I was immediately interested in the premise of Miriam Robinson’s debut, And Notre Dame is Burning (thank you @littlebrown… via @netgalley for the review copy) - a novel told through fragments, notes and letters, but was a bit wary when I realised upon reading that it was mostly epistolary. The only book told entirely through letters that I have ever liked is Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, about an elderly pastor, John Ames, who is writing an account of his life to his young son as he is dying from a heart condition. In a similar way, Esther in And Notre Dame is Burning is also writing to a child. This time, though, it’s the daughter she miscarries and her subject matter is more specific as she sifts through the burnt remains of a failed relationship - one that begins and ends in the shadows of Notre Dame, the many betrayals and feelings of guilt and navigating through early motherhood as her marriage breaks down. It becomes an excavation of sorts as time flattens and Esther, a writer by profession, tries to tell her story in the ‘right’ way and realises the impossibility of doing so. I was not always on board with the structure, but I ate this up over the course of a few hours in August. It evoked so many emotions, portraying the hurt, anger and self-righteousness that comes with feeling betrayed. An incredibly raw and moving debut that I would highly recommend. I look forward to seeing what Miriam Robinson does next.

I finished this book in August and let it percolate for a few weeks before writing a review as it wasn't a book that grabbed me in any way at the time of reading. Several weeks on, I can barely remember anything about it, which is a review in and of itself. Fragmented and irritating literary fiction on the breakdown of a marriage. Not for me unfortunately.

Many thanks to Corsair and Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

I was recommended this book but can't for the life of me remember by whom! Maybe Radio 4 or a Sunday newspaper!
And Notre Dame is Burning is a fascinating debut novel and one I predict will be featured on prize lists.

The novel is told in the first person by Esther. Still not sure whether this was her real name - Many of the book's characters are known by pseudonyms.
A very brave book, literary, and one that takes some reading! Not lighthearted or for the fainthearted!!
Full of wonderful imagery, it's cleverly written, and, like any good book, keeps you thinking a long time after it's come to a conclusion
Recommend!

2.5

This short novel tells the story of Esther and husband Ravi as Esther recounts the beginning and end of their marriage.

Written in prose (in the form of letters to her unborn child, Noa Lynn, and Eve, a woman her husband has been intimate with) Esther guides us through each part of their life as a couple and how she expected certain aspects of it to play out.

Her letters to both the unseen mistress and child are the most poignant parts for me but I felt that a lot of the end of the novel tended to ramble on. I think I wanted more punch to it when few relationships begin and end in fireworks.

I am afraid that this book didn't move me quite as much as I was hoping it was my fault for having these expectations of how the story would play out, given the circumstances.

If you like a thoughtful, measured book that deals with relationships, couple expectations and disappointments then this is for you.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Corsair for the advance review copy.

Heartbreaking, powerful and beautifully written, this debut is an unflinching exploration of betrayal, motherhood, time and the impossibility of saying exactly the right thing at the right moment.

Esther’s marriage begins and ends in the shadow of Notre Dame cathedral, and in the aftermath, she sifts through fragments of her life – moments of love, grief, faith and failure, in an attempt to piece together meaning.

The fragmented structure, with some chapters only a handful of words long, mirrors the way grief collapses time, and the way memory comes in flashes rather than a smooth narrative. It is a style that works perfectly here, drawing the reader into Esther’s disorientation and slow process of rebuilding.

Robinson’s prose is both sharp and lyrical, filled with dry wit and emotional precision. This is a deeply affecting story of love ending and identity shifting, written with a rare voice that feels urgent and entirely original.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

“Ravi is in the bookshop when it happens. He climbs onto the roof and begins to film with his phone and posts the videos, all in one long thread, one after the next after the next. The TV networks use his footage, call him for comment. He is all over the news. He is someone who is acting in the world. My parents, in America, see him on the news. My friends, everywhere, see the videos, which are viewed by thousands. At 5 a.m., as the last line of his thread, he tweets to the world:

Across from this spot where the flames burn now, my wife and I kissed for the first time. But things change: the years have passed, it is time to divorce. And Notre Dame is burning.”

