An earthy, vibrant tale of love, longing and life, ‘The Seine at Noon’ is fantastic and surreal. It is the 1970s, Stefan— a Kochi Jew— whose parents migrated to Paris, is married to Esther, the woman who is the centre of his universe. They are childless, for Stefan does not want anyone to come between them.

Their lives become entwined with that of Jacques, a Frenchman, also deeply in love with his wife, Tatiana (a painter). Jacques, however, loses his wife to the promise of Salvador Dali.  It is perhaps this obsessive love for the woman in their lives that bond the two apparently quite different men.

Both men carry baggage— Stefan carries the guilt of neglecting his parents, now dead. Jacques is the son of a rich mother, who flits from lover to lover, but spends his days manning a yacht, estranged from his wife, living with his dog. Jacques and Tatiana have a daughter Bianca who visits him regularly; her feelings for her father fluctuate between affection and rage.

Bianca endears herself to Esther and the latter bequeaths her ancestral house in Kerala to her.  After Esther’s death, Stefan, Jacques and Bianca go on a journey to visit the house in Kerala. The tsunami strikes sending Stefan to his death and Jacques and Bianca back to Paris, from where Bianca moves further afar to America.

‘The Seine at Noon’ is a tale told with total abandon. Viswanathan weaves in friendship, love, loss, obsession, guilt and death into a rich vibrant carpet with no central design. It is a vividly descriptive tale told in a jiffy.

Character of Paris
Paris, meaning many things to many people becomes the backdrop to these experiences. Like its people, the city too reveals multiple identities— for the minorly talented like Bianca it, ‘allowed them to feel important and then dismissed them for being flotsam and jetsam.’

For Stephan, Paris was a city ‘where the light was like no other…’ ‘Paris was no predatory animal, Paris had no tentacles, no claws, no fetid odour. She was not a courtesan even, she knew her worth, but not her price and she took human souls as if they were hers to own as long as she willed.’ The Seine is the witness for ‘The life of a city was its river, and the Seine was still alive.’

There are a myriad characters— brilliant and palpable, geometrical patterns on a carpet. Vishwanathan takes up characters, fashions them, discards them and moves on to others.

The story begins with Celestine, who keeps repeating her name over and over, afraid that, ‘If she stopped saying her name, she would forget the rest…’ and after that we hear no more of her. There are Stephan’s immigrant parents, the guilt over whose death Stephan is unable to overcome, but Vishwanathan soon dispenses with them and moves on to others.

Stephan’s limp and Jacques idleness liven up the narrative. Bianca is gentle, yet emerges strong. The family of her husband— who she meets later in the USA and who, as destined, is an immigrant from Kerala— are so delightful that they are the only people in the novella you don’t want to part ways with.

A gripping book which you don’t want to put down till finished. Yet, it seems incomplete, a tale begun but not ended, a promise made but not kept.  Beginning with a Kochi Jew in Paris, ‘The Seine at Noon’ seems to offer much, yet the pages pick up other threads. And once the story is read and done with, it leaves no lingering thought.

Aditi Bhaduri

The Seine at Noon by Susan Visvanathan