Echoes and sorrows beneath Monet's sky

We live in a luminous cloud of changing light, a sort of envelope. That is what I have to catch,” says Claude Monet towards the end of a lunch with his family in Eva Figes’ slim marvel of a novel, Light.

He makes this remark to the art critic Octave Mirbeau, who has dropped by his house in Giverny. Figes’ book, which describes the progress of a summer day in 1900 at Giverny, where Monet lived and worked till his death, was first published in 1983.

Figes adopts an impressionistic style with her prose — we start with Monet awakening, before sunrise: “It looked good to him, the dark just beginning to fade slightly, midnight blue-black growing grey and misty, through which he could make out the last light of a dying star. It looked good to him, a calm pre-dawn hush without a breath of wind, and not a shadow of cloud in the high, clear sky.” Figes builds a picture of the great artist and his family gradually, till we are in the thick of the goings-on at Giverny.

Reading Light is not unlike gazing, rapt, at one of my favourite impressionist paintings, Monet’s Summer.

Stay long enough in front of that picture and you can feel the heat of the sun, the dry grasses, and almost hear the chittering of insects on a summer day. Immerse yourself in Figes’ narrative and you are amongst the high emotions and secret hopes and deeply etched griefs of Monet’s wife, his children and grandchildren.

The household we are introduced to is weighed down with loss — the year before, Monet’s stepdaughter, Suzanne, had died. Her mother, Alice, Monet’s second wife, is still mourning the loss of her child. Suzanne’s two children, Lily and Jimmy, are the youngest residents in the house.

We also get to know Monet’s and Alice’s other children from their previous marriages — Jean-Pierre, Michel, Germaine, and Marthe. Figes slowly and surely brings the characters of these men and women to life — an astonishing achievement considering the brevity of the book. Everyone is given due consideration (including the househelps) and their relationship to Monet coloured in and contextualised with deft precision.

A time for revival?

As is the case with most literary works that explore the lives of characters through the course of a day, nothing much happens in the moment. The past casts its shadow on the present, and Figes, in a breathtaking leap in the last chapter, gives us a view of the future of Giverny.

Figes’ ability to describe in the most minimal of text the gardens and ponds and surrounding countryside conveys a range of emotions within just a few sentences. Consider the thoughts of the Abbé Touissant, who drops by the house during lunch and walks back to the village afterwards:

“It had been a good spring and summer, but he contemplated the harvest to come with mixed feelings: it reminded him too much of death, of smoke in the air, leaves turning yellow, bleak winter days with a mist on the horizon and a grey sky stretching to infinity. Cold months during which he was dismally conscious of his own crop growing in the soil round the church, each year bringing more headstones and high grey crosses, stark as the leafless trees.”

Figes, who was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1932 and fled to Britain as a refugee in 1939, was renowned in her lifetime as a feminist and critic.

While appreciation for her works does appear now and then in some corners of the literary world, she isn’t as widely read today as some of her contemporaries. It’s probably time for a revival, and there can be no better introduction to her writing than the luminous Light.

That One Book is a monthly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.

The author is a writer and communications professional. She blogs at saudha.substack.com