BLUE BAY PALACE
Nathacha Appanah
Translator: Alexandra Stanton
Aflame Books, Paperback, 102 pp., ISBN: 9781906300074, Price 7.99

Ling Low

I started reading Blue Bay Palace while trapped in an airport terminal. Being jetlagged and hungry put me in no mood to indulge what I thought I would find: a romantic story set in a romanticised Mauritius. But Blue Bay Palace turned out to be much more than I expected. At just over a hundred pages, this novella leaves an impression beguiling for its size and simple storyline.
Francophone readers may already be familiar with Nathacha Appanah, who has picked up various literary prizes in France. Blue Bay Palace is her third work and the first to be translated into English. Its plot is nothing new, but Appanah imbues the narrative with rare intensity. Maya, a girl from a poor part of Mauritius, finds herself in love with one of the island’s wealthiest sons. Inevitably, various obstacles arise and they are not allowed to marry. What begins as an idealised romance rapidly descends into claustrophobic sexual chaos.

Partly, the book’s power arises from the reader’s participation in the process of disillusionment. In the opening pages, there is a tone of languid enchantment. I had some misgivings over this; lines like “I have noticed that people sigh a lot in this country” suggested there would be a heavy inflection of Marquez. When the narrator tells us that her name means “illusion”, it doesn’t assuage the suspicion that we might be encountering a derivative Macondo.

But the language quickly takes on an identity of its own, and the fear of pastiche fades. Chapter Two concludes with some of the most poised and poignantly simple lines I have ever read: “As they say in those trashy romantic novels, he changed my life. I am searching for a better way of putting it, but nothing else comes to mind.” From this point onwards, the language continually surprises and engages with its subtle and understated intimacy.

In a way, Maya is the “illusion” her names suggests, but only when it comes to other people. The people surrounding her do not really see her: her parents, locked into their daily routines; the tourists, admiring her exotic complexion; and even her boyfriend, who lies to her so that she remains in a delusional realm of her own.

For the reader, though, Maya is no mirage. She is a substantial, sensuous narrator, navigating her life with discerning detail. Far from a sleepy paradise, the island is a place colonised by hotels and wedding parties, stifling in its heat and ridiculously rigid caste distinctions. Blue Bay’s poverty is perceived without the sentimental glossing of the tourists: “the gutters blocked by rubbish, the tortured cacti held up by wire like puppets, men slumped on the floor, their stomachs full of bad beer, the smell of piss as one turns to the right to follow the first path.”

Because she is caught between the clear cut categories of rich and poor, Maya’s narration reveals the disparities of Mauritian society. But this is experienced through everyday life, rather than the dictation of a political subtext. Everything is subsidiary to the passion of the ill-fated couple. Yet minor characters in the tragedy are also captured with exacting brilliance. Maya’s mother, for example, follows the daily routine of placing a mug of tea in front of her daughter, handle to the right, and cleaning the crumbs off her plate with a sponge before breakfast is barely over. When her daughter kisses her goodbye, she replies “okay” with an inflection of simultaneous question and statement.

Such details as these made me want to know more about the other characters. It seemed as if there was more to tell, and in this sense the novella’s focus on love’s wounds leaves it scratching the skin in other places. The overall structure is also tied strictly to the lovers’ story, and I felt the book ended a few pages too soon. I was reminded of the similarly jilted Felicité, from Flaubert’s short story “Un Coeur Simple”. Felicité handles rejection with a crippling passivity, while Maya enacts her anguish. But the unrelenting anger also leads to a kind of passivity, and the swiftly asserted ending seems to confirm this by cutting Maya’s story off.

Perhaps I am asking too much by asking for more from Blue Bay Palace. This is, after all, a novella. Alexandra Stanton’s translation should bring Appanah some deserved and overdue attention from English language readers. It is a remarkably distilled piece of writing, which reads like a bead of sweat trickling down your neck. Unlike the overblown and exoticised West Side Story I expected, Blue Bay Palace is a reminder of the insidious side of passion, and its language is impressively insidious in its turn.