Tatiana Tibuleac has finally arrived in America. A Moldovan journalist and broadcaster turned woman-of-letters, she has lived in Paris since 2008. Her books, at most recent count, have been translated from their original Romanian into at least seventeen languages. She has won most of the major literary honors in her native Moldova, and was awarded the European Union Prize for her second novel, The Glass Garden. Her first, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes, spread rapidly through Europe before becoming a bestseller in Spanish across Central and South America. It is now the first of her books available in English.
The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a novel in fragments, held together by a frame that comes into view only gradually. Aleksy is a fabulously successful painter, as famous for his tragic life story as he is for the work itself—violent canvases populated by figures out of a personal symbol system, with titles like The Secret of the Summer Miscarriages and Wave with a Mother Core Within. When he suddenly loses the ability to paint, a psychiatrist suggests that Aleksy compose a journal devoted to “reliving” the titular summer of his 18th year, from which he draws much of his inspiration.
In 77 chapters, some as short as a single phrase, Aleksy narrates the months he lived with his mother at a rented house in the French countryside, caring for her through the final stages of cancer. From there, he jumps backwards and forwards in time, weaving the many catastrophes of his life around this central thread: the death of his younger sister Mika about a decade prior; his mother’s subsequent descent into depressive catatonia; his own history of psychosis and violence, including the near-murder of a schoolmate and an episode in which he struck his head “against the bathroom tiles twenty-four times, leaving a round, red mark, as if someone had crushed an enormous bedbug”; the periods of drug addiction and institutionalization in his late teens and early 20s; his marriage to a woman named Moira, a vague and idealized figure about whom he all but refuses to speak; and finally the car accident that resulted in the loss of his legs and left his wife permanently brain-damaged.
Given that summary, Tibuleac leaves herself open to accusations of writing mere “trauma porn” on one hand—the list of misfortunes here would rival that of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life if only The Summer My Mother were longer than 180 pages—and vulgar sentimentality on the other. Regarding the second count, Aleksy does seem, at first glance, to fit into two stock roles favored by celebrity book clubs: the difficult teenager who reconnects with a dying parent, and the grieving adult who finds salvation through art. In the end, however, Tibuleac dodges both of these traps, risking them in order to stage their overcoming, and then goes a step further. Through Aleksy, she critiques every major contemporary account of the “purpose” or “justification” of art-making, thus forcing a confrontation with the poverty of our aesthetic life.
Aleksy’s voice, captured by Cure’s translation, oscillates between two main registers, two versions of himself. We enter the book and find ourselves inside the head of a troubled adolescent, a kind of Polish Holden Caufield if he were more disturbed and less sympathetic. “That morning,” reads the opening sentence, “when I hated her more than ever, Mum turned thirty-nine. She was short and fat, stupid and ugly. She was the most useless mother who ever lived.” Aleksy is 18 at the moment narrated, but he sounds closer to 12 or 13; only later do we realize that these are in fact the words of a 32-year-old man sometimes clumsily attempting to perform the speech and thereby inhabit the mind of his youth. The teenaged voice plays counterpoint to and is eventually supplanted by that of the adult—the cynical, cosmopolitan artist who has spent the past decade hobnobbing with wealthy clients, giving television interviews, and lying down on the couches of every famous psychoanalyst in Europe. Aleksy sums up these comings and goings with contempt: “Out of the entire motley, gluttonous world that surrounds me—middlemen who earn more than the artists, directors of prestigious or questionable galleries, art critics crazier than me, Russian oligarchs and Japanese Maecenases, Jewish millionaires who won’t admit that they’re either this or that—only Sacha [my agent] has a vested interest in seeing me alive.”
The most striking passages of the novel occur when these two registers meet. Aleksy spares no detail in describing the smells, excrescences, and humiliations of dying as he retraces the ruination of his mother’s body. The perverse intimacies of caring for such a body as it regresses towards second infancy—from bathing and feeding, to eventually cleaning up vomit, urine, and shit—are handled with courage by both author and character. At several key moments, the older Aleksy drops the pretense of merely “reliving” that summer and begins interpreting it, flagging certain events as decisive in light of all that came after and before. Of his first meeting with Moira: “What would have happened if I hadn’t met her then at John’s house… I would’ve lived that day—or rather, the rest of it—relaxed, full and drunk, remembering trifles and dreaming of trifles… And my summer would have passed beautifully, but as unyielding as a nun, leaving behind a few crumbs of happiness and taking in exchange an almost unused life.” This accidental encounter bears the weight of his whole tragic past and the seeds of his unlikely future, but also the ghosts of other futures suddenly cancelled out.
