THE REINVENTION OF LOVE by Helen Humphreys (HarperCollins), 309 pages, $29.99 cloth. Humphreys launches the new novel at Dora Keogh on September 14. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Time for Helen Humphreys to snap up one of Canada’s major literary prizes. She took the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for Afterimage, but that was before it came with a whack of cash. With The Reinvention Of Love, she’s earned a spot on the short lists for Canada’s lucrative awards.
The new novel, set in the 1830s and 40s, recounts the real-life love affair between the writer Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Adèle Hugo, wife of the French writer Victor Hugo. But it’s also about art, ego and jealousy as well as the sacrifices women make for their families.
Sainte-Beuve is welcomed into the Hugo household when he becomes the first critic to take Hugo seriously as a poet. He’s immediately smitten with Adèle, and they begin an intense affair.
Humphreys puts lots of ideas in play. There are gender issues (to avoid being recognized, Sainte-Beauve often dresses as a woman when he meets Adèle, for example) and meditations on the enormous amount of energy required to feed Hugo’s gargantuan ego. He’s a secondary character, but he casts a huge shadow over the proceedings, hauling his family into exile from Paris to Guernsey without taking even a second to consider the implications for his children.
As for the relationship between Charles and Adèle, Humphreys has never written about love with such ferocity. She’s been almost coy about sex in previous novels, but she forgoes nuance for passion in gorgeous ways here.
Her poetry is still on full display in rhapsodic sequences about desire, spectacular descriptions of Paris and the house Hugo builds to his narcissistic specifications, and her account of the heartbreaking restrictions of 19th-century social convention.
Glorious.
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