A debut novel in the mould of German Romanticism

Wanderer. By Sarah Léon. Other Press; 209 pages; $15.95

IN THE middle of winter, in the middle of the French countryside, Hermin, a 30-something composer, gets a knock on his door. Lenny, a child prodigy who vanished from his life a decade before, enters it as suddenly and as cryptically as he had left. For weeks they circle one another uneasily, while Lenny, now 27 years old and a celebrated concert pianist, refuses to disclose why he has decided he will never play the piano again. As snow falls and ice hardens, so does Lenny’s mysterious illness take hold, coughing fits causing him to shudder and shake.

The plot of “Wanderer”, Sarah Léon’s debut novel, would not seem out of place in the library of a fan of 19th-century Sturm und Drang. Indeed it wears its influences—of Goethe, Heine and, most of all, Schubert—heavily, quoting from these writers and that musician throughout. But Ms Léon, who is herself something of a prodigy, having published this novel in France when she was 22 years old, just about manages to keep all these Romantic influences in some sort of equilibrium. The result is an intriguing, poetic work.

Ms Léon, who studied literature and musicology at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, writes most confidently when dealing with musical phrases or expressions. Similarly the pathos of the French countryside is depicted vividly—it is a landscape of a Brueghel painting, Ms Léon using a palette of various shades of grey and blinding, frightening white. Descriptions of the changing effects of light, perhaps a nod to Gustave Flaubert, are particularly striking, such as the moment when the composer finds his younger companion drinking alcohol, alone, in the dark:

“In the growing darkness, his features were barely distinguishable. Only a single ray of light fell on his prominent cheekbone, creating a broken line between night and day. Outside, an evening the colour of wine lees descended on the horizon.”

More characters appear in flashbacks interwoven throughout the novel, which describe Hermin and Lenny’s first meeting and the years leading up to the moment Lenny disappeared from Hermin’s life. In contrast to the bursts of vivid description of music or landscapes, however, these moments can seem rather pallid. Ms Léon’s lyricism does not yet extend to dialogue or characterisation.

The character of Lenny, irascible and pathetic at the same time, can occasionally grate. Evocations of Hermin’s inner life, including a sexuality that seems as frozen as the landscape around him, occasionally verge on the ludicrous: “And now the hour had come, the one he’d imagined as a lustral water that would purify them when they met again, and instead the hour was clouded, even tainted…”. Meanwhile the plot, which seems to build towards a crescendo, the drama of the novel appearing to escalate in tone and content, ends instead on a softer, quieter note. “Wanderer” hints at a potential new talent in French literature—but one who is not there quite yet.