THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609300209
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KATE MELHUISH
LENGTH: 63 lines
THE KNOWLEDGE OF WATER
SARAH SMITH
Ballantine Books. 469 pp. $23.
``Trouble the water enough and it's an Impressionist masterpiece.''
This line of dialogue almost perfectly sums up novelist Sarah Smith's second book. Writing of early 20th century Paris, Smith (The Vanished Child) captures the city of love, art and floods in a shimmering, complex story.
In January 1910, after months of rain, every river in northeastern France has crested almost at once, and floodwaters rage through Paris. The characters in Smith's The Knowledge of Water play out their passions during the most devastating flood in the city's recorded history.
Baron Alexander von Reisden is a doctor specializing in cases of mental disturbance. Himself the victim of a brutal childhood, he now does research that furthers the understanding of human behavior - particularly deviant behavior. Alexander also lives with a horrifying secret, one that makes him especially sensitive to the personalities and disorders of those around him.
His lover, Perdita Halley, a young, nearly blind American girl, devotes herself to study at the Paris Conservatoire with the aim of being a concert pianist. Alexander's cousin Dotty, the widowed Viscountess de Gresniere, a bon vivant of the fashionable Parisian upper class, intends to ensure that her eligible cousin find a more suitable match than Miss Halley.
These characters dance about each other in an artful gavotte. Through short, intense chapters, with dialogue that is both rich and evocative, Smith fashions a story that is as much romance as it is mystery.
A beggar-woman known as the Mona Lisa is stabbed to death and her body later pulled from the Seine. Alexander uses his powerful understanding of the twists in human nature to track the deranged killer before he can strike again. At the same time, he tries to understand Perdita's intense desire for a career.
The novel's central mystery, though, involves a painting in Dotty's collection of oils. An Impressionist work titled ``View of the Seine,'' the painting may be a forgery - or it may be genuine. Alexander, Perdita and Dotty have their own reasons for delving into the truth behind the painting.
Throughout the novel, Smith delves into women's struggle to gain acceptance and recognition of their talents. Certainly in the years before World War I any woman achieving international fame in her chosen field was a rarity. For a woman with family obligations such esteem was very nearly unheard of. This is Perdita's dilemma as she weighs her love for Alexander against her passion for music:
``(A career) would mean, not half measures and genteel music, but the real thing. It would mean to squeeze out of that piano every note and more. It would mean hurt too, and time, a heartless devotion, going away for weeks and months; leaving a husband and a child alone; loving some thing, some idea, as much as any person, and knowing they sensed it, giving hurt for the sake of truth and love.''
Several of the supporting characters are drawn from real-life members of the Parisian art and literary scene of the early 1900s. The most charming is Milly Xico, a Colette look-alike who befriends Perdita and helps her to recognize that ``real women really made art.'' Gertrude Stein and Juan Gris, among others, also appear. MEMO: Kate Melhuish is a former bookseller who lives in Norfolk. by CNB