My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition” (p 98), and this is what Elizabeth Strout is pretty good at. In a comparatively small book with comparatively little text she lets her protagonist, Lucy Barton, look back on a time she had to spent in hospital, away from her two little children, away from her husband and her everyday duties. Her situation of having to stay in a hospital gives her room and time for reflection, but also for rare talks with her mother, who comes to visit her for five days. It’s obviously meant to be a story – a very troubled story – of a daughter and her mother, who were never close or dear with another. And still, there is still love and there’ll always be love. Strout manages to say the important things and, at the same time, leaves many things unsaid because they cannot be said due to the distance between mother and child. She astonishes the reader with this strange, distant relationship without judging the mother or leaving her unlikeable. Many of Lucy’s thoughts are being shared, concerning her writing (“And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone!” p 24, “Never ever defend your work.” p 107), her insecurities (“As has often been the case with me, I began to dread this in advance.” p 75), her motherhood or her marriage, which she knows at the point of writing will not last. (“There are days when I feel I Iove him more than I did when I was married to him, but that is an easy thing to think – we are free of each other, and yet not, and never will be.” p 148) They are common thoughts packed in a rather simple, lean language and sentence structure, often written just as she would speak them. And therein lies the beauty for me, because it made it so easy to dive into that world, every now and then recognizing Lucy’s thoughts as my own.

What a lovely, breezy read! This is Lucy Barton and this is the story of her childhood and her life as a grown woman. Lucy is in hospital and her mother comes to visit her and that’s where the story really begins. It is the presence of her mother that takes her back to her home in Illinois. She revisits places, people she had known, the gossips of small town that seemed lost in her New York life. She begins looking into her own marriage, men whom she has admired and disliked, women whom she has loved and not forgotten. and all the kindness and heartlessness she has withstood from people she would never meet again. How common her life was to ours! This was a beautifully written novel. Strout writes with simplicity, with a tone that makes you want to sit down and breathe. That’s what her writing felt like, a breathe of air; you inhale and let go with every turn of the page. In such a small book, the author has said so many things and not for a second making it sound unreal or impossible. It really seemed as though Lucy isn’t fictional. She is real, she is someone you have known but never cared to listen to because your life was busy figuring out your story. It seemed she was a woman you would pass by on the street, or a neighbour looking out the window with a smile to acknowledge a bright, sunny day.

Há muito pouco de Elizabeth Strout publicado no Brasil – infelizmente. Apenas seu penúltimo romance MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON (aqui, Meu nome é Lucy Barton, com tradução de Sara Grünhagen), o que é uma pena, pois os leitores brasileiros não estão tendo acesso a uma das maiores escritoras americanas da atualidade. Nem OLIVE KITTERIDGE, ganhador do Pulizer de Ficção em 2009 e base de uma série estrelada por Frances McDormand, ganhou uma tradução no Brasil.A obra da escritora tem ao centro personagens femininas e seus dilemas cotidianos. Há algo em Strout que lembra Alice Munro, embora o cenário seja outro, mas a delicadeza e precisão com que constróis perfis e tramas a partir destes a americana tem em comum com a canadense. O romance Lucy Barton é algo raro no gênero, sempre tão preocupado com a formação de personagens masculinos. Aqui temos um romance de formação que recusa o rótulo e traz como protagonista uma mulher.Narrada pela própria Lucy que tem a vantagem de olhar para o passado e revisitar episódios de sua vida, a trama se passa durante cinco noites nos anos de 1980, quando ela estava num hospital em Nova York, onde tirou o apêndice, mas ainda convalesce de uma doença que os médicos não conseguem diagnosticar. Inesperadamente sua mãe, com quem não fala há anos, aparece no hospital, e isso traz à tona memórias da infância.Os anos de formação da personagem são contados de forma quase factual. Strout não deixa se levar por sentimentalismos, sua precisão ajuda a dimensionalizar Lucy, e sua infância solitária, que, conforme ela confidencia, a levaram a se tornar uma escritora. E isso persiste até essa vida adulta, na qual é divorciada e mãe de duas filhas pequenas. E essa doença misteriosa que a mantém por meses no hospital? Poderia ser algo psicossomático que se cura com a presença da mãe e a reconciliação das duas.Apesar da mãe ser faladora, cheia de histórias sobre pessoas que as duas conhecem, ou conheciam, é nos silêncios que elas se entendem. É quando aquilo que não precisa ser dito emerge que elas podem olhar olhos nos olhos (nem que seja simbolicamente), ver a verdade de uma na outra. Strout parece conhecer isso muito bem. Suas personagens são repletas de nuances, assim como os laços que as une. É também um prazer encontrar um romance sobre a formação emocional e o amadurecimento de uma mulher – atualmente, Elena Ferrante, com seu quarteto napolitano é outra que tem feito isso – num gênero tão dominado pelos ritos de passagem de garotos para homens.

