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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A formative experience, for both narrator and reader, January 27, 2007
This review is from: Olivia: A Novel (Paperback)
"Olivia" is a "récit"---a short novel told in the first-person by someone with a story to relate or a confession to make, sometimes as observer, sometimes as protagonist. She or he concisely describes a crucial series of simple events with complex depths and resonances, capped by a catastrophe that often combines physical with emotional extremity.
The "récit" was born in France; and Dorothy Strachey Bussy (1865-1960) absorbed its tradition into her blood, as befits a translator of André Gide, to whom she was passionately attached, and whose "L'Immoraliste" personifies the genre. Written in French in 1933, "Olivia" was not rendered into English until Leonard Woolf accepted it for the Hogarth Press: it grips you from first to last.
Sent to a finishing school outside Paris well before the Great War, Olivia becomes an unwitting object of contention between the two headmistresses, Mlle Cara and her partner Mlle Julie, after the young Englishwoman contracts a crush on the latter. The gathering crisis is chronicled with an ecstatic ruthlessness, classically contained, akin to the verse dramas of Racine which Mlle Julie reads aloud to her charges with such intoxicating effect.
Strachey's astute artistry is exemplified by the moment when Mlle Cara, driven to jealous ranting, makes poisonous use (for a book published in 1949) of the designation "Jewess"---a cherry-bomb word that sends tremors through the floorboards. But a writer's severest test comes near the end of a dramatic work, when the emotional climax which concludes the main action absolutely must convince the reader of its truth. Here it is the final encounter, after Mlle Cara's illness, between Olivia and Mlle Julie: without a false note or cliché it sweeps one along with authentic, closely-observed anguish. How apt that Colette wrote the 1951 screenplay.
In her foreword, Regina Marler provides the biographical and cultural background needed to appreciate the tale even more deeply. One hopes she will rescue another mislaid classic for us to reappraise. If only more masterpieces were this "minor."
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Shock of the New, June 4, 2006
This review is from: Olivia: A Novel (Paperback)
The brilliant Regina Marler has contributed an elegant introduction in which she very simply and directly lays out the facts about Dorothy Strachey's strange, privileged life, and dashes our hopes at once by letting us know that this is no memoir, it is that rarer more courageous thing, a novel. And yet, Marler continues, the novel possesses an emotional truth which may in fact vie closer to Strachey's own life, her needs, her accomplishments, than she in fact knew. Just as we are now familiar with Dora Carrington, the brilliant UK painter who staked her life and soul to her love for the gay author and flaneur Lytton Strachey, and who killed herself when Strackey died, we now have the example of Dorothy Strachey, who seems to have half-embroidered, half-distilled this example of pure, clear Sapphic enchantment as an offering to the man she was in love with, French novelist Andre Gide, whose translator she had become years and years earlier.
Happily she did not kill herself when Gide died, and happily the book that she wrote, "Olivia," has a punch and an emotional availability that none of Gide's works possess. So it seems today that sometimes, the lover wins out, while the loved one wraps his shroud of untouchability right into the grave of Lethe. The story of Olivia and Mlle. Julie has one of those tears guaranteed wallops at the end; not just at the end, when you're prepared for it, but at the extreme end, like the hand of Carrie reaching through the grave around Amy Irving's ankle.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read this!, August 22, 2006
This review is from: Olivia: A Novel (Paperback)
This novel by Dorothy Strachey, sister of famous biographer and eccentric, Lytton Strachey, is a little jewel of a well-written novel. Probably based on Dorothy's experiences in a girl's school, it describes a English teenager's crush on a school mistress in late 19th century France. This novel is not about sex or being a lesbian. It is about anticipation and the overwhelming need for affection and approval. It is a classic, "coming of age" novel with (for once!) a young girl instead of a young boy. Quick, enthralling read!
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