And Notre Dame is Burning is a fascinating debut novel and one I hope to see featured on prize lists, perhaps starting with the Goldsmiths Prize.

The novel is narrated in the first person by Esther - or at least that’s how her future self addresses her past self, but this is a novel where most characters are known by pseudonyms.

Told in fragmentary pieces, the novel is perhaps centred around (this is not a novel with a clear centre or a linear progression) the narrator suffering a miscarriage and also finding out that her husband had an affair, or indeed affairs.

“Betrayal is a palimpsest. An overwrite. It scrubs most of what was written on your parchment and emblazons a new story in its place, more important, more real and relevant than what was there before. Except little fragmented bits of the old story remain, if you look closely. The ghosts of the old eradicated story haunt the new. Faint, emaciated fingers trying to grasp something they can’t quite hold.”

The bookshop featured above is obviously (although not named) the wonderful Shakespeare & Co, which is also where the narrator first met her husband (whose was introduced to her, incorrectly, as Ravi and she has chosen to use that pseudonym here):

“The moment –perhaps not the moment I knew I would marry him, but the moment I awoke to his presence –was tiny. So tiny, in fact, and lacking in detail that there is almost no story here, and yet I don’t think there could have been the story of us without this. The four of us were leaving the bookshop. We walked up a few stone steps, ready to cross over onto Île de la Cité (C’est juste en face de Notre Dame, I would tell the rare French person who could not locate the shop). He said something, something infinitesimal but desperately familiar, that made me laugh. It was the kind of laugh that takes you by surprise, that shakes your shoulders before your mind has fully caught up to the joke. I couldn’t unsee him after that.

I don’t remember the joke, but I remember the laugh.”

The novel is largely told in letters addressed (although not necessarily sent) to various people, primarily her miscarried child, but also to the women with whom her husband had affairs (all of who she addressed as Eve), her past self, her husband and her living daughter.

The novel is also in close and respectful dialogue with Cat Bohannon’s 2023 non-fiction work Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and powerfully portrays the modern female experience, contextualising it in history and evolution.

The narrator acknowledges early on how the two key events have collapsed her experience of time, and the novel reflects that with its fragmentary and non-linear structure, where repetition and recurring motifs play a key part.

“Probably I do not mean to speak about time at all. Probably what I mean to say is this: I cannot identify when or where this story began. I cannot say if it was this year, when we lived for six months in Switzerland, or before that, at home in London, or before that, when our daughter Annie was born, or before that, when the sky went red over Paris. It might have been before that, when they bulldozed Colorado prairie land to make the Denver suburbs, or before that, when England drew a ragged line through Pakistan and India, or before that, with the killing of the Jews (Which killing? Be specific), or before that, with all the killings of all the Jews. Perhaps it was even before that, when Eve plucked the apple from the tree, or before that, when Miriam and her mother sent Moses downriver in a reed basket, or before that, with the flood. I cannot find the starting line. It is too difficult to say.”

As one small example of how the repetition works, the narrator discovers a form of sanctuary in the urban marshes near her London home, but in a first extended piece (which in this book means 2/3rds of a page) on the topic, she explains how she can not really escape there due to various intrusions. Returning to that several times the observations get shorter - “I go walking in the marshes. You cannot disappear in the marshes. There is the train from Liverpool Street. There is the pylon. There are the wires. There are the Hasidic Jews and the taunting, prickling plants”. - until by the novel’s end simply the line “I go walking in the marshes” is enough to invoke a (Proustian? Pavlovian?) response in the reader who remembers the litany of challenges.

A common feature of debut novels is they can pack too much in - material that might have made future novels. There is an element of that here, but deliberately and effectively so, since the narrator also explains, meta-fictionally, how her writing evolved and various projects she abandoned or left as unfollowed trails. This can though mean that some element of the repetition - one on mountain lines for example - felt to me a little orphaned, and others - notably an incident early in her relationship with Ravi in Paris where she was questioned by the police, accused of being involved in a fraud - though clearly key to the narrator’s message, passed me by to an extent.

