Helen Bonaparte

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A lurid exploration of passion, agency, and the role of art in self-actualization. 

In D’Stair’s novel, a listless mother finds an object of obsession while on a guided tour of Italy. 

Middle-aged Helen Bonaparte is quietly starving, but she can’t articulate what will sate her. She arrives in Venice while on a weeklong guided tour of Italy’s great cities and artistic history under no romantic illusions about where she is or who she’s with—she finds Venice “grey” and “unfortunate,” while her fellow Americans “inspire loathing.” Providing welcome distraction amid her vapid company and the ostentatious design of the city is Marieke, the tour guide, who’s young and beautiful and Dutch. Helen’s fascination is immediate: “My body is pierced with Marieke.” From the first dinner they share in Venice, Helen’s hyper-fixation intensifies, and her engagement with her fellow travelers and the cities they traverse (not to mention her relationship with her partner, Marcel, and their two children) begins to pale in the face of this new erotic fixation. She has enough self-awareness to shield her darker compulsions—Helen is careful not to look at or speak with Marieke for too long, and she befriends a fellow tour mate, Richard, to obscure her singular focus and desire. But as the group visits more cities, monuments, and museums (nearly every chapter denotes a new city and day), she becomes emboldened (inching toward frantic) as she reads into every touch and gloats over the symbolism in gestures as simple as sipping from a coffee cup. Is this erotic spell mutual, or is Helen losing herself to fantasy? 

Before Helen departed for Italy, Marcel had recommended she take the novel Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith (author of queer, psychological novels such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Price of Salt) for company. Marcel’s reasoning is that the novel’s story takes place in the same towns; this can be read as a meta “wink” at D’Stair drawing inspiration from Highsmith’s interrogations of identity and existential crises amid picturesque backdrops. The novel Helen brings along involves a murder, and readers will find echoes of Ripley’s title character’s obsession with a beautiful young man and the escapist potential of his lifestyle in how Helen pines for Marieke and in the story’s mounting potential for violence. Helen notes again and again how little she cares for any of her tour mates, not even bothering to learn their names (aside from Richard’s). Her deepest conversations and moments of introspection that aren’t filtered through the lens of Marieke come from experiencing the art around her. The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, for example, offers a reprieve from her general cynicism, allowing her to ruminate and perhaps even believe in the power of art’s influence, if only briefly: “What does it matter whether it is truly real or some burgeoning capitalist’s abomination. Only the romance matters now, the symbol, the truth not in the material but in the mind of the observer.” And this elusive romance, for better or worse, eventually drives Helen toward her conclusion.

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An academic’s obsession plunges her Italian tour into charged erotic suspense.

Blending literary suspense, travelogue, and a spirit of uneasy eroticism, D'Stair (author of One Year of Desire) plumbs the heart and needs of a bored academic, Helen Bonaparte, on a restless tour of Italy she's undertaken to get out of her rut at home. But Helen can't stand the giggling girls and impassioned teachers on the tour and is fully prepared to mope her way through until she meets the tour guide, Marieke. Helen immediately forms an obsessive, strange, and poetic attachment to the beautiful young woman, an attachment whose unsettling qualities are echoed in the novel’s references to suspense master Patricia Highsmith, as Helen imagines an Italy “infused with Highsmith's pulse” and the rich details of the author’s world: “a hand resting on a hotel door, a pulled trigger,” and more.

The evocatively named Helen is still mostly sullen on the trip, except with a vivacious man named Richard, who becomes her travel buddy. Wrapped up in her own narrative, Helen continues to fixate on the details of Marieke's beauty, even as she's reminded of her partner, Marcel, and children at home. As she plunges deeper into fantasy, the narrative alternates between first- and third-person, suggesting a protagonist getting swept away. Soon, after a charged scene before Michelango's David, Helen surreptitiously takes a bite of food with Marieke's fork, just to have a "chance to feel her tongue." Things get increasingly weird as Helen takes advantage of being in Marieke's room to put her toothbrush in her mouth as well as leave her scent—a scene that jolts.

Helen Bonaparte brings poetic vigor to Helen’s imaginings and occasional pushing of boundaries, deftly mingling desire, tension, and the feeling that things could go very wrong. This is a full-bodied, sumptuously written, always perceptive study of yearning for something more, as Helen works through a moment of existential crisis, eager for connection. D'Stair’s prose startles, dazzles, informs, and pleases. 

Sarah D'Stair is available for readings and interviews (online, in person, radio etc). Print copies of Helen Bonaparte are available for review to individuals, retailers, libraries, universities upon request.