“I was alone, with myself, a stranger.” A Review of Eva Figes’s Nelly’s Version by Savannah Anderson
I recently had the pleasure of spending a week immersed in the world of Nelly’s Version, a formerly out-of-print novel by Eva Figes. Part surrealist mystery, part feminist odyssey, Nelly’s Version explores the complicated nature of identity and fate, as well as the implacable pressure of our social programming. Though Figes is most often remembered for her feminist texts, she is a talented novelist with a unique ability to blend brutal social commentary with humor and levity, all the while tap-dancing through literary genres and tropes. It’s an intellectual read, but it’s also a very entertaining one. I’m delighted that indie publisher, Dalkey Archive Press, has chosen Nelly’s Version to champion.
We meet the titular character Nelly Dean as she meets herself, signing her name, or a name at least, to the hotel registry at The Black Swan. This act is her earliest memory. She is, as she describes, a “walking blank” perplexed to find herself in a conservatively dressed middle-aged body. The novel follows Nelly’s meandering adventures as she attempts to figure out who she is and what has happened to her. However, Nelly seems far less interested in her past than she is in determining what “role” she’s meant to be playing in the current drama. She walks around the eerily empty town waiting for direction and trying to decode clues in casual conversations; sometimes she also destroys the clues she finds. The introduction of characters claiming to be from Nelly’s past is met with a stylistic shift in the narrative, and, I think, an important reminder of the fraught relationship between role and identity.
It’s impossible to talk about the character Nelly Dean without also talking about genre. While Nelly wonders what role she’s meant to play, the reader wonders what kind of story is this? The name Nelly Dean is shared by the housemaid in Wuthering Heights, which feels significant, but it’s only one of many literary clues. It’s almost like Eva Figes is playing with our expectations and our internalized understanding of genre. You could argue that genre is how Nelly attempts to anchor herself in the present—at times she behaves like a character in a detective story looking for clues, then like a spy awaiting an assignment, later like an aging femme fatale—and we try to anchor ourselves, too. Nelly self-consciously performs for an imagined audience and we are entertained, but there’s something dreadful implied—are we all guilty of this? And is it somehow because we consume stories? With all of her memory and experience wiped away, Nelly is still driven by an instinct to perform, to be polite, and to please strangers, especially men. This, as she acknowledges, leads to her undoing.
As I mentioned above Eva Figes, who died in 2012, is often remembered for being a feminist writer, and while I think Nelly’s Version is a feminist novel, some of the sharpest social commentary is focused on a different vein of societal ills. Nelly is not just a woman, she is in the role of an outsider observing the uncanny, consumer-driven, suburban hellscape in which the novel takes place. One of my favorite passages describes businessmen interacting with their waiter: “They lounged in their lounge suits, took their time because he would wait, passed round cigarettes because he lit them, sat because he stood, and talked in loud voices about other things because they knew he could be counted on to remain dutifully quiet” (36). In Nelly’s Version Figes seems to suggest that none of our desires or motivations are pure, but are determined by societal conventions and our environment. In other words, we’re all letting our role determine our identity.
So what kind of story is this? Definitely a LITERARY one. Nelly’s Version is dripping with allegory and allusion. We’re waiting for Godot, we’re through the looking glass, we’re in a post-modern suburban landscape, or is it a waste land, or is it hell? Nelly’s Version is an enticing mystery for any reader, but it does reward those steeped in English literary tradition. As a lit nerd myself, I really enjoyed the experience of reading Nelly’s Version—and it is an experience. Nelly is an unreliable narrator and an unreliable interpreter of clues, but she’s also compelling and likeable. She’s paranoid, dramatic, and performative, but also frank and surprisingly upbeat. Perhaps most importantly, Eva Figes’s prose is beautiful and peppered with surprising and jarring turns of phrase—every sentence is a pleasure to read.
