vivdunstan

Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide surprised me in several ways, some good, some bad, and some just very funny.

For a start, for a book titled Notes from a Regicide, it is really pretty minimally about regicide. I would have liked a bit more regicide. On the other hand, it is maximally about living on after dramatic events, about Having Done something world-shaking and then becoming just another person moving the various broken-and-put-back-together pieces of yourself through a life like anybody else's, and that I liked very much.

It is also, I cannot help but think, about what happens when an author sits down and thinks 'I want to write trans Grantaire but am I more interested in transmasc Grantaire or transfem Grantaire ... well! actually!! Who needs an Enjolras, why NOT trans het Grantaire x Grantaire!' I can't in any way prove this but once I started thinking it I couldn't un-think it and it did absolutely bring a particular lens to my reading of the book that heightened both my appreciation and my irritation ...

Okay, so the plot. In the novel's present day, Griffon, an NYC journalist, is arranging the papers of his deceased adoptive parents, Etoine and Zaffre. Etoine and Zaffre are immigrants from a Ruritanian principality named Stephensport; in their younger days, they were instrumental in bringing about revolutionary change to Stephensport, subsequent to which they fled to NYC and lived out the rest of their lives as mildly notable elderly emigré artists. The novel moves back and forth between Etoine's narrative of his life in Stephensport -- as written during a time in prison post-regicide when he thought Zaffre was dead -- and Griffon's notes on his own life with these people, how he came to be a part of their lives as a trans teen from an abusive home, his various attempts and failures to understand them and vice versa.

The other reason I think Les Mis is integral to this novel, by the way, is the fact that Zaffre is compared on like the second or third page to Jean Valjean because of her strong back and shoulders, the first reference the book ever makes, and I do think that if you're turning around thoughts about revolution and post-revolution and traumatized children rescued by traumatized people you might get end up with something like the shape of this book. The Griffon chapters are about how Griffon loves his parents and is fascinated by them and is also really often deeply annoyed by them, the way they often don't recognize his various attempts to gain their approval, the way they have their own private history that they will not share, the way their house is always messy, the way they behave really embarrassingly in art museums. And sometimes he lashes out at them, and sometimes they lash out at him, and sometimes they do provide exactly what's needed and sometimes it's exactly the opposite. I enjoyed seeing this domestic-but-not-at-all-cozy narrative juxtaposed with the fantastical revolution story; I've never seen it done quite this way before, and it's not what I expected, and I liked it quite a bit.

The revolution story itself -- well, this is the part, I think, that perhaps needs a bit more regicide. All the backstory is from Etoine's point of view, and Etoine has gotten all the not-caring-about-the-revolution-except-as-it-impacts-his-beloved bits of Grantaire. Zaffre, despite clearly being a fellow Grantaire -- she's severely, schizoaffectively depressed and introduced by Etoine as a fellow art student who's awkwardly obsessed with him before the feelings later become mutual -- is also the Enjolras; she's passionate about the revolution and deeply involved in the logistics of it (and blonde, and majestic, and compared at one point to the Marianne.) But we know very little about why she's passionate about it or what kind of logistical activities she's doing for it because Etoine barely talks about it. Etoine really just wants to talk about his alcoholism and his trans journey and his romance with Zaffre, until circumstances eventually slam him into the regicide situation. Griffon, annotating the text, complains about how little Etoine talks about the revolution, and I think Isaac Fellman thinks that because he's pointed at the lacunae and drawn a circle around it as Intentional he can dust his hands off and feel satisfied with it. I disagree! I think if you are titling your book Notes From a Regicide it is perhaps incumbent upon you to put at least a little bit of politics into it!

Also, speaking of politics ... NYC hasn't got any. ( This bit is technically spoilers but really just worldbuilding spoilers )

That said, I do like the little bits of worldbuilding we get about Stephensport, though I wish there were more of it -- the disintegrating electors buried in the stone yard who rise every couple of decades to choose a new king is really very good as a bad system of government -- and I like also that Fellman is one of the few contemporary authors I've come across who's both written a speculative society that supports a form of trans identity, and then instead of stopping there written about people in that society who are queer within that context, who want things that their society's particular allowed form of gender expression doesn't support or condone. So: an unusual book, an ambitious book. An interesting book, I think, on gender and identity and transgenerational trauma. Not a particularly interesting book on revolution. But revolution sells, I guess, so Notes from a Regicide it is.