“So much to regret”: Gabriel Josipovici’s “The Cemetery at Barnes”
“Friends who had known him in the old days would comment on the uncanny resemblance between his two wives.”
Cracking open Gabriel Josipovici’s novel The Cemetery in Barnes (Carcanet, 2018), we are immediately ushered into a world of ambiguity, confusion, and repetition, even though it’s a simple story of a man and his two wives (none of whom is given a name). He works as a professional translator with a penchant for sixteenth century French poetry. He is especially a fan of the The Regrets, a collection of sonnets by Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560). “The title had immediately struck a chord in him. There was so much to regret.” He is also very much “a creature of habit,” a man who enjoys his daily routines. “He always made a point of leaving and returning to the flat in the same manner. Sixty-seven steps, he would say. He had got to know them so well, could, after a while, have gone up or down them blindfold.” Throughout the novel, the descriptions of the man’s three residences and his two wives often seem to be so similar that the reader can momentarily get confused. Is this London, Paris, or Wales? Is this the first wife or the second? More ominously, certain events seem to recur, with different outcomes each time.
He and his first wife, who is described as “a trainee solicitor and amateur violinist,” had lived in London. On occasion, he would secretly observe her as she exited the tube station near their house coming home from work, and he would follow her home from a distance. “It moved him to see her like this, from the outside, as it were, a young woman with a light step and straight fair-to-reddish hair.” In fact, the translator never felt as if he really knew either of his two wives. Here he is again, thinking of his first wife. “He felt at times as if he did not understand her at all. She was there and yet she was not there. He held her and yet he did not hold her. As they walked, hand in hand, he sometimes felt as if he was walking with a stranger.”
On weekends, he and his first wife liked to walk along the Thames. The circumstances that lead up to her death are told three times. In the first instance, the couple were walking along the Thames when she seemed to slip, or perhaps “the bank seemed to crumble beneath her feet.” Fortunately, she was a strong swimmer and she found a place to scramble up out of the river and the two walked safely home. In the second telling, she fell into the Thames after the two have had an argument. But then she developed an ominous cough which didn’t go away despite a round of antibiotics and we aren’t told what happens to her. In the third telling, his wife drowned, after which the translator was questioned about the incident by the police.
What did you do then? they asked at the police station when he reported it.
I sat down, he said.
You sat down?
Yes.
What do you mean, you sat down?
I sat down and waited for her to reappear.
You didn’t think of jumping in after her?
No, he said.
Why not?
I don’t know.
Try to remember, they said.
I told you, he said after a while. I thought she would reappear.
But when she didn’t?
I didn’t know where she was.
What do you mean you didn’t know where she was?
I didn’t know where to jump in. She might have swum under water. Or the current might have carried her.
So what did you do?
I came here.
After the death of his first wife, he moved to Paris, where he lived in a “small apartment at the top of a peeling building in the rue Lucrèce, behind the Pantheon.” To get to it, he had to climb the steep flight of sixty-seven steps (that I mentioned earlier) out of rue Saint-Julien. This was his haven, where he could see the dome of the Pantheon from the window near his desk where he unfailingly worked every weekday from 7:15 AM until 4:00 PM, stopping for a two-hour break at 11:00. When he remarried, he and his second wife moved to a restored farmhouse in the mountains of Wales. His second wife was made well aware that she was no match for her husband’s knowledge and interests, and so she was always explaining to their dinner guests how much he had to teach her after they were married. “He had to teach me that a Baroque suite was not something elaborate you served at the end of a meal, she would say.” And he would always respond to her: “You had other qualities.”
But apparently, his second wife and one of their frequent dinner guests—a civil servant—began to get a little too personal when they were alone in the kitchen, and the civil servant’s wife finally cornered the translator and spoke up.
Look at them! she hissed. It’s disgusting!
What is? he asked?
The way they carry on.
I’m sorry?
Anyone can see what’s going on.
I’m afraid I don’t follow you, he said.
You know, she said, looking him full in the face, that’s exactly what it is: you are afraid.
He tried to move away but she followed and pinned him to the bookcase.
Do something about it! she hissed. You understand?
Please, he said.
Because if you don’t I will.Standing on the frozen garden he watched the flames rise into the night sky and listened to the roar of the fire as it devoured the wooden beams, mingled with the hiss of the ineffectual jets of water the firemen were still pumping into the rapidly disintegrating building.
In this telling of the fire, the house in Wales was destroyed, although his second wife survived. But a few pages later Josipovici seems to be giving us a different version of the aftermath of the fire. We see the translator apparently leaving the local morgue. “He could not believe that the charred bodies he was shown had once been living people. He could not recognise the other corpse they had dragged from the burning house. On his way out he saw Mabel, but she pretended not to see him and he for his part had nothing to say to her.” This is the only time in which a character in the book is named—Mabel, who must be the wife of the civil servant. Did she or the translator deliberately set the house of fire which killed his wife and the civil servant? We aren’t told.
One of the most beguiling things about Josipovici’s prose in The Cemetery in Barnes is his narrator’s quirky voice. Just like the main character, the narrator is also a person “of habit,” repeating the same phrases throughout the book. Take the opening paragraph, for example. It’s only two sentence long: “He had been living in Paris for many years. Longer, he used to say, than he cared to remember.” That little tossed off clause, “he used to say,” is a subtle way of suggesting to us that the translator has a habit of saying the same thing repetitively. But it’s just the first of literally hundreds of times that the narrator will use this or a similar phrase. On the first page alone, the narrator uses the phrases “he would explain” and then “he would say” a total of three times. “At my age, he would say, it’s too late to change.” Scarcely a paragraph in the book goes by without the narrator using one of these variants.
When I first wrote about this book in 2018, I tended to focus on the novel as “a maze, a Möbius loop, a multiverse.” In this reading, I thought much more about the character of the translator, a man who might be a double murderer or who might just have an overactive imagination. After the apparent death of his second wife and her lover, the final pages of the novel are occupied with the translator’s reminiscences of his days in London and in Paris. “As is the way with the imagination, thinking frequently and long enough about something makes it seem at first possible, then even probable, and, finally, necessary.” He thinks about his two wives and he remembers some of the sixteenth century poetry that has always sustained him. And then on the last page he recalls something he said to his second wife earlier in the book: “One sprouts so many lives, he would say, and look at her and smile. One is a murderer. One an incendiary. One a suicide. One lives in London. One in Paris. One in New York.” Then the book ends with him where he once lived on the rue Saint Julien in Paris. Or perhaps he never left Paris at all and the two wives were just figments of his imagination. At this point, we don’t quite know what to believe.
What I had not paid attention to in the first reading were the poems and the music of the sixteenth century which he adored and how they set a tone of regret that reflected directly on his two marriages. He’s a man who married twice, but who, deep inside, wants to be left alone.
The Cemetery in Barnes, like nearly all of Josipovici’s fictions, is a novel that reminds us how easy it would be for a life to have gone in many different directions and how one’s memories and one’s imagination are essentially interchangeable.
By the way, the real Barnes Cemetery in Putney, where the translator and his first wife lived (and presumably where she was buried), has a fascinating history.
Vertigo 