The style of the book - the family history; the use of pseudonyms - almost invites you to consider it autofictional. But trying to work out what is real and what fiction is either missing the point, or perhaps the opposite. As the author has said:

“So much of the book was about what’s real and what’s not real – about the ways in which women have been made, time and again, to question their reality and doubt their instincts.”

I must admit to going down a futile rabbit hole trying to identify the documentary that was Ravi’s key project for over a decade, but having more luck with a portrait mentioned (although unable to verify its connection to the author as opposed to the narrator):

“I looked again today at the painting of my paternal grandmother and her twin sister, my great-aunt. Really looked at it, the two of them sitting next to each other, in white nightdresses that are just on the wrong side of appropriate for twelve-year-old girls. Of the two of them, I always thought of my great-aunt as the one who looks nervous. Too young to be subjected to a painter’s gaze, she sits slightly lower than my grandmother, with one arm clasped over her stomach. Her hair is longer, more childlike, and she folds over her arm ever so slightly. But now that I look again I see that she has support —the chair, her sister’s hand, even that arm of hers. She is nervous as she looks at the painter, but still she is looking at him. Straight on. It is my grandmother —taller, back straight, bobbed hair held tight with a thick green headband —who looks away, past the artist to somewhere else, as though in her mind she has vacated the room. It could be that she is just bored. Or perhaps she is coping in her own way with the intensity of being scrutinised. Perhaps by looking away she is making the world –or herself –disappear.”

Which is The Twins by Boris Grigoriev.

I realise, reviewing my review, that I have failed to mention at all perhaps the novel’s most powerful, in emotional more than literary terms, writing, which is on the topic of both the physical experience and mental aftermath of miscarriage, something far more common that is talked about and seldom written about in literature. For that alone this would be a wonderful novel, but it is also a brilliant piece of creative writing.

! found this rather tedious. Esther, the central character, is recovering from the trauma of a miscarriage while facing the challenge of parenting in a collapsing marriage but I found it difficult to be sympathetic to her plight as she was so self-centred and self pitying. The other characters were all two dimensional and equally unsympathetic. Not sure why her family had to be Jewish since they were not apparently religiously observant or even identifying culturally. The title seemed to me to be quite irrelevant to the story, the Notre Dame fire was used as a rather clumsy metaphor. The conceit of telling the story through fragmentary letters to the unborn child, and to others, wore rather thin

I found this an overwhelmingly self-indulgent and introspective reflection on life from the point of view of the narrator, who spends her time reflecting on what has gone wrong in her life and her marriage, and it was all too much journaling and not enough telling for me, a disappointment really when the premise for the book was good. The character of Esther is completely self-obsessed to the exclusion of anyone else, and the characters of her husband and daughter don't even enter into the fray. Just didn't work for me.

What a great arc of a possible story.
Couple meet in romantic Paris under the shade of Notre Dame cathedral and years later in the destructive flames of the destructive fire at the cathedral their relationship reaches its final burnout.
Well the bit in the middle between beginning and end has to be the meat of this French sandwich and sadly it disappointed.
I really tried to engage with the characters - particularly the narrator - lover, wife and mother Esther. Her extreme awareness of self and particularly the loss of her child Noa Lynn which inspired her fictional writing was devastating as all such miscarriages are in personal lives of women.
The imagery was strong, sensual and emotive.
But the huge level of self indulgent psycho talk and blame just became too much in the narrative.
The husband Ravi had no particular voice beyond the criticisms and I also felt their surviving daughter/sister to Noa, Annie seemed not to be fully represented.
I do expect this will be a very popular read but it was not one for me.

