City of darks
May 1999: Newcity Chicago
The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin
Chopin in Paris
My spring in Paris was not unlike my spring in Chicago spent reading about Paris:
sexless, dreary, stalked by death and steeped in zal. Zal (pronounced JAHL), a Polish word
for which there is no translation, signifies longing, resignation, even anger, and it
figures largely in the two books that sucked away my April and May like a last breath.
"The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin" is a short, first novel about a passive,
unremarkable woman who gets a little better, I guess. Forty-year-old Rosie is an expat
from Pittsburgh who slogs through the demise of her live-in boyfriend Serge, a 50-year-old
intellectual who sells Communist newspapers on Sundays and who is predisposed to being
urinated on during sex ("'Wet me,' he whispered."). I can't say I missed Serge,
but Rosie sure did.
Chopin like Serge also coughs up blood, but his longtime girlfriend, author George Sand,
takes this for a bad thing, and seeks to soothe his tubercular suffering through maternal
zeal and trips to healthier climes. "Chopin in Paris" actually spends a good
deal of time in Nohant, Sands' country mansion and perhaps its most memorable scenes take
place during the couple's stay in Majorca, a vacation from hell. Tad Szulc's previous bio
was an acclaimed book on the Pope and his vision of Chopin is sexless and uncomfortable in
this world. With their lives pieced together through letters, it's no wonder that Sand,
far more skillful with the pen, actually upstages Chopin, whose missives entreat friends
to run errands and are rife with expressions of irritability and zal. Such is the effect
when a life in song is rendered through words.
(Ellen Fox)