Jennifer Kabat
Beauty and brutality, repression and rage: Hélène Bessette’s 1953 roman poétique is a work in defiance of novelistic time.
Lili Is Crying, by Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs,
New Directions, 183 pages, $16.95
• • •
Never show a character crying. It’s not sympathetic, I was told by a man—a white man. He was my professor and talking of realist fiction. Tears aren’t realistic; readers can’t feel them. Instead, show characters swallowing, their throat sore; or looking aside, staring at their shoe, or a corner, or a stain. That’s what readers will feel. In Hélène Bessette’s novel Lili Is Crying, the tears are unavoidable. They’re in the title, and ten pages in, I was emailing everyone I could about the book. It felt electric and urgent, as if Bessette should have long been in my canon, with Ingeborg Bachmann or Elizabeth Hardwick, Lynne Tillman and Annie Ernaux. Yet, Lili is Bessette’s first novel translated into English, though it was written in 1953.
I’d like my review just to be quotes from the book, only they’d extend Borges-like into a 1:1 recreation as I try to capture what Bessette called the “roman poétique,” the poetic novel: half sentences, fragments, offset line breaks, white space, repetition, compression, inner monologue and dialogue running together, all with a musicality that seems to take place in a diaphanous fairy-tale world. Simply her descriptions of atmosphere: “Others gaze out at the bright hole of night through the swing door,” or “He’s . . . guiding Lili out into the bright white stain of the outdoors.” That bright hole and bright white stain, or how “He says this quietly into the bluing night.” (He is Lili’s husband, never named).
Meanwhile, Lili’s mother haunts her daughter in the sky: “Maman lost, deformed, reformed, disappeared, reappeared in the clouds—in repressed, compressed, thinning, regathering clouds of torment . . .” The descriptions remind me of watching old Popeye cartoons. Strip out the characters, and all you’re left with is an abstract fence, sketched-in grass, the barest suggestion of sky . . . Lili shares the cartoon’s casual violence, which is not to say the novel is comic, though at times it is, yes, darkly funny. It is beautiful, brutal, and, by the end, everyone’s lives are ruined.
The book tells the story of Lili’s claustrophobic relationship with her mother. She won’t let her adult daughter leave, so Lili eventually runs off with a man she doesn’t love, because she feels unworthy of love. He is a “Slav,” with little more said of his background. He’s also the only sympathetic character. Lili gets an abortion that nearly kills her, and, later, he is deported to Dachau. These details are stark and revealed sidelong, making them even more shocking. Bessette writes that the poetic novel’s “force comes from its lack of commentary.”
Lili was Bessette’s first book. She was thirty-five when it was published and had already been a missionary wife who’d left her husband after a miscarriage and moved to Sydney for nine months in the late 1940s, where she worked in a toothpaste factory. Michel Leiris learned of her, told Raymond Queneau of her. She wrote thirteen novels for Queneau at Gallimard, each with fewer and fewer readers. Back in France, she was a primary-school teacher, lost her job, cleaned houses, and died in poverty, her books out of print. Now, thanks to Kate Briggs’s translation, we have the luck of reading Lili Is Crying. With its repression and rage, the novel hardly seems to fit with Briggs’s own mother-daughter story, The Long Form. Hers is capacious—one day with a mother and newborn. But both authors probe the novel and time, compression and ongoingness, and how a novel holds a life.
Translators often must lobby for the writers they think are important, and Briggs is currently working on two other Bessette novels and her poetic manifestos. You can see them all as a key to Briggs’s own ideas. Early in her process with Lili, she wrote for the Yale Review, “The crucial negotiation . . . will turn precisely on these possibilities of the present tense. The translation of a novel which seems to me to propose the novel as a time-space, a duration, in and with which to ask these questions: questions about the basic conditions of being.” Bessette defies novelistic time. She cuts time-markers like “next week,” “the next morning,” or “six years later” used to orient readers, so the book feels outside our ideas of progress and time as linear. Events happen simultaneously, and she calls our attention directly to it:
The two things happened on the same day.
Because it’s like this.
Always.
Two things, three things, four things happening, always, on the same day.
Two dreams, three dreams, four dreams shattering in a single minute.
There are so many dark days. So many days of sickness. So many days when death could come and no one would care.
. . .
Then, on one day amid all the others, they all burst into flame.
Coincidences, I was taught, also don’t feel “real.” Events must seem inexorable, arising from characters’ actions. But Lili’s simultaneity feels to me closer to the truth, or closer to the world we inhabit now.
For nearly one hundred pages, the novel is set in a fable-like world beyond any particular year or era. Then, under the heading “THE VERB TO CHOOSE,” like some superscript in a Godard film, Lili’s context comes clear: capitalism and genocide. Asked to decide between her husband and mother, Lili calls out the false choices capitalism requires so that people—women—think they are free:
Show me a woman who’s chosen something.
Some women choose one fabric over another, but fabrics fade and market sellers keep selling just so that women can tell themselves they’ve made a choice in their lives.
By the end of the page, the choice is made for her by war, which sounds like capitalism, too:
They all knew that war had been declared, a new kind of war, patent pending.
Everyone knew that deportation had been invented, a new make of deportation, patent pending.
And barbed wire,
a new style of barbed wire;
. . .
a new god,
a peerless new model
beating all the competition.
The passage goes on. It’s clear that Lili’s form, its perpetual present and the compressed time of multiple crises, is a response to the ongoing catastrophe of war and capitalism. The novel is Bessette’s exploration of how to write of these, like Benjamin’s writing just before his death: “This storm is what we call progress.”
Writing cannot contain the pain of life, so Bessette breaks the sentence, shatters it, and finds a new language. It is akin to the way Ernaux uses the second-person plural in The Years, or how Bachmann writes in Malina’s opening about time, “today,” and “suicides.” In one of her manifestos, Bessette writes: “ ‘Poetic’ language is necessarily the language of Difficult Times. It is the language of suffering and everyday normal expression in Times of War. In a noisy anxious world, it is the sentence that makes itself heard. A sentence that has no choice but to be haunting and painful. The cousin of Jazz. That grabs at the attention. It might be cruel.”
I read Lili Is Crying as people are being stolen off the streets, deported to prison camps. Art is, if not yet criminalized and called degenerate, certainly being censored. There are right now multiple genocides, and US democracy feels particularly cruel and definitely undemocratic. Crying is an apt response. The realist novel comes with a fiction of resolution, progress, ending in a new and better place. Bessette defies that fiction. In her, I find the form to fit our ongoing present, where hiding our tears seems disingenuous—but so does the fantasy of the neoliberalism smuggled into the traditional novel. In concealing tears, in looking away, or down, at a shoe, or a stain, those stories hide much more than tears. They come excusing the violence we are facing.
Jennifer Kabat’s books The Eighth Moon (2024) and Nightshining (2025) are published by Milkweed Editions. Her writing has been in Best American Essays, Granta, BOMB, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s. She lives in rural upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.