Briefly, A Delicious Life

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As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George’s case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involved an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training). Stevens tempers this excitement with tragedy, and Briefly, A Delicious Life is also about the ways a body can betray a person, especially a woman.

If you prefer novels that let you join with the characters within them, you're apt to be disappointed. Though Stevens’s idealized view of Sand can feel a bit Mary Sue–ish, for the most part it credibly reflects Blanca’s romanticizing of a woman who “dressed like a man, kissed like a man, smoked like a man. While she tries to figure George out, Blanca reflects on her own memories of life before she died and how her young death came to be. Once I’d found my way inside a person’s head,” she explains, “their pasts were right there, under the slop and tide of feelings on the surface, and I could see it all for myself, as though I was translating a language I didn’t know I knew.

This book was captivating to put it simply, there was something so grounded and relatable unlike anything I’ve read before even though it is a story centered around a ghost. She and her mother find the monks in the charterhouse sexy (‘so much muscle and heft and fat and their lovely broad shoulders under their habits’), but this enthusiasm infuses everything. She was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award, [7] and has written for publications including The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and Granta.

The children and servant looked astonished to find themselves there—kept looking around at the walls and ceiling, at their feet on the floor—as though this was as unexpected by them as it was by me. Briefly, A Delicious Life is the story of Blanca, a ghost who died young and stays close to a small village in Mallorca where she lived. As Chopin becomes gravely ill, Stevens alternates the lovers’ story with Blanca’s memories of her own life and death, and Blanca dwells on feelings of blame toward the man who got her pregnant during their affair. That morning, I had gone into the garden to try my hand at swatting fruit from the branches of one of the taller trees, and after that to sneak up on the starlings and howl, which would send them into the air together like a single giant bird. It never really sounded exactly my kind of book, but I was tempted by the idea of a ghost in love with a woman.She not only acts as a watcher like, Death does in The Book Thief, but she also has this ability to directly interact and somewhat influence what is going on in the narrative. A young man, or perhaps he was still a boy, was attempting to direct the porter leading a donkey laden with cases. And still, for all my expertise, there was no sign whatsoever of where these two people had sprung from: the same old corridors, same echoes, same spiders crawling from beam to beam across the ceiling. A decade or so after that, there was the boy from the village who sold bad oranges with the boy in the kitchens who made bad preserves.

Aside from Blanca the ghost, there is a clear historical foundation for many, if not most, of the scenes in this book: Chopin's music pieces, Sand's writing and affairs, the family's stay in Mallorca, the antipathy they encountered there. It’s pages are a lush ode to the ways in which the human spirit carves a legacy, the ways our feelings are strong enough to last long after our bodies fall away. A stomach-dropping, blood-fizzing, breath-stopping, knotted lurch-and-swoop that I recognized, by then, as the first faltering step towards falling in love. Blanca is a furious, hilarious fourteen year old ghost who lives in the former monastery where Sand and Chopin have come to escape the pressures of life in Paris, along with Sand’s children and a maid.

She was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award and is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. George, one of our central characters, rejects marriage and typical women’s fashion, adopting trousers and suits for most of the book.