For Rouenna: A Novel - Hardcover

Nunez, Sigrid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374254303 ISBN 13: 9780374254308

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

From one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation, the story of a woman in the Vietnam War

"After my first book was published, I received some letters." So begins Sigrid Nunez's haunting novel about the poignant and unusual friendship between a writer and a retired army nurse who seeks her out decades after their childhood in the same housing project. Among the letters the narrator receives is one from a Rouenna Zycinski, recalling their old connection and asking if they can meet.Though fascinated by the stories Rouenna tells about her life as a combat nurse in Vietnam, the narrator flatly declines her request that they collaborate on a memoir. It is only later, in the aftermath of Rouenna's shocking death, that the narrator is drawn to write about her friend--and her friend's war. Writing Rouenna's story becomes all-consuming, at once a necessity and the only consolation.

For Rouenna, an unforgettable novel about truth, memory, and unexpected heroism by one of the most gifted writers of her generation, is also a remarkable and surprising new look at war.

About this title

About the Author

Sigrid Nunez is the author of A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, and Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. She has been the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and of two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from For Rouenna by Sigrid Nunez. Copyright © 2001 by Sigrid Nunez. To be published in November, 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
After my first book was published, I received some letters. Most of them were from strangers, people who had read the book and who wanted me to know what they thought of it. They were friendly letters for the most part, though a few were critical. ("I hope you won't mind my saying that I did not like the ending at all," and so on.) I also heard from people I had known in the past. Near strangers: people I had not been in touch with for twenty, thirty years and whom I rarely if ever still thought about. Almost every one of these letters began with an expression of doubt that I would remember the sender, and my letters in reply always began with an assurance that I did remember, which was the truth. Even before I opened one of these letters, I would recognize the name written above the return address on the envelope. (Sometimes I recognized the handwriting.) Almost always unfamiliar, though, was the return address itself. These old acquaintances of mine, these ghosts from my past, had moved away from the places where I had known them, some very far. One of the few letters from the state of New York had been mailed from a men's penitentiary. Sometimes the writer wrote PERSONAL On the envelope, or PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. "I hope you will remember my sorry ass," the letter from the inmate began, "now that it has landed in jail."

Unlike the ones I received from strangers, these letters were not usually about my book. In fact, often the writer had not read the book but had only heard of it, from a review, say, and had been moved to get in touch "after all these years." These letters tended to be long--three or four pages--and filled with autobiographical detail. They took me back--to college, to high school, and even further. I heard from three women who had been my best friends in seventh grade. (Most of the people I heard from were women.) Rarely was I surprised to learn what had become of people. They had married. They had had children. The jobs they were in were the jobs I might have predicted for them. It was their wanting to tell me all this that surprised me and that I found poignant.

I answered every letter. And usually that was the end of it. I would not hear from the person again, or if I did it was just once more. A much shorter letter might come; a postcard. One of s20the friends from seventh grade dug up and sent an old photograph, me at thirteen, along with a copy of a poem in my own juvenile hand, which I threw away, unread, remembering only too well the kind of poem I wrote at thirteen.

Time passed. A year, another year, enough time for me to finish another book--a long period when no such letters came. And then one day there came one more. ("I don't know if you remember me.") From Brooklyn this time. And this time I did not remember.

I did not remember a Rouenna Zycinski. I was sure I had never known her. But many years ago, according to her letter, we had been neighbors in the same public housing project, on Staten Island. She was older than I, this woman, the same age as my elder sister, and she remembered her, and my other sister, and my mother and father. She gave everyone's name and the number of the building we had lived in and the apartment number--she gave all this information in her letter, and it was all accurate. That world--the world of the projects--I had written about in my first book, which she had just read. The book had brought that world back to her, had brought back many memories, and that was all she wanted to say.

I answered the letter right away, thanking her for writing, and then I forgot about her, until a few weeks later, she wrote again. We were, she said (hardly accurately this time, in my opinion), neighbors once more. Brooklyn, Manhattan. Two stops on the L train. A matter of minutes. Could we meet?

I did not want to. I had no desire to meet this woman. She was a stranger, and I am wary of strangers. Ours was only the slenderest connection. Not even her name rang a bell. She and her family had moved out of the projects some forty years ago. My own family had moved out ten years later. Why should we meet? I could think of no good reason. And I had the uneasy feeling that this woman wanted something--something more than just to meet. I could not say what it was, but I sensed that there might be some danger--no, danger is melodramatic--some trouble that could come of meeting her, and I had enough trouble. Had she been a man, I do not think it would have been hard for me to say no. But a peculiar sense of obligation nagged me, as if I owed this woman, this perfect stranger from the margins of my book of memories--but what could I possibly owe her?

