VILLA OF DELIRIUM, a récit in translation to keep you intrigued this winter weekend

VILLA OF DELIRIUM
ADRIEN GOETZ (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Along the French Riviera in the early 1900s, an illustrious family in thrall to classical antiquity builds a fabulous villa—a replica of a Greek palace, complete with marble columns and frescoes depicting mythological gods.

The Reinachs—related to other wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis—attempt to recreate "a pure beauty" lost in the 20th century. The narrator of this brilliant novel calls the imposing house “an act of delirium, above all an optimistic act, proof that one could reset time as one could reset a clock and resist the outside world." The story of the villa and its glamorous inhabitants is recounted by the son of a servant from the nearby estate of Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower, and the two contrasting structures present opposite responses to modernity. The son is adopted by the Reinachs, initiated into the era of Socrates and instructed in classical Greek. He joins a family pilgrimage to Athens, falls in love with a married woman, and survives the Nazi confiscation of the house and deportation to death camps of Reinach grandchildren.

This is a Greek epic for the modern era.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've been years without writing up my notes on this read. It's shameful. I'm so sorry not to have warbled about it...in my defense, it was COVID time.

First off I want to encourage you to take the virtual tour of the (real) villa itself. It definitely blurs the lines between reality and fantasy...both the fact there is a real place, built by real pre-war Jewish aesthetes, and the fact the novel (a roman à clef, surely, though I don't have the key) treats its subject as so close to the mythical world it embodies conspire to give the story a powerful impact. Attributed to the fictional creator pf the fictional villa is the epigraph: "The Greeks discovered glory, they discovered beauty, and they brought to this discovery such jubilation, such an overabundance of life, that a sense of youthful contagion can still be felt even after the passage of three or four thousand years."

As a statement of purpose for this novel that one is spot-on. It's a bit Tom Ripley/Line of Beauty/Saltburn-esque in its insertion of a young lad from an impoverished background into a world he could not even have dreamed up, still less entered. He learns vast amounts of cultural information not widely available to boys of his class as he companions, somewhat à la Patroclus, his wealthy young compatriot Adolphe.

Time passes; the education he gets by being whisked out of his dead-end life leads him to, on a trip with Adolphe and his uncle Theodore (benefactor of Achilles), to do something very wrong; in his turn, wrong is done to him by Theodore who dresses it up as redressing the balance. It is not that at all, it is greed. A set of scales falls from Achilles' eyes, and the reader's; being cultured, being educated and deeply humane, does not being a good person.

Time-jumping decades, we meet Achilles in his famous-artist phase. He might not have profited from his bad deed fortyish years before, but his connection to wealth and high culture is solid, and very useful. As it is 1956, the area is abuzz with the marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Achilles uses this influx of strangers to mask his return to the now-derelict villa of his childhood. We all know what he has gone to look for: the object purloined by him, then stolen by Theodore.

Greed and the complicated desire to Win, to Beat Them, are deeply enmeshed with the self-justifying desire to be Right, to get the last word. Humans...such irredeemable scum. Recovering an object? No, no more than the madeleine was the object of Swann's memory palace. Recovering a moment once lived with intensity? Okay...recovering lost, doomed first love? Okay...all of these at once, reviving memory's mood board as it was being edited and stuck into place is rather the project of middle age. In Achilles' case it's quite a beautiful reconstruction. Do we trust him? Is he, in the confines of his mind that is this récit, editing, embellishing, altering the raw material of memory, cutting the scenes into the movie he wants to watch?

This is where the story becomes so much more than the sum of its beautiful parts. In any récit, we're not given the momentous clash between narrator and reality because there is only the one person speaking to us. In this story's case that means reckoning with the nature of memory, the pain of identity being formed as it must always be in tension with Other; it is Achilles' story, but of necessity it is only his story of the myriad he comes into consequential contact with. Author and translator let us be in the flow with Achilles, of sacred name, and hurry no revelations to keep us "engaged" by creating an unnatural action. It is meditative, it is dense, and it is going to be obvious to you in twenty pages if it's one for you pursue.

I'm now approaching Achilles' end-age. I see things as he does, in strobe-flashes of intense memory followed by blind black voids of time. I found Achilles and his remarkable life deeply pleasant company, telling me an involving story at an old man's pace.

It was a slow read. It kept calling me back. I was able to pick right back up after literal years away from it because I was that invested in the man. It's a story I think will reward the reader who can just...go with it. I hope you'll read a sample, see if it's for you or not.