Middle-aged, middling academic Helen Bonaparte has left her husband and children at home for a week-long Italian group tour with strangers. Happy with her home life, but needing self-renewal, she intends to sulk in the corners of buses and museums for a week, indulging in great art but scowling the rest of the world away.
Until, that is, she meets Marieke, the tour guide, who becomes the object of erotic fantasies Helen didn't even know she had. As each day passes, Helen's home life recedes, only to be replaced with increasingly bizarre, invasive, and always secretive ways to get closer to Marieke.
As she meanders around tourist gems of Renaissance Italy, Helen must come to terms with her new obsession, existing just on the border of dream and disillusionment, the imaginative and the mundane, the sacred and the profane.
Finalist
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: In Helen Bonaparte, D'Stair tells the story of the titular heroine, a listless academic, who experiences a profound midlife awakening while on tour of Italy. Every page is imbued with longing and lust; every turn of Marieke's head; every hand gesture; every refolding of her green scarf consumes Helen. Across the backdrops of Venice, Florence, Assisi, Pompeii, and Rome, each stop journey becomes more enticing and tempting.
Prose: The prose is highly detailed, often fragmented, almost painterly. Intriguingly, the narrative takes on an objective quality, as though the protagonist is viewing herself externally.
Originality: Tales of sexual and psychological renewal are a mainstay of literature. D'Stair takes an often mesmerizing approach that will leave a deep impression on readers.
Character/Execution: The character of Helen, in particular, is finely drawn. Readers will feel her coming to life via her powerful and overtaking attraction to Marieke as well as her encounters with the art of Italy. Marieke, meanwhile, emerges through subtle descriptions, movements, and gestures.
Blurb: D'Stair takes an often mesmerizing approach to a tale of sexual and psychological renewal that will leave a deep impression on readers.
Date Submitted: April 10, 2024
The evocatively named Helen is still mostly sullen on the trip, except with a vivacious man named Richard, who becomes her travel buddy. Wrapped up in her own narrative, Helen continues to fixate on the details of Marieke's beauty, even as she's reminded of her partner, Marcel, and children at home. As she plunges deeper into fantasy, the narrative alternates between first- and third-person, suggesting a protagonist getting swept away. Soon, after a charged scene before Michelango's David, Helen surreptitiously takes a bite of food with Marieke's fork, just to have a "chance to feel her tongue." Things get increasingly weird as Helen takes advantage of being in Marieke's room to put her toothbrush in her mouth as well as leave her scent—a scene that jolts.
Helen Bonaparte brings poetic vigor to Helen’s imaginings and occasional pushing of boundaries, deftly mingling desire, tension, and the feeling that things could go very wrong. This is a full-bodied, sumptuously written, always perceptive study of yearning for something more, as Helen works through a moment of existential crisis, eager for connection. D'Stair’s prose startles, dazzles, informs, and pleases.
Takeaway: An academic’s obsession plunges her Italian tour into charged erotic suspense.
Comparable Titles: Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Madeline Stevens’s Devotion.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: B
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-
