Thirty-three Swoons - Martha Cooley
by Zia ~ July 6th, 2005. Filed under: Books.There are certain writers who are not terribly prolific, but what they have published seems so precious that you treasure what they have written. Martha Cooley is one such writer–and when I saw Thirty-three Swoons at the library, I pounced.
Camilla Archer has a past shrouded in some mystery; when her mother died in Paris, her father, a perfumer, brought her back to New York to live with her mother’s brother and his family, including her cousin Eve. In the present, Camilla owns a theatre memorabilia shop with her ex-husband. When Eve dies, her 25-year old daughter Danny starts searching for her father–a man who was never identified–and Camilla is forced to take a look at her own past to provide answers to a woman she has always considered her own daughter.
The story is riveting and beautifully written. (And what’s not to like about a novel that mentions Mitsouko, my all-time favorite perfume?) But what sets Thirty-three Swoons apart from a great tale is not the tale itself, but the novel’s structure.
Cooley has woven in the story of the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and, even more fantastically, his djinn–a strange creature who infiltrates dreams and suggests courses of action–and who moves on to Camilla after Seva’s (Meyerhold) death. “Think of me as real,” he says. “Whether or not I am is unimportant, an idle theoretical question.” The unconscious, perhaps? Or what we deem inspiration? But as he says, it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps the best way to sum up the novel is, again, in the djinn’s own words in the very beginning: “I could make a few additional remarks, but I don’t wish to prejudice you. Seva felt strongly about this. The audience, he insisted, should always be defamiliarized.
And Cooley delivers. The result is a multilayered novel that delves far deeper than merely telling a tale. Highly recommend.