Bluebeard, Amélie Nothomb

Here’s an updated version of Perrault’s 1697 Bluebeard. In the original Bluebeard, a rich nobleman, marries a young girl. She’s initially terrified because the guy’s eight previous wives have all disappeared. He tells her that she’s allowed everywhere in their Castle except for one mysterious room.

“You should not enter that room, if you were to enter it you would sadly have to face my just ire and resentment”. She obviously will enter the room.

Perrault’s tale is a favourite among American feminist academics. Bluebeard’s will is a symbol of the Patriarchy’s rigid structure. The girl’s decision to disobey is a woman’s rebellious act in pursuit of her freedom of choice.

In Amelie Nothomb’s Bluebeard, Saturnine is a young woman from Belgium who works as a substitute teacher at L’École du Louvre. She’s also going through a nightmarish search for a place to stay in Paris. She suddenly finds a dream opportunity: A luxurious 40m2 room with ensuite bath for just 500 euros. 

Even if she finds a long queue of candidates (all female, btw), she gets the room straight away. Only to discover that the owner has had eight previous women as tenants, all of which have mysteriously disappeared. 

Elemirio Nibal y Mílcar is a slightly weird fortysomething aristocrat who lives in his magnificent mansion like some sort of Philip II locked up in El Escorial. Reading theology or mystical books, enjoying its dark aesthetics. 

Nothomb’s approach is somewhat different from that of feminist academics. Individualistic rather than collectivist. Saturnine seems to defend Elemirio’s right to have his own secrets. As a consequence, she’s ok with respecting the forbidden chamber. But she’s also dragged, human as she is, by a strong wish to know. 

They have dinner together every evening. She introduces the ascetic aristocrat to the pleasures of obscenely expensive champagnes. They share culinary delicacies.They reflect on aesthetics and chromatic miracles. Saturnine tries to dig up his sinister secrets while he displays his peculiar somewhat twisted wit.

Bluebeard flows nicely like some creepy romcom. An elegant dark narration and a very quick read: I devoured it in just a few hours.

Bid Time Return (1974). Richard Matheson

Richard Collier, 36, has a brain tumour, and only a few months to live. Out of despair, he decides to dump it all. Determined to live his last weeks without a care, with the sole company of his imagination and dying dreams, he leaves home. He drops a coin, and drives off northward, along the west coast.

He reaches Coronado, near San Diego, where he finds an elegant hotel, perhaps one century-old, neatly reminiscent of a time past. He checks in. There he comes across a 1896 photo of a gorgeous theatre actress, famous back in the day, who played in this same Coronado hotel.

He becomes obsessed with the woman, furiously dragged by the past. Probably because the present is a nightmare. He develops a maddening wish to travel back in time and meet, in the flesh, his beloved ghost. Meet Elise McKenna.

With a titanic effort of self suggestion (and carefully following the instructions of a JB Priestley book*), with the sole aid of his mind, he manages to travel back in time. From 1971 to 1896.

Really? Or was it all just an hallucinatory effect of his brain tumour? Matheson won't let us know. Up to us to decide.

Anyway this is one of the most subtle time travel novels ever written. (I believe Henry James left one* unfinished also on the topic, btw).

With precision and literary skill, Matheson describes the psychological experience of being transplanted (and adjusted) into another century. What would it be like to actually find yourself in the 1890s? Time travelling was never so close and tangible for the reader.

The 1980 movie version is way cheesier in my view. The novel is undoubtedly better and more complex.

(More on this novel and its conception on the Maude Adams post).

*Man And Time, 1964. JB Priestley

*The Sense of The Past, 1917. Henry James (Posthumous and unfinished).