Book review: Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s Marie brings us into the mysteries of a woman’s mind

Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s contrast between her heroine’s internal and external world makes for a rich, compelling read.

Marie by Madeleine Bourdouxhe is published by Daunt Books Publishing.
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The facts of her protagonist Marie’s life – a 30-year-old happily married woman who’s intelligent and beautiful – are clearly not the story Madeleine Bourdouxhe is interested in telling. As Marie herself protests towards the end of the narrative: “Life isn’t a story to be told like that. At the very most it might be something that could be shown...”

Indeed, to describe the plot of Marie is to inevitably fail to do justice to both the novel's power and precision. Bourdouxhe does nothing as pedestrian as simply tell a story; instead she sets out to show us the complicated workings of one woman's consciousness.

It would be fair to say that the events depicted – so far as one can call them such, since Bourdouxhe doesn’t deal in plot in a traditional sense yet she’s certainly not as avant-garde a writer as to dismiss it altogether, but hers isn’t a novel in which things happen as much as characters exist – are spurred into action by a chance encounter between Marie and a young man she sees lying on the beach one day. However, to describe Bourdouxhe’s novel as the story of a relationship would be to miss the larger and more important emphasis on Marie’s awakening mindfulness as she strives to free herself from the routines of domesticity and wifely responsibility, pushing instead for solitude, freedom and a life lived without constant witnesses.

It’s a yearning she feels deep within, long before she’s able to give it a proper name, “Like a warm beast that moved inside her, making its nest.”

Originally published in Brussels in 1943 with the title A la recherche de Marie, Bourdouxhe's 1930s-set novel wore its homage to Proust on its sleeve. From the start, Marie's interior world holds more sway than that of the external one around her – "Closing her eyes again, she raised her knees and rested her head upon them. He wanted their embraces to last forever ... they were still dancing". Although, fittingly, when she does venture into descriptions of the latter, from the sun-blistered beaches of the Côte d'Azure, to the bustling boulevards and train stations of Paris, or the rain-drenched northern French town of Maubeuge, it's a sense of heady atmosphere rather than geographical specificity that pervades.

Central to her talents though is a Proustian slippage between experience and memory, and here, as with so many elements of the novel, the ease with which this is conjured nearly conceals the power of the actual effect. Bourdouxhe’s depiction of Marie’s interiority is richly and complexly drawn, the acuity of her portrait all the more realistic because at no point does she revert to anything overly dramatic.

Outwardly content yet inwardly dissatisfied, Marie vacillates between action and apathy, and it’s these quiet ambivalences rather than any grand gestures that render Bourdouxhe’s portrait of a woman, if not personhood, more realistic than most.

As this new edition's talented translator Faith Evans astutely suggests in her afterword, alongside Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, the novel also reverberates with echoes of the writings of Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Marguerite Duras.

Oftentimes a distinctly Woolfian consciousness shines through, moments in which Marie feels an intense connection to the world around her: “She felt that even the slightest increase in the link between her and all of these things would make her dizzy to the point of vertigo; that she would die of excitement if the word that defines these specific meanings were ever to be uttered.” All in all it’s a gem of a novel ripe for rediscovery.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance reviewer based in London.