Disclosure: I love Florence Noiville’s fiction. Everything that Teresa Lavender Fagan translates is a favourite. I was mesmerised by the duo’s novel, Attachment and I wanted to wait a few years before I picked up Noiville’s other books. When I finally read A Cage in Search of a Bird, I was reminded again why I love their work so much. Sparse and unsparing, Noiville’s novel offers a vivid canvas of two women’s psyches while Fagan’s elegant translation recreates the canvas using an equally beautiful and searing colour palette.
Originally published in French as L’illusion délirante d’être aimé in 2015, the novel was translated into English in 2016. We follow Laura Wilmote, a television journalist in Paris, who does her work with singular focus and prefers to keep to herself at her workplace. She is not exactly known for her sociable nature but is respected by her colleagues for her dedication to her job and for doing it well. Besides her work, the other axis of her life is her Mexican boyfriend Eduardo who adores her and is more upbeat of the two. For Laura, this is as perfect as life can be. A “solitary and discreet” creature who has taken pains to guard her private life from unnecessary scrutiny.
But all happiness is short-lived. A friend from the past, C, seeks her help finding a job. Laura gets her one at the same television status as her. C has a strange effect on her – by her own admission, this friend was well-read, informed, lively, and intelligent. Their younger years were spent in more intimate company of each other. Now, Laura remembers how she had been “kidnapped” as a friend. Ravished by C.
For C, simply being grateful to Laura isn’t enough. She also cannot seem to accept that very little remained of their original friendship. Frantic calls are made at all hours of the day, C begins to dress up as Laura, there are also attempts to do the same work as her at the television station. The obsessive devotion-jealousy-hatred points to something meaner, more rotten in C. It could be a clinical condition.
In the meantime, Laura discovers De Clérambault’s syndrome – the delusional illusion of being loved. A disorder mostly – if not always – seen in women. A somewhat sexist disorder, its main symptom is a woman’s unshakable belief that another person is secretly in love with them, and the “secret admirer” is almost always an unattainable man of significant riches and social standing. Only here, C is not interested in any such fantastical man. The woman of her dreams is Laura. As for Laura, the constant correspondence from C is “irritating, demented, exasperating, and acidic.”
She is chased down at work and home. And imitation is no longer just flattery. While Laura cannot say that she fears for her life exactly, she is sure that being the centre of someone’s (unwanted) attention is not what she wants either. So much so that she can no longer take C’s name – C stands for “creepy” and “Clérambault”. Laura knows she’s the victim (one who is irritated, aggravated, concerned) while C is the aggressor (one who waits endlessly and limitlessly). Still, she is terrified of the feelings that rise in her. She does not want to fall into the “trap of compassion” for C.
Eduardo’s refusal to take the matter seriously and her male friends regaling here with their own stories of crazy female stalkers don’t help either. Even as she maintains a strictly-imposed silence with C, she can hear the “supreme order” C sends her way: Love me! Be me!
The only way out of this mess, as a psychiatrist tells her, is death. Either the admirer kills herself or kills the object of her obsession. Either way, it’s an unpleasant conclusion. Laura cannot say she likes what the future holds for her. Can she really punish C for this “endless love”? Moreover, what will such an ending say about her? Perhaps it is a punishment for a sin long committed and forgotten. “Hostility. Solitude. Guilt. I must have done something to deserve all this,” she thinks.
As C’s delusions become increasingly incurable and Laura’s fears are brushed off by her boyfriend, she feels herself turning into an “overnight hostage” to a “deranged brain.” C’s insanity has quite literally rubbed off on her – the link is complete. Like the most natural antagonists, the pathogen cannot survive without the nutritive host. A clear distinction between C and Laura is no longer possible. What started as C dressing as Laura has completely “upended” the latter’s world in an “irreversible” way.
“Posessed and dispossessed” by C, the only way for Laura to wrangle her way out of this mess is to do something that is completely uncharacteristic of her. Two can play the game, the only way to quell insanity is to become even more insane. The stakes are high and if Laura slips up, she could lose everything she has so painstakingly acquired in life.
The frightening effects of obsession and untreated mental illness assume a very realistic form in A Cage in Search of a Bird. Instead of confronting C or seeking help, Laura starts to spiral as she relies on theory, fantasies, and outdated psychiatric explanations to fit into language the horrors she feels. Only, as she repeatedly admits, she experiences a “failure of language” and “nothing that passes through words is effective.” She cannot convince those around her of the acute danger she experiences or the anxiety she has become prone to. There are no plausible explanations for why she feels both fear and compassion for C. The other has been able to communicate her devotion but she has not been able to break through the silence to either accept or reject it – a natural result of being stripped of the clarity of not knowing what to say, when to say it, or how.
For Noiville, the most dangerous situation one can fall victim to is the poisoning of language – the root of sanity, the method and institution that separates the sane from the insane. Therefore, if the cleanliness of speech and complete comprehension of language is essential to being a functioning human being, what does one make of the sudden inability to put into words what one is feeling? As this novel shows, it is quite possibly the most horrific reality one can find oneself in.
A Cage in Search of a Bird, Florence Noiville, translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan, Seagull Books.