This gem of a novella, first published in 1983 and reissued this summer, traces a day in Giverny from sunrise to sunset. We follow Claude Monet into his garden and watch the sun slip over willow trees, pool in dirt paths, and nudge the crystalline stillness of a slumbering pond. It is often opined that Impressionism was a movement for painting, not for writing, but Figes accomplishes in prose what the artist struggled to do in paint—to, as her protagonist puts it, “break through the surface of the envelope, the opaque surface of things.”
This book is light, in more ways than one. It is a slim thing for a big swing, exacting but not taxing. Monet strained to catch the fleeting moment on canvas, but this book is interested in how the hours of a day square up to the experiences of a life: when the past shades into the present, a shadow can contain years; a blue sky can be a promise or a minefield. Art history buffs can look forward to cameos by fabled fringe figures like the provocative anarchist (and horticultural hedonist) Octave Mirbeau, but more interesting, perhaps, are the little-known characters whose minds we inhabit for just minutes at a time: Alice, an aging mother protecting a penumbra of grief from her light-obsessed husband, or Marthe, the stepdaughter whose hidden hopes wax and wane with the afternoon. Not a book to overstay its welcome, we leave the family with the dying light—but what a pleasure, to spend a summer’s day in Giverny.