Tea at Trianon: The Unfinished Life of N.

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The Unfinished Life of N.

The Unfinished Life of N. by Micah Cawber is the debut novel of Wiseblood Books, a press dedicated to publishing works of high literary quality, both old and new. Like the strokes of an Impressionist's brush, the author paints rather than tells the story of Nafula, a troubled young woman struggling for a seemingly elusive redemption. The fractured narrative takes the reader inside the heroine's tormented mind, as she struggles to make sense of the senseless cruelty and pointless misery which she experiences. From the Wiseblood Weblog:

In the tradition of Flannery O'Connor, Micah Cawber's The Unfinished Life of N. scrutinizes the quiet ambitions of normal people, their everyday fictions concerning others' and their own humanity and goodness, as it follows Nafula, the innocent but not naïve protagonist, from the backwoods of Wisconsin to AIDS-stricken regions of Africa, and, at last, through a rehabilitation program at a Mental Health home. Nafula is the granddaughter of a local-celebrity preacher whose church-without-a-church religion plays a large part in propelling her into a "missionary" existence. As does that same grandfather's sexual abuse. Soon her work in Africa confounds her self-identification as a “helper.” In the novel's final turn, Nafula must reckon with the terrible speed of mercy.

Her parents do nothing to prevent the abuse to which Nafula is subjected as a child; it predisposes her to seeing herself as an object to be used. Her on-going sexual experiences result only in a growing disgust and self-loathing; she nevertheless keeps attempting to reach out for God and His goodness in her own lost way. The book exposes Nafula's grandfather's ephemeral church-without-a-church which, based upon pietistic sentimentality, is incapable of dealing with the real problems of human suffering. It holds the Incarnation at arm's length and thus offers no redemption for the flesh. As her African ordeals shatter her already fragile psyche, Nafula is helped by Benedictines, who are able to grasp the battle of good and evil which has seized her deeply wounded being. It is in seeing the image of the Heart of the God-Man that Nafula realizes that Christ has been suffering within her, and she has been suffering in Him.

The brilliant aspect of the story-telling is that amid the confusion of Nafula's life it is illustrated how mental illness and diabolic possession can mingle and overlap. On the deepest level Nafula is indeed an innocent, retaining the heart of a child in spite of losing her childhood to a depraved old man. She is ultimately a victim soul. The most powerful message of the novel is that judgment does not belong to us, but only to the Lord.

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