Until the appearance of this unconventional family, Blanca spends her centuries enjoying ‘simple pleasures: making people jump, knocking things over, tripping up passersby’. Chaos unfolds while Blanca watches, falling ever deeper in love with Sand. Chopin is sick (possibly with tuberculosis, possibly dead, depending on which doctor you ask), Sand is struggling to hold it all together, and the locals aren’t altogether happy with these ‘godless foreign odd consumptive crossdressers' living near them. Blanca is a furious, hilarious fourteen year old ghost who lives in the former monastery where Sand and Chopin have come to escape the pressures of life in Paris, along with Sand’s children and a maid. For the first time in Stevens’ books we’re clearly in fiction territory: in the first paragraph, the narrator and real star of the novel, Blanca, declares that she has been ‘in Valldemossa for over three centuries’. After Bleaker House, a memoir about trying to write a novel, and Mrs Gaskell and Me, a memoir about trying to write a doctoral thesis, Nell Stevens continues her playful interrogation of the relationships between life, writing and life-writing with an account of the French novelist George Sand’s time in Mallorca with Frederic Chopin.
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