I had enough trouble. The arrival of this woman's letters coincided with an odd time in my life--an unhappy time. When her first letter came, I had just broken up with a man I had been living with for several years. I had moved out of the apartment we'd shared (his apartment before we met) and into a new one. I was alone. (She was alone, too; though she did not say so, I could not imagine Rouenna Zycinski except living all alone, those two subway stops away in Brooklyn.) Midway through unpacking, I had lost heart and quit. I was living in disarray, half out of boxes--I hardly knew where anything was. The kitchen was bare, I had not yet once used the stove--I went out for everything, from morning coffee to midnight drink. I went out alone--I was avoiding people. I was avoiding having to explain that G. and I were no longer together. I was avoiding having to answer questions about my work, about how my next book was going, and having to explain that it was not going, I had abandoned that book. I had not written anything for months. I'd had to move quickly and was forced to take more or less the first place I saw. Two small rooms that even put together would not have made one large one. The sofa here, the bed there, and no more space. The floor was splintery, the light was--well, there was no light. Almost all the tenants in the building were women. The landlord would not rent to single men or to families (not that it was easy to imagine any family squeezing into one of the cramped apartments that had been carved out of that once-elegant townhouse). So we were mostly women; I had young women living on all sides. I had forgotten how much young women cry. And it seemed I was not the only one with romantic troubles. I often heard couples fighting--how my pulse would surge whenever I heard that. And once, an anguished male voice bellowed up and down the air shaft--I love you, you bitch!--and I burst into tears.

In that building also were many cats. I think every woman had one. (Dogs were not allowed--the landlord had the same low opinion of dogs as he had of single men.) Coming home sometimes I would glance up at the facade of the building and see the familiar curvaceous silhouette in almost every other window. My own cat prowled the cluttered rooms with wide, disbelieving eyes. At first he meowed a lot, as if imploring me . . . Then he grew silent and grave, as (I supposed) the truth sank in: the order that he was accustomed to and needed and loved did not follow wherever we went but belonged to that other life, the one we had left behind forever.

Instead of making order, instead of settling down in my new place and getting on with life, I dreamed of going away. I had read Marguerite Yourcenar's account of how she had traveled by train across the United States, writing portions of her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian. "Closed inside my compartment as if in a cubicle of some Egyptian tomb, I worked late into the night between New York and Chicago; then all the next day, in the restaurant of a Chicago station . . . then again until dawn, alone in the observation car of a Sante Fé limited." Page after page of this work that had given her so much difficulty for so many years now poured out of her, and: "I can hardly recall a day spent with more ardor, or more lucid nights."

Irresistible fantasy. New York to California. I would visit S. in San Francisco. Days of ardor. Lucid nights. Writing as I had never done before.

Irresistible fantasy: the look on G.'s face when I told him. It had been one of his chief complaints: I was incapable of just the sort of act I was now contemplating. I had no sense of adventure, I was the least spontaneous person alive. ("Someone says to you let's have sex, and you say just a minute I have to go make out my will.") If I did not do more--go out, travel, see more of the world, get more experience of life--I would end up having nothing to write about. It had been one of the last things he had said to me before we broke up (though he was hardly saying it to me for the first time), and the way he said it, that final time, I felt as if he were putting a curse on me.

It was not the sort of trip that people made anymore--certainly not alone. I was told that my fellow passengers would be mostly families. And things were different now than they had been in the forties. Now there would be music, or Muzak, playing in that Chicago station restaurant. Nor would Yourcenar likely find herself alone in that observation car. The trains were almost always crowded now, rarely quiet, hardly the place for reading, let alone writing masterpieces. Always the sound of someone's chatter or snoring, the tinny music coming out of other people's Walkmans, or the beeps and quacks of someone's computer game--this, at least, had been my own experience riding trains in recent years. The filth of the toilets. The bad food. The families with young children in neighboring compartments. "Will all the compartments be full?" I asked the booking agent. "Oh, yes. And you'd better make up your mind fast. We book these trains ten months in advance."

So much for spontaneity.

But I had fallen into one of those writer's traps: I had let myself become convinced that in order to begin writ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0374254303
• ISBN 13: 9780374254308
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208