Day of the Bees: A Novel - Softcover

Sanchez, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 037570177X ISBN 13: 9780375701771

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

Day of the Bees celebrates passion and creativity as it explores the links between love and violence, art and war, and reveals the sacrifices made for love—of person and country.

An American art historian is seeking to discover why the famous painter Zermano abandoned his beautiful muse Louise during World War II. Visiting Louise's cottage in Provence after her death, the scholar finds letters that carry across a panoramic landscape of fifty years and piece together a tempestuous affair with tragic conclusions.

About this title

Review:

The narrator of Thomas Sanchez's fourth novel teaches art history in America, but he dreams of Europe--or more specifically, of Spain. The Professor (as he identifies himself) specializes in a Spanish painter of the 1940s, Francisco Zermano, to whom he has devoted a spate of scholarly articles. He also spends hours staring at the man's paintings, trying to imagine the stories behind them. This iconographic detective is particularly curious about one bit of recurrent imagery: the body of a beautiful woman, which is rumored to belong to Louise Collard, the painter's muse.

As Day of the Bees opens, in fact, Louise has just died alone in a small provincial village, and the Professor rushes to France to learn more about her role in Zermano's life. There he finds a pile of correspondence--and a revelation. According to legend, the artist treated Louise cruelly and abandoned her. Yet the letters reveal a deep and doomed love, one which is forever shattered when Louise is raped by a platoon of enemy soldiers (whom she later describes in her letters as "bees," a wonderfully eerie motif). Zermano, already beaten with a tire iron, is forced to watch the entire event. Here Louise recalls how the rape ruined her life, and its paradoxical resemblance to the redemption of true erotic love:

I have discovered something unnerving--that a woman in sexual ecstasy with her man forgets all detail; when it's over she wants to return and explore this abyss that still makes her tremble. The same thing can happen when she is raped, but for a different reason. Where joy once deleted memory, horror now destroys it. In two acts in her life can a woman lose all consciousness: in the act of lovemaking, and in rape, its cruel parody.

After discovering Louise's letters, many of them never sent, the Professor embarks on a search for the aging Zermano, hoping to help set the record straight. In these chapters, the violent and tragic love story at the heart of Day of the Bees is nicely counterbalanced by an obsessive academic's comedy of errors. Like most of his kind, the narrator is late for trains, professorial to the bitter end, and devoted to (in every sense of the word) ghosts. --Emily White

From the Publisher:

One afternoon I had lunch in a small village in an isolated part of Provence with an expatriate American woman. When the lunch was over, I asked my hostess if she knew of a famous artist's mistress/muse who had lived in the village since the outbreak of the Second World War. The rumor was that the woman had actually been cruelly abandoned there by the artist. The expatriate assured me the muse was not only alive, but lived next door. "Then," I asked, "you must be good friends?" The expatriate answered, "Oh no, she never speaks to me, never speaks to any women. She only speaks to men--three men: the grocer, the pharmacist, and the postman. She lives so close, and yet is such a larger-than-life mystery."

This story stayed with me, and I often wondered what happened between the artist and his muse. Why would a famous painter abandon such a young beauty? Why her reclusiveness over the years? What if he had not abandoned her, but she had abandoned him? I became fascinated as to the truth; not the historical reality of these two people, but the fateful consequence of their passion. What fatal secrets were being concealed? What historical events combined to abort such profound love?

During that summer in Provence I also became fascinated by the story of another woman. She had arrived in France at the turn of the century, an orphan from Russia; her only identity, ironically, was a small crucifix on a chain around her neck (crucifixes were sometimes placed on orphaned children who were smuggled out of Russia during this time to protect them from virulent anti-Semitism). As a young woman, she was active in the French underground during World War II, the only woman in her cell of Resistance fighters. The cell was betrayed, the men shot, and the woman crucified, nails pounded through her hands to the door of the village church. This story fused in my mind with that of the abandoned muse, and together they provided an emotional map for what is now, after ten years of writing, Day of the Bees.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 037570177X
• ISBN 13: 9780375701771
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320