Zelda
Fitzgerald, the beautiful, sparkling and aristocratic wife of the
legendary author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The unique lady who had acquired
everything life could offer in the happy days of the 20's and had lost
it all just as precociously, including her own mind, had always
fascinated and attracted endless attention and theories of the dramatic
life she had lived and lost. One might assume indifference of her as a
person, of the glamorous life she led, the wealth, cocktails,
literature, or the electric shocks .... but the story would always
return and repeat, in some form or another, bringing her life, short but
intense, back to public inspection and analysis again and again. This
time in yet another book, a fictional autobiography titled 'Alabama
Song', by the French novelist Gilles Leroy, who is in Barcelona to
promote the new edition of this book.
Writing a biography of a famous, infamous or any well known personality must involve tremendous amount of work, exhausting researches, references, interviews, etc. to know all there's to know about this person and all the ups and downs she had encountered. To write an 'autobiography' as if you were this person whom you are writing about must be a lot harder still, having to take on this other person's mind, character and personality, that person's speech and mannerism, to emerge and literally become this other person so as to be able to think, view, express and react ... On top of all that, Leroy must also take on the challenge of the gender issue, putting himself under the skin of a complex woman. One of strong will yet fragile, intelligent and naive at the same time, outstandingly wise and logical, yet let her life slide into insanity, oblivion and doom ... Not to mention the background as well as the era Leroy doesn't belong to.
The story is of course also of her famous husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald (The great Gatsby - book and movie), and of the era of the carefree 20's. Leroy wrote the book in 1st person, telling the life story through Zelda's mouth, but he had to feel she must have felt, every page of the way. It won the Goncourt prize in 2007 and now re-published in Spain. He confessed that he spent hours saying the lines out loud from his book in front of a mirror, trying to pronounce every word the way Zelda would have, and that the most difficult part in 'being' her was when she later became mad or crazy, ending up in the psychiatric hospital.
The book intrigues me, because the author does, far more than the story of Zelda's colourful and tragic life, is the 'artificial autobiography'. How does one go about doing that? It's not exactly autobiography because it's not written by the person who is already dead, nor is it exactly artificial because the life and events depicted were all facts, and the person who thinks, talks and acts is not Zelda, not even a woman!
Current Mood: 
Contemplative
Contemplative
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