We are eternal, Pierrette Fleutiaux (Little, Brown)
By Dominic Di Bernardi

In general, the " great French novel " is short and centered on the intimate portraiture. Even the one 20th-century exception to this rule, Proust's Remembrance of things past, has more in common with the native tradition of the roman fleuve, a series of related novels, than it does with Ulysses or the The Magic Mountain. The peculiar power and innovation of Pierrette Fleutiaux's We Are Eternal is precisely to have joined the laserlike intensity of the psychological novel with an epic expansiveness. In doing so, she has created one of the most outstanding monuments of contemporary European prose.
In the original French, her novel numbers more that 800 pages. American readers will here find an abridgement in which four chapters havec been dropped and a good many pruned. The publisher doesn't indicate the rationale behind theses excisions, or whether the author had a hand in them.
Fortunately, the editing proves keenly sensitive. If we do not have all of Fleutiaux's words, her extraordinary vision remains intact.
Hers is a disarmingly simple tale. The narrator, Estelle Helleur, recounts the great love of her life for Dan, her brother, who has died. Her listener is an unidentified " Madame " called upon to weave these fragments of remembered time into a story and ultimately to celebrate them. For Estelle's goal is to bear witness to the " unknown dead who anwered life's summons without bluster. Alone they marched out with their weak bodies and insignificant stories, to take their stand at the great dark wall. "
Fleutiaux's voice, beautifully rendered in translation, is like the melody of " Bolero " haunting the narrative, at once simple, deliberate and relentless, all the while building to a breathless crescendo. Estelle recreates her idyllic childhood with Dan in a provincial town with their father, a lawyer, their mother, a dancer, and their caretaker, Tiresia. The latter is an older woman who, concealed behind dark glasses and rarely speaking, nonetheless binds the family members to each other. Indeed, we are told very early on that the narrator wishes to tell none other than Tiresias's story in order to give it " its identity, its place among all the other stories that history picks up and sweeps along. " The woman's name inevitably recalls that of the prophet Tiresias, another ancient who knew a secret that could bring a family to ruin. Many readers may well guess the mystery of this novel before the final revelation. But like a Greek tragedian Fleutiaux has little interest in suspense. Instead she focuses on how personal myth and historical lies are intimately and catastrophically intertwined.
We Are Eternal is essentially a hagiography of Dan, the " wellspring " of his sister's being, detailing signs of his childhood genius, especially his passion for dancing. Dan, who dances, and Estelle, who tells, are the literary cousins of the spectacularly eccentric, self-dramatizing duo of Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles (a team which also gave birth to the siblings of the The Garden of the Finzi Contini.) Prone to " strange compulsions ", they are " two minds racing side by side through the world and sniffing at mysriad possibilitities. "

Estelle eventually follows her brother to New York, where he has gone to pursue a dance career in the hayday of the 60's. Dance is the emotional core of the novel, both as a reality and metaphor, embodying the dream of " an immaterial invulnerable body that the most relentless nightmare on earth could never harm. " But the nightmare proves inescapable. Estelle tries conventional relationships ; Dan engages in anonymous homosexual encounters. Although familily tragedy allows them to fulfill their sexual passion, their happiness is short-lived. For Dan apparently proves victim to a devastation " in the form of a virus ".
In fact, it is the agony of history that reveals itself as the heart of Dan and Estelle's tragic love. The childhood adventure which gives this novel its name revolves around a local cave the boy and girl believe to be prehistoric. Inside they find a wall drawing in which they see their conjoined images. This yearning for eternity is quite lierally a yearning for a time before history begins with all its cruelty and human suffering.
In We Are Eternal readers will discover a moral gravity and tragic lyricism which harks back a generation to the great existentialist classics of Camus and Sartre and Duras.

(Dominci Di Bernardi regularly translates 20th-century French fiction.)

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