«A pretty girl like that», a desire like no other

After The last in the city in summer, The cult novel by Italian author Gianfranco Calligarich, published in the 70s and translated into French in the 2020s, is another recommendation for quality summer reading: A pretty girl like that by British author Alfred Hayes, originally published in 1958. Also from Gallimard's «Du monde entier» collection, available in paperback..

Forbidden spaces, spaces of the unsaid: can we retain the words spoken, a flickering I love you thrown into the darkness? Words hovering between bodies, then finally dissolving, like a secret. Charred words. Scraps of burnt dreams. A zone we never thought we'd cross. A jazz note in the distance, turning into unfathomable sadness. Love is a desire weighed down by error, stupidity, vanity and suffering. A nameless complaint that seeks to answer every face. A melancholy with the sweet bitterness of a martini.

Read also | A last summer in town, the exhilaration of la dolce vita

Hollywood, 1950s. One evening, at one of those noisy, drunken parties, a man approaches the railing, weary of disdainfully observing this cocktail of vanity and vacuity. The ocean stretches as far as the eye can see, pecked out by the party lights in the distance. He sinks his spleen into the cold calm of the night and thinks of nothing more, letting himself be lulled by the unknown. A silhouette emerges towards the shore: a woman with a glass in her hand. He barely has time to look at her before she darts into the ocean. A few minutes later, he pulls her painfully from the waves. He has saved her.

Saving love only to drown in it

And yet, it's to their doom that they're headed. They soon become lovers. By force of circumstance, the powerlessness of others. He's a successful screenwriter in his forties, she's a young woman seeking the glory of the stage and the eternal glamour of her twenties. What they have in common is an obvious existential despair and a need to escape. Two lost souls who will spin, for a time, in this ball of shattered illusions.

«What she possessed, on the other hand, apparently, was a kind of desperation, which engendered a different form, an alternative kind of seduction.»

Alfred Hayes excels at conveying the essential in just a few sentences: a bored narrator, a young woman as twilight as she is evanescent, a love story as the only remedy for reality, mystery and veiled tears. A fragile, melancholy pen for a story you can read with your gaze lost in the distance.

Write to the author: quentin.perissinotto@leregardlibre.com

Image: British author Alfred Hayes © DR

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Alfred Hayes
A pretty girl like that
Gallimard
2015
166 pages

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