Book Tamers| book reviews

Alabama Song is not Zelda Fitzgerald’s biography, as we are being cautioned in the beginning of the novel. Actually it would be pretty hard to take it for a biography due to the chaotic structure and the madness of the narrator, a madness that infiltrates every word and phrase up to the point when truth, fiction, time and history itself mingle in a stunning amalgam, at times hard to follow, but so fascinating to read.

The novel begins from the very cover, where lies the sepia portrait of the most talked about couple of the ‘20s, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The portrait is fascinating because of the bizarre attraction between the two and especially because of the look in Zelda’s eyes, who seems to be contemplating a riotously interior world rather than paying attention to the camera. I came back to the cover several times while reading the novel and her look had new meanings every time.

The novel is narrated by Zelda and is written in the form of a diary, but there appear some time discrepancies. Half of a chapter takes place during the First World War and in the other half we meet a nostalgic Zelda (and a little crazy) talking 20 years later. The events are not inserted in their natural temporal order, but are moved back and forth in the structure of the novel in order to create a spider web out of the confused memories of an old and schizophrenic Zelda. I guess that Gilles Leroy chose this kind of a structure to show that one’s life cannot be totally described, not even autobiographically.

But, as I said before, Alabama Song is a novel, not a biography. Zelda will leave the conservatory south of the interwar New York and she will get to France and then Spain, where “The Lost Generation” lives in a self-imposed artistic exile. Her relationship with Scott is of course the central point of the novel, and its description puts the American writer in a very bad light, as he steals her novels and puts her away in psychiatric hospitals. This torrid relationship will eventually destroy both of them, and the great couple’s decline is almost hypnotic to follow. We see again how society finds pleasure in creating idols only to destroy them and watch them fall apart.

I think the great merit of the author lies not in the late defense of Zelda Fitzgerald, but in the way he became one with the character and wrote in her voice. Every sentence is a bizarre mix of venom, nostalgia, hate and love, and Zelda’s madness floats through the letters in rising quantities until it distorts the whole novel. The only disadvantage is that the events are sometimes hard to follow and connect, being pulled out of their natural course.

Alabama Song is a whirlpool which absorbs both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and the reader, a whirlpool like the one of the ‘20s which absorbed a whole generation of American writers but at the same time produced masterpieces of great value. Everything stops leaving behind a crazy and tired Zelda, upon whom the reader can draw personal conclusions. My conclusion only regards the novel, and it is a positive one, as it was pleasant to read Alabama Song and discover such a fictionalized version of Zelda Fitzgerald.

Written by Cristi