There is something so captivating about the voice of Lucy Barton, it made me wish to slow read this novel, as if it were a box of exquisite chocolates that require enormous self-discipline not to finish in one sitting.Lucy Barton is in hospital after an operation and isn’t healing as she should, the very kind Doctor doesn’t understand why, so keeps her under observation.That Lucy finds so many people whose path she crosses in adulthood so very kind or nice, is a telling detail.Her husband, of whom her parents disapprove and have never met, arranges for her mother to visit Lucy, they haven’t seen each in years, but over five days she sits near her bed and they chat as if those years of silence hadn’t been.It’s as if Lucy Barton relives a part of her childhood as an adult, but transplanted to a safe, uneventful place, a room in a hospital where they will not be interrupted, except by the occasional nurses."Then my mother and I talked about the nurses; my mother named them right away: “Cookie,” for the skinny one who was crispy in her affect; “Toothache,” for the woebegone older one; “Serious Child,” for the Indian woman we both liked."Lucy now lives in NY, her parents are from the rural town of Amgash, Illinois, life for them, including her siblings hasn’t changed much, Lucy however liked to stay after school near the warm radiator, doing her homework, reading books. She read her way through school and out of their town, almost by accident, into university and onward to marriage, children and writing stories.Her turning point she wonders, came through a chance encounter with a woman in a dress shop, a writer, in whom she recognises something she can’t quite articulate. She attends one of her workshops and though intending to work on a novel, begins to write sketches of scenes of her mother visiting her in hospital, these are the pages she shares in her private meeting with the author, who gives her this advice:"Then she said, “Listen to me, and listen to me carefully. What you are writing, and what you want to write,” and she leaned forward again and tapped with her finger the piece I had given her, “this is very good and it will be published. Now listen. People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. Such a stupid word, ‘abuse’, such a conventional and stupid word, but people will say there’s poverty without abuse, and you will never say anything. Never ever defend your work. This is a story about love, you know that. This is a story of a man who has been tortured every day of his life for things he did in the war. This is the story of a wife who stayed with him, because most wives did in that generation, and she comes to her daughter’s hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone’s marriage going bad, she doesn’t even know it, doesn’t even know that’s what she’s doing. This is a story about a mother that loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.”"Through her writing, her listening to her neighbour Jeremy speak of the necessary ‘ruthlessness’ of the artist, of Sarah Payne’s writing advice to take any weakness in her story and address it head-on, Lucy Burton moves her life and her narrative on from its traumatic past, to a new empowered beginning."But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go – to Amgash, Illinois – and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think."Absolutely loved it, hypnotic, slowly affirming a life that can grow and change and evolve out of traumatic experience, that past narratives don’t define future stories, that love is as hardy as a seed that grows out of rock, not impossible to bloom even in the harshest of circumstances.

さらっと読んでしまってはもったいない。言葉少ないこの小説は、決して単純ではない重層的な響きを奏でる。ストラウトにとって重要な一冊になるのは間違いない。（２０１６年のブッカー賞では、ロングリスト入りで終わったが）著者はこれまで４冊の小説を出版し、つねに家族を描いてきた。今回も、疎遠になった母と娘のその距離の取り方と心情を巧みに描いた。しかし又、これまでとは大きな違いもある。それは、著者初の一人称小説であり、その「わたし」が作家であるという点だ。さらにもうひとり、実に印象的な作家が登場し（著者自身を思わせる）、主人公の「わたし」が書いた原稿を読み、解読し、作家の心構えをアドバイスする。（その原稿が、この小説の母と娘の深い溝と情愛を描いた部分なのであるが）しかしこの愛すべきメンター作家は必ずしも絶対ではなく、主人公はその弱点を感じ取るのであるが。つまりこれは小説内小説という構造をもつ、小説についての小説でもあるのだ。著者Elizabeth Stroutは、架空の小説家Lucy BartonとSarah Payneと三つ巴で、小説とは？作家とは？と煩悶しながら、『My Name Is Lucy Barton』という、母娘の普遍的物語に結実し読者に問うたというわけだ。さて、小説の中では、こんなことが言われている。 作家はruthless でなければならない。 しかしcompassionateであるのは悪くない。 judgeしてはいけない。 protectしてはいけない。 神のごとくopenな心で頁にむかおう。作者のこんな心構えを知ると、甘いと思っていたこの小説の結末も許せそうな気がするのですが。