I actually couldn’t believe this was a debut novel. Interspersed with a fabulous humour, this is the story of one woman’s life unravelling through a double heartbreak- the loss of her unborn baby and the end of her marriage due to her husbands betrayals, and how she emerges from this and endures. Really unique in how it is writtten- letters, memories and asides, this is a fabulous book.

a compelling and emotionally weighted book of a woman who seems to be dealing or trying to deal with alot of loss. this book is that lady trying to figure things out. asking the questions of herself and about her situation. she has a miscarriage and we feel all that comes with that. shes also asking the questions of where her marriage started to breakdown. and we get to read that journey. so often these little intricacies of peoples lives and thinking we dont see. its like reading someone diary. some things we can connect with and some things we can truly feel weve asked or wanted to know our self. and all in all its a really in deep book of this woman and what she is going through.
its not easy at times. and you have that feeling from books like this as if you are taking on some of the load which is such a skill to be able to do. and thats ok. it really gets you involved and caring about the characters.

I really struggled with this book and did not finish it. The author writes about her life and marriage to her deceased daughter. Perhaps I have read too many books where the husband has strayed and it is all his fault but this failed to engage me.

The set up of the novel is that the narrator named (or at least named by herself in this novel as) Esther is looking back across her marriage to her documentary filmmaker husband – Ravi in the novel (although that is the name she was mistakenly introduced to him as) who she first meets and first falls in love with in the English Language bookshop where she works opposite Notre Dame (“Shakespeare and Co” of course although not named”; later in the same bookshop and after failed attempts to save their marriage Ravi tweets from the roof of the same bookshop on a viral thread of tragic images he is filming and broadcasting to the world “Across from this spot where the flames burn now, my wife and I kissed for the first time. But things change: the years have passed; it is time to divorce. And Notre Dame is burning”.

What we are reading is the story of that marriage and its breakdown – of which the pivotal moment is a miscarriage Esther suffers just as the couple (and their young daughter Annie) relocate back to London from a temporary assignment in Zurich. In the aftermath of her loss as she bickers with Ravi over his seeming lack of support and care, the narrator discovers that Ravi has had an affair (and that over time he has had several).

The narrator was we learn trying to write a multi-generational part-family-biographical novel tracing from a 1920s portrait of two twin sisters – and part of what we are reading is built on the ruins of that novel. But what we are reading now is a mix of narrative and letters written by the narrator but not sent to: her never-born daughter who she names Noa Lynn; herself from the future when divorced writing to herself some years earlier while still with Ravi; the known and unknown women with who Ravi slept; Ravi and (at the novel’s end) Annie.

And over time we are told how the original novel and writing changes and morphs into what we are reading now via different versions (for example including one in which the Noa Lynn letters were addressed to Annie) although with elements of the original (in particularly some multigenerational family biography) remaining.

Cat Bohannan (the author is not named) and her inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlisted “Eve; How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Yeats of Human Evolution” is key to the novel: frequently referred to with the narrator drawing on the book to understand the concept of how female bodies have not just evolved but draw on the struggles and changes of previous generations (including literally via fetal DNA); the narrator and author (who as the novel points out look superficially similar) are confused for each other and later meet; the narrator names the women her husband has betrayed her with Eve and this leads to riffs on alternate Genesis creation myths and societal placement of guilt on females.

Other recurring themes and passages – which are threaded among the epistolary sections and limited narrative in a fragmentary, recurring way include:

Ravi’s documentary of a climate protest group which is pulled when one of the activists is arrested – which for me was a sign of his piece of art derailed by a transgression just like the narrator’s novel.

Some honesty and hugely resonant writing about miscarriage (and its emotional aftermath) which reminded me of Louisa Hall’s “Reproduction”.

Discussions with Ravi’s best friend – a philosopher/scientist on the nature and experience of time and how perspective leads to temporal ordering.

Ravi’s refusal to take on the narrator’s request to come clean about the full details of all his affairs – instead repeatedly trying to turn the discussion back to her inadequacies or failings (in some excellently rendered dialogues)

The mountain lion P-55 (which many literary fiction readers may know as the narrator of Henry Hoke’s “Open Throat”;

A small area of waste ground and marsh near Liverpool Street (I was reminded of Esher Kinsky’s “River”)

A scary encounter with the French police after the narrator inadvertently aids a counterfeiting scheme but where the memories revolve around her being asked accusingly “Vous connaissez cet homme” which in turn leads to ideas of what it means to know someone else, including in the biblical sense.

