Per Olov Enquist / The Story of Blanche and Marie / A deadly blue light

A deadly blue light

The Story of Blanche and Marie

by Per Olov Enquist, translated by Tiina Nunnally

215pp, Harvill Secker

Anne Enright
Saturday 4 November 2006

Per Olov Enquist has been a great writer for so long in his native Sweden that, at this stage, he can write what he likes. He brings a sense of freedom, and intellectual relish, to The Story of Blanche and Marie, which is not so much the story of two famous women as an interrogation of their story. Enquist likes asking questions of history: this is perhaps a more honest way of proceeding than merely stating the facts.

The facts are amazing - but in a funny sort of way. By the time Marie Curie received her second Nobel prize, in 1911, one of her lab assistants, Blanche Wittman, was a triple amputee, having lost her left arm and both her legs as a result of working with radioactive materials. Blanche had come to Curie from the x-ray department of Salpêtrière, the great female lunatic asylum, where she had once been a star patient - quite literally. Blanche was the "Queen of the Hysterics", one of the women exhibited by Dr Charcot to the good people of Paris, every Wednesday afternoon, for free. A convulsive attack would be provoked by pressing very particular points on their bodies - for which Charcot had the diagram, of course. The need to squeeze, for example, their ovaries also explained the women's state of undress. Everyone took these hysterical displays, which were both violent and swooningly creative, very seriously, including Charcot's one-time assistant, the young Sigmund Freud.

This is very rich stuff; you might think it would be enough for one book at least - but Enquist keeps going. It is what Blanche, as a sublime victim, takes to the story of Marie Curie that interests him most.

Per Olov Enquist

Curie's astonishing achievement - she was the first person to be awarded the Nobel twice - was not reported by the French press. They were too busy publishing her love letters, hounding her as a foreigner - possibly a Jewish foreigner - and the seductress of a married man. Blanche was living in Curie's house at the time, propelling herself about in a little wheeled wooden box. She is, as Enquist tells it, a torso who can write, and it is to her that Marie turns when she needs to talk about the baying crowd, and about love.

This is a book of intersections. Enquist puts the facts down on the page, then he questions, repeats and rearranges them. He nudges and dunts the historical moment, in the hope that it will yield its sweetness. Blanche sees her role as "explaining the connection between radium, death, art and love". The essence the writer extracts is a poetic truth about love, but it is also the story - which is to say the fiction - of the novel itself. Some things, finally, he can simply make up: Blanche, while hypnotised, has a vision of kissing a boy by a river bank; Charcot, her hypnotist, is not only in thrall to her, but actually in love; she spends her last days in Curie's house not bombed out on laudanum, but writing a "book of questions" in three notebooks that have covers of yellow, black and red.

The beautiful, deadly blue light of radium illuminates the novel. This was a time when science and mysticism were still close. Charcot was a believer and Curie was a lover. Enquist admires their wrongheadedness, somehow, as much as, or more than, he admires their work.

The Story of Blanche and Marie is written with the same poetic vigour and eye for the moment as Enquist's last, much acclaimed novel, The Visit of the Royal Physician. It is dizzy with associations and questions, full of interest and appetite and the satisfactions of a good mind. It is a strongly feminist piece of work, and often funny. The aftertaste it leaves, however, is a little strange. Blanche's career as a beautiful hysteric is, quite rightly, suffused with a sense of the ecstatic, but it is odd to see a multiple amputee in the same glowing light. Blanche Wittman was used and then destroyed - what's so attractive about that? Is this what we have to endure, in order finally to understand what love is?

THE GUARDIAN

Olov Enquist was born in 1934 in a small village in Norrland, the northern part of Sweden. After studies at the university of Uppsala he received his MA in 1960. Since the early sixties Enquist has worked as literary and theatre critic for several newspapers and magazines. He is one of Sweden's leading contemporary novelists as well as a playwright. He has been a member of the Swedish Cultural Council, a member of the Board of the Swedish Radio between 1969 and 1973 and of the Board of the Swedish Writers' Association.

Enquist made his literary debut in 1961 with the novel The Crystal Eye, and since then he has published many novels, an essay and short stories which have all brought him international fame and readers in 30 countries.

WithThe Royal Physician's Visit, P O Enquist achieved an international breakthrough with the critics as well as with a large audience. It was awarded the August Prize in 1999. The memoir Another Kind of Life was also awarded the August Prize 2008, making Enquist one of only two writers ever to have received the prestigious August Prize for fiction twice.

Enquist has also written screenplays for TV and film and several plays, including The Night of the Tribades, a play about August Strindberg and his relationship to the women around him. This play made Enquist into one of the most performed Scandinavian playwrights and has enjoyed about 200 productions around the world including a critical success on Broadway.

NORSTEDS AGENCY