They Say Sarah

March 16, 2020
Delabroy-Allard’s debut is a whirlwind jaunt through two women’s fast-moving love affair. The unnamed narrator, a single mother recently separated from her partner, meets Sarah at a friend’s party in Paris, and the action unspools quickly through a blitz of sex, travel, and emotional turmoil, cascading to a point of no return: Sarah’s simultaneous falling out of love with the narrator and Sarah’s diagnosis of advanced breast cancer sends the narrator reeling. The prose’s short, noirish lines (“The Metro speeds through the darkness. I catch my breath. I swallow the taste of iron, of blood in my mouth”) barrel forward with relentless momentum until the narrator ends up in Italy, bouncing around friends’ apartments. Here, her thoughts stretch into longer and less immediate digressions, as Delabroy-Allard spins up a sudden mystery that haunts the novel’s final moments. The narrator’s obsessing on the torrid effects of a passion abruptly ended (“My fingers still smell like her snatch. I sniff them like a lost soul”) creates a lean alternative to the amplified interrelational tension found in her contemporaries Ottessa Moshfegh and Guadalupe Nettal, with thrilling, if less heady, results. This slim tale will interest fans of French pulp legend Francis Carco.

May 1, 2020
In a whirlwind of queer eroticism, classical strings, and vernal sensuality, debut novelist Delabroy-Allard whips up a bracing portrait of consumptive love and mutual obsession. A young mother and new teacher in Paris has found herself adrift, "living a life [she] never thought [she'd] live" following her husband's sudden departure. Left to raise their young daughter alone, the unnamed narrator "walk[s] around like a ghost," the sudden shift in identity rendering her vulnerable, transparent, thrust into "a period of latency." Drawing her back into the world and its fecund, proliferating springtime is Sarah, a woman she met at a New Year's party who has quickly woven herself into the fabric of the narrator's life, sparking off a liminal hum of possibility that buzzes between them. Sarah, a successful violinist who darts in and out of the city on tour with her quartet, is too much in every respect--she drinks too much, smokes too many cigarettes, wears too much makeup, is too loud, too magnetic. In her faded and fragile state, the narrator absorbs Sarah's radiance until she too begins first to shine, then burn as their unsustainable passion increasingly erupts in violence and despair. Each time Sarah departs and returns, the narrator is torn apart and stitched back together, until finally she's worn too thin for further repair. While the cumulative effect of repetition can at times slow rather than drive the swell of the narrative's crescendo, overall the prose exerts a tidal pull, and the book's structure skillfully mirrors the story's atmosphere: The short vignettes that constitute Part I replicate the breathless swirl of the narrator's turbulent affair with Sarah while lengthening chapters throughout Part II reflect her descent into rambling dishevelment and a sense of being stuck in time. In this second half, the narrator flees Paris for Italy in a frantic attempt to resurrect herself from the ashes of her devastation when her relationship with Sarah finally collapses beneath the weight of its own fraught history. A dizzying, lush flight through the ecstasy and devastation of an incendiary romance and the grief that follows its loss.

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May 15, 2020
An award-nominated best-seller in France, this American debut begins in Paris in springtime, "a spring like any other, a spring to depress the best of us." The narrator, a young mother who is not named, has recently been left by her husband and is obsessed by the word "latency." Into this between-time arrives Sarah: a violinist who both performs and exists con fuoco. Their fast friendship quickly becomes all-consuming, and then much more, catching them both off guard. Lighting a cigarette, Sarah is the first to profess her love; for the narrator, "the smell of sulphur will always and for ever be the smell of that admission." As in the music Sarah plays with her globe-trotting quartet, beguiling the narrator, Delabroy-Allard's novel cycles through phrases, refrains, and movements. The book's first pages introduce a future Sarah ravaged by sickness, and, after the book's love-fiery first half, readers find the narrator dealing with the repercussions of that illness, and something of a nervous breakdown, in an abandoned Trieste apartment. A gasping, sensory-driven symphony of love and despair.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)