The narrator agonising over how much her open writing about her marriage and about motherhood will hinder or help her child (and her relationships with her) - “Look what they did to Rachel Cusk!” and later (in a page of its own) “Friends tell me Rachel Cusk and her children seem like they’re OK” we are told.

And these literary resonances – some intended by the author, some specific to this reader, are testament (if I can be excused my own biblical reference) to the way in which the very spaces which are key to the typography and pacing in this novel invite the reader to form associations.

Perhaps one of the key passages in the novel is when the narrator says “Betrayal is a palimpsest, An overwrite. It scrubs most of what was written on your parchment and emblazons a new story in its place, more important, more real and relevant than what was there before. Except little fragmented bits of the old story remain, if you look closely. The ghosts of the old, eradicated story haunt the new. Faint, emaciated fingers trying to grasp something they can’t quite hold.”- and this feels very much like a novel itself written across other works as well as one which is of course (by its very nature) fragments of the more conventional historical and family-biographical novel the narrator was going to write.

The extent to which the novel is autobiographical/autofictional/purely fictional is deliberately blurred and deliberately integral to the novel which is precisely about the question of what it means (particularly as a woman) to have one’s own story/understanding of one’s own life questioned, undermined and rewritten – and cleverly the novel ends with the narrator about to tell Annie (just before the novel is published) how much of it is true and how much pretend.

My review has I think only touched on this in many ways brief but highly impactful novel.

Highly recommended.

I adored this!

It follows a writer who is trying to understand how her marriage failed and you can feel her slowly turn it into a story. It’s told in fragments and in a knowing way that makes you relate to the narrator as well as keeping them at arms length.

There are so many descriptions and imagery that will stay with me for a long time. Sticking a buttered knife into a jam jar, or forgetting the joke but remembering the laugh are examples of such simple phrases that other books spend pages struggling to capture.

The use of telling some of the story though letters isn’t a new idea but somehow still feels fresh. She changes the grammar half way through or stops just short of saying what you expect so you feel it stronger.

This book is a masterpiece and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

This book deals with miscarriage and the trauma that comes with that, so will not be for everyone. It is very slow paced and at times very heavy and a lot to digest. It is written beautifully though, and I know it will have a profound impact on many people.

This is an emotional read telling the story of Esther.

When she suffers a miscarriage she sets herself a quest to find the answers to her life and her grief.

I loved this book . it is an intense slow read that I connected with immediately, I loved the dry humour that shone through and the stroytelling is modern and brilliant.

It is a book that will stay with me. Many of Esthers experiences are thing that I have gone thorugh myself so this book highlighted some issues that I still have to think about and what needs to heal.

When Esther miscarries, the grief and the worry about dashing Annie’s longing for a sister are complicated by the knowledge of her husband’s betrayal. Esther seeks answers and solace, turning to books, friends and a therapist but knows that she cannot forgive him until Ravi says he’s sorry, recording her struggles in what will become a book to be published five years after her loss.
That sounds quite straightforward but as Esther explains, she sometimes moves events to fit her own chronology having lost the sense of linear time. She delivers her story in a series of letters – most addressed to the child she miscarried, some to the women she feels invaded her life and her body thanks to Ravi’s infidelity, a few to herself and others, and one or two to Ravi – peppered with short observations. It’s an ambitious structure for a debut and I’m not entirely sure it works but it does fit the disordered, inward-looking mind of someone struggling with emotional turmoil. Miscarriage is a difficult subject and there are some visceral scenes which may well make very tough reading for some. I was in two minds about reading this one, and I still am, but I’ll be interested to see what Robinson does next.

And Notre Dame is Burning by Miriam Robinson captures a woman grieving for the loss of a baby and for her relationship with her husband and digging into her experiences of motherhood, of time, of being betrayed. I think readers of authors such as Rachel Cusk and Cat Bohannon would appreciate this.