Monica Stirling

Monica Stirling was a correspondent in Europe for the Atlantic Monthly Press both during World War 2 and afterwards. According to the short bio of her on the dusk jacket of this novel, "Monica Stirling belongs to a theater family. Her father, the late Edward Stirling, founded the English Theater in Paris and took his company all over Europe, the Middle East, and South America. Her mother, Margaret Vaughan, is an actress, and her sister, Pamela, who trained in Louis Jouvet's class at the Paris Conservatoire, was the first English actress to be admitted into the Comédie-Française company. Miss Stirling started writing during the war and was encouraged by Edward Weeks, of the Atlantic Monthly, who bought her first stories. In I944 the Atlantic sent her home to France as their war correspondent."

Sigh for a Strange Land is a short novel about displacement and alienation, but also about love. Our protagonist is Resi, a teenage girl being brought up by her Aunt Natasha. As the novel opens, is on the way to fetch her aunt out of the hospital, where she is, essentially, suffering nothing more serious than the consequences of an all-night bender. (The novel's opening line is, "On the day the revolution started my Aunt Natasha was drunk.") But the streets are mostly empty, save for a few people seemingly scurrying to shelter. And as the two head home together, tanks have arrived, shelling has begun, dead bodies start to cover the streets and buildings are afire. They find Natasha's lifelong friend, Boris, and soon the trio are packed into a bus on its way to the frontier, where they suddenly transformed into refugees. Now what?

Stirling's writing here is hallucinatory and somewhat fable-like, adding to the sense of confusion and alienation. We're never told what country and what revolution we're in, or what country is over that frontier. But given the book's 1958 publishing date, the tanks and the confusion, the implication is clear that Resi, Natasha and Boris have escaped the Hungarian uprising and landed in Austia. The books themes about dislocation are clear. Resi's parents are dead but between her parents and her grandparents, she has the blood of four nations in her. Natasha and Boris have bounced around Europe, sometimes apart, sometimes together, since, as members of the Russian upper classes, they were run out of their homes by the Russian Revolution. All of this is very effective and compelling during the book's first half to two thirds, but by the final section, for me at least, the storyline flattens, as the sense of doom and horror fade.

Still, this is a very interesting and often powerful novel, also of note for its spot in history and its author's interesting story, as well. The only photograph of Stirling I could find online is one of her in olive drab sitting in an American jeep with the famed correspondent Lee Miller in Paris in 1945. I discovered this novel only because in an old copy of Atlantic Magazine I was reading (see Post 82, above) appeared the final installment of the book's serialization in that magazine. Reading the final section of the book would never do, but, curious, I immediately order it online. I do recommend Sigh for a Strange Land. Even the sections that were quite as good as other were still fine, all in all.… (mais)