Name: Tišina, polna vetra
Price: 27 EUR
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5.0000 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9789612848668

A Silence Full of the Wind

Tišina, polna vetra

Gabriela Babnik

Read a Sample Chapter

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2022
Number of pages:: 448
Rights available:: world
Available reading materials:: English sample translation

Jeanne Duval and Charles Baudelaire first met in 1842. Their relationship lasted some twenty years, during which time the poet wrote a number of the most famous poems in Les Fleurs du Mal. James MacManus, in his book Black Venus, notes that nearly all of Baudelaire’s biographers have condemned Duval as the person who ruined the great poet’s life. Among other things, she is accused of cheating on him with his friends, squandering his money, and supplying him with opium. Gabriela Babnik’s novel A Silence Full of the Wind, however, is no mere repetition of established biography. While we do, certainly, find here scenes from a passionate relationship, the February Revolution of 1848, and Jeanne Duval’s testimony at court, the archaic origins of racism and anti-Blackness are also carefully reflected in the novel. No longer does Duval represent some hallucinatory sexual force; no longer is she a Creole (probably from Haiti), the bastard daughter of a Black female slave and a white plantation owner; rather, the novel deconstructs the poet’s relationship to the muse. The Black female, one of the most fertile sources of poetic creativity, is no longer a now indifferent, now ready-for-anything, now submissive woman who inspires the phantasmagorical impulses of the French male, but what we see instead in this novel is a genuine encounter between two characters. Their relationship, which undergoes an interesting twist at the end, is presented as a kind of power play. The novel explores the history of the period, the influence of photography on the depiction of the female nude, hot-air ballooning, Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, the status of the poet in an urban environment, the history of silence, the aesthetic of the colonial imagination, and, especially, the gender and class differences between Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval.

“Charles once asked if she knew where migratory birds went to die. At the time she answered him with a bashful smile, but now things were more or less clear.”