covid doesn’t exist.  Tell that to someone who hasn’t had it, and been very sick with it.) Whatever about that, O’Keeffe shows us a little of how difficult it must have been to negotiate lockdowns in places where the traveller doesn’t have the language, and how the fear of a sudden, lonely death impacted differently on people marooned overseas.  The writer, who is called Georgia in the novel though that isn’t her name, has an important story to tell her daughter, and though it seems inconceivable that she should die alone in a hotel room, Hortense witnesses the writer’s change of project when she writes the story of Georgia instead.

Hortense is just a witness. Although she and the writer talk to each other, Hortense has no corporeality.  She is an empathetic presence, curious and engaged by the reversal in their roles as the gaze of another shifts away from her.  But she cannot do anything to alter events.  She cannot perform the support role as she did for Cezanne for whom she was housekeeper, secretary, lover, model and muse.  She cannot intervene to tidy up the mess accumulating in the hotel room as the writer works long, tension-filled hours to pen her new story.

If I could, I’d sort her clothes into clean and dirty, I’d stack the dirty dishes and leave them outside the door for the staff to collect; I’d gather the books scattered across the floor and arrange them into neat piles.  I’d try to help. (p.107)

In the new story — a confessional of sorts though ‘Georgia’ has committed no sin — she explains that there are some stories which have to be written, they cannot be told face to face.

You probably wonder why I have kept silent all these years. Silence is seen as a weakness these days, a means of denying the true life of the self, one’s own history, and of course in some sense this is true.  But it assumes that words are always up to the task, and I do not believe that they are.  It might surprise you that I do not put all my trust in words.  I am wary of them.  Words are wild animals; I keep a respectful distance.  I do not hunt them; I let them come to me.

There have been times when you have drawn close to the story I am about to tell you.  When we were talking the other night, just a few weeks ago — my last night in Sydney — I thought you’d stumbled on it, and I wondered if the right words might come at last. (p.72)

But the reader knows from the writer’s panic, that it is fear that is driving her to explain herself to the person she loves most in the world, lest it be too late.

As you can see in this review at The Visionary Company*, there is a great deal more to unpack in this deceptively short novel, including allusions to other texts, symbols and metaphors, and correspondences between Hortense and the writer. There is also the novel’s emotional impact which transcends the words on the page but can’t be discussed in a review. I think book groups would enjoy this one, and there are book club notes at the publisher’s website. I’ve checked them, and they don’t give away any spoilers.

*Updated to include this link 25/9/23

Author: Angela O’Keeffe
Title: The Sitter
Publisher: UQP (University of Queensland Press), 2023
Cover design by Josh Durham
Cover art:  ‘Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair’ by Paul Cezanne c1877
ISBN: 9780702266348, pbk., 169 pages
Review copy courtesy of UQP.