Rating: 
Summary: "She closes her eyes. She cannot remember more."
Review: Victorine is an absolutely gorgeous novel. Lucid, poetic, romantic and sensual, the story tells of one young woman's defiance of social convention in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Victorine, a young schoolteacher, lives in Vendee, a quiet province of France. She becomes pregnant at an early age to Armand, and in keeping with the propriety of the time, is forced to marry him. But Victorine's heart is with the blond, virile wonderer, Antoine, and in a fit of lust and abandon, she embarks on a highly passionate affair. Falling desperately in love, and trapped in a loveless marriage that is like an "ever-tightening corset," Victorine abandons her husband and her two children, Madeleine and Daniel. Together with her new lover, and tormented by guilt and remorse, she travels to Indochina to start a new life. Told in a type of duel narrative that effectively switches backwards and forwards in time - from eighteen ninety nine to nineteen forty - we journey back with Victorine to her home in France with her family, and to her adventures with Antoine along the Mekong River. Victorine is torn between the question of love and the question of marriage, and for her, marriage for love seems to be forever rendered moot. But she can't resist Antoine's desire and ends up defying the entire social rules that she's been bought up with. She describes herself as "always cold in the early winters" of her marriage and she wonders if there is something amiss in her heart. It is as though she has kept the feelings of Antoine's "fingers on her wrist buried under the smooth surface of her life." The novel is quite compelling because of the power of its thought and its writing, and it steadily crescendos towards Victorine's decision to abandon Armand and her children. Her small, original lies gradually blossom into elaborate stories as she tries desperately to keep her affair with Antoine a secret from her family. She realizes she's only buying time in a land of "fuzzy boundaries" where truth - already a shaky concept, gradually gets corrupted, and irremediably altered. Texier has crafted a complex portrait of a woman who is a dreamer longing to escape, and who is irrevocably bound by stuffy conventions. Texier's style is deceptively reserved, quietly crafted, and with a simple beauty that is impossible not to like. Witness the "sun melting in apricot trails along the horizon," and the "moonlight playing silver circles on her naked arms." And the colours of Indochina: yellow stucco and green shutters, the smells of frangipani, jasmine, overripe mangos, and dried fish. Texier writes throughout with a fine ear for the sound and rhythms of her sentences and there is a constant pleasure in reading her prose. She also has a way of describing Victorine's sensuality while managing to avoid judging her actions. Like the loosening of her corset, which she does with a sigh of relief, her sensuality awakens and also becomes loose; it suddenly appears to her as an object of desire, "dangerously intimate and precarious." Victorine is a gorgeous evocation of a time and place and is a startling account of one woman's search for independence and freedom from the oppressive restrictions of the time. Mike Leonard June 04.
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