Alongside the older self “going down” into the world of the younger bearing ambivalent news from the future—a future unthinkable to the teenager who has at this point never even considered making a painting and has hardly left his poor, ethnic neighborhood in London—Tibuleac also gives us moments in which the younger self surges up into the consciousness of the older. These make up the emotional heart of the book, and they are the aspect which readers will remember best. Distinguished from the performative juvenility of the opening sentences, this fourth mode of discourse appears as a staccato art-speech reminiscent of Paul Éluard and Pablo Neruda, usually marked off from the rest of the text: “Mum’s eyes were fields of broken stems,” reads the whole of Chapter 28; “Mum’s eyes were seashells that had grown into trees,” says Chapter 55. Elsewhere, a list of kennings, describing the figure of his mother in the huge white dress that she wore to disguise her emaciation: “Toothpaste-Mum. / Esophagus-Mum. / Roundworm-Mum. / Cable-Mum. / Chalk-Mum. / Bone-Mum. / Thread-Mum. / Comet-Mum. / Candle-Mum.”
These scraps of language seem to have emerged spontaneously from Aleksy’s adolescent mind in response to the brute facts of his mother’s dying, confronting a mangled life with a mangled speech. Though no single line in itself rises to the level of great lyric poetry, in the total context of the novel they can be read as the first stirrings of a nascent artistic consciousness, the seeds from which his oeuvre and career will grow. They are the phrases and images that will repeat ceaselessly in the deep background of his life, singular and impenetrable, kernels of truth lodged in the brain like shrapnel—or, as he calls them, “memory-jewels.”
These memory-jewels will become the defining motifs of Aleksy’s work. He begins drawing while institutionalized precisely in order to rid himself of such moments, as if he could surgically remove them from his head and transplant them onto the canvas. The model of art-making at play here is purgative, externalization intended as a means to forgetting. The result is precisely the opposite. The more Aleksy paints, the more preoccupied he becomes with these very memories, compulsively repeating the same images in sketches even after he is dropped from the art-therapy group: “Dad’s fist with the golden ring,” “Grandma wearing eyepatches,” “Mum among walnuts and apples.” There are a few “beautiful” moments as well, drawn largely from the central summer in France and dominated by the figure of sunflowers.
Art for Aleksy thus becomes a way of reliving his memories, both the good and the bad, and of consolidating the “objective” facts of his life, the associations they evoke, and the affective charge they carry into appropriately chimerical figures on the canvas and phrases pushed to the edge of sense. These inward explorations are motivated neither by the desire to better understand his past nor to communicate a message derived from that past. They are, rather, attempts to sustain a fascinated encounter with the contents of his own mind at a degree of maximum intensity, a drive towards a state connected with death: “Paradise—for me at least—would mean living those same few days over and over again as if it were the first time.”
Aleksy is basically indifferent to his audience, and we have no doubt he would continue painting (or trying to) if not a single one of his works sold. But they do sell, and towards the end of the novel he offers his own theory of their appeal: “[B]ecause people are damaged and they look for damaged things,” he says with a shrug. There is no moment of redemption here, no pretension that individual suffering may be sublimated into universal truth, such as one might say of Mahler’s final symphony, or of Goya’s Black Paintings. If the paintings are, for Aleksy, merely the necessary vehicle for quasi-hermetic journeys into his own mind, for his patrons they are a means to identification, a way to encounter their own damage through his. But, crucially, the viewer undergoes this encounter without ever properly grasping either Aleksy’s pain (because they project themselves onto it) or their own (because they can only bear to confront themselves through him).
Thus the three dominant justifications of art in our time—as a strategy of self-knowledge, as means of therapy, as a road to empathy—are thrown out with the soiled bathwater. And add to these a few, more troubling accounts: art as a form of ethnic or national expression (a reading forced upon Aleksy in print by a Ukrainian journalist who he promises to murder if he ever meets again), or art as a pleasant lie we tell ourselves in order to live (the path taken by Aleksy’s mother, who lives her final days among invented scenes of a happy family life; Aleksy understands her drive to fabulate, but cannot take it up himself). What then remains but the artwork as the product of private compulsions pursued beyond all reasonable bounds, the oeuvre as psycho-cartography, the practice itself as infinite auto-analysis undertaken without hope of a cure, or even desire for one? This is a portrait of the artist at once grandiose and abject—as pervert Christ locked in the tomb, fingering his wounds; with the viewer as voyeur at the keyhole—but Tibuleac comes by it honestly and develops it convincingly.
When Aleksy loses his ability to paint, he loses the one practice capable of holding his mind together. We never uncover the specific source of his “block”; instead, Tibuleac leaves us to confront the possibility that his creative powers were never “blocked” at all, but simply exhausted. He has not struck an obstacle, but found the end of a road. There is no substitute for the losses suffered and no repair for the damage inflicted, Tibuleac tells us, only temporary strategies that allow one to carry on until one can go no farther. Art-making (or viewing) is one such strategy, no more nor less.
It’s not the palliative moral we’ve come to expect from our bestsellers, but perhaps the global response to a book articulating such a message with such unrelenting force speaks to a welcome developments: a rising dissatisfaction with the various sentimental liberal-humanisms on offer, the first tremors of longing for a new kind of novel struggling to be born.
Jon Repetti
Jon Repetti is a writer and critic from New York City. He works in publishing.