Every month, our literary critic puts a work through a kaleidoscope, collecting the images it projects and reconstructing their diffractions. Even if the flashes of genius turn out to be shards of glass.
Roxane, the narrator, discovers the Villa Bergamote with the same astonishment as when I first saw it in a bookshop: a dusty Polaroid cover, a little-known publishing house and a flashy description; there was this identical mixture of wary hesitation and intrigued haste. Daughter-in-law of a fashionable political couple, Roxane enters this glamorous environment as a spectator, dressed more in embarrassments than Prada. She navigates between guests and servants, unsure of what she's doing there, looking for escape routes among the crystal and trade winds, with the distracted conviction of those who know they're disturbing, but hope they'll be forgotten in a corner of the décor. She enters this home like one leafs through a family album to which one doesn't quite belong: with the restraint of an uninvited guest and the strange acuity of inner exile.
In this world of hushed exuberance, Roxane learns to weave in and out of the obvious and the sinuous jibes, giving a constant «Chéri» and «Madame et Monsieur». And by dint of observing the consistency of silences, she gradually takes on their thickness. Villa Bergamote, It's eight hectares of luxury, calm and pleasure, framed by high walls of scheming, influence peddling and habitual corruption.
I read this novel on a train, wedged snugly into the seats of the first-class carriage, which was just right: there's enough comfort to feel nothing, but never enough to feel like you belong. Mona Messine's silky-smooth writing, concealing uproar under the carpet and disguising clashes as indifference, slips into the unspoken and never abrupt, as if each sentence hesitated before coming into existence. Beneath the ellipses, however, there's no hint of quiet cynicism or polite irony. She prefers detached lucidity to untimely squeals. It's a prose of restraint, where conflict nestles in discomfort rather than confrontation. It's a prose that grounds and weighs with all its weight, that immobilizes to the point of making the silences around it more massive and impassable.
Chapter after chapter, the whispers of the travelers beside me became as if destined for me, and I was engulfed in the same confusion, the same lethargic nervousness as Roxane. The scenery flashed by without interruption, and I stared at it absently, a dull mist encircling my space. The strangers in the compartment stirred, and I watched them in slow motion, with no control over the moment.
They seemed to have given each other the word: glances that were barely supported, gestures too distinguished not to be calculated. They all seemed to have stepped out of a novel. The well-dressed men spread the tepid perfume of well-born illusions, while the women wore the suit of narrow-minded propriety.
Villa Bergamote you can read the confusion in the thoughts and weary souls of those who know but smile. Leaving behind the slightly bitter taste of truths that we say without raising our voice, because we know they won't change anything.
Quentin Perissinotto is a literary critic for Regard Libre.
Write to the author: quentin.perissinotto@leregardlibre.com
You have just read a review that appeared in our print edition (Le Regard Libre N°118).
Mona Messina
Villa Bergamote
Bouclard
January 2025
176 pages
French 
German 
English