Maria Borrély’s novel: “Mistral”: You can also talk about the weather in books

The weather is always good to talk about in books. In older novels in particular, however, it is more than conversational material or a backdrop; it often has something prophetic about it and becomes an element of the story that carries the plot. For example, in Friedrich Christian Delius’ cheerful scholarly work “The Hero and His Weather” one can learn something about the ideological use of certain weather phenomena in bourgeois novels.

For the French writer Maria Borrély, the weather plays a major role, not an ideological one, but an existential one. To be more precise: Here it is the wind that makes all her characters a little crazy. It’s cold and cutting mistralthat pitiless one Master, sweeping through southern France. As if he were blowing out the stars, they say, as if he had the power of a manslayer, they say in Provence. Some days it blows non-stop. “Like jabs with a plane, one thinks, hastily, furiously, obstinately wanting to rasp the earth down to the bones.”

“Sous le vent”, which literally means “lee side”, the side turned away from the wind, was first published in 1930. It was the debut of the then 40-year-old Marseille-born Maria Borrély. Amelie Thomas new translation bears the simple title “Mistral”, we know immediately what is meant, something short-tempered and irrepressible.

“Mistral” is a painting of all colors and shades

But Borrély knows quite a bit more about this Provençal wind than any meteorologist; She knows how to paint and sing about him, she turns him into an instrument when his rage turns into “reed and flute sounds”, when he divides in the trees, loses himself in them and “dissolves into music”. In the pines he sings “deep like a beautiful organ, in the big oaks he murmurs like a mountain stream”. It goes on like this, and you think how beautifully someone has seldom listened when the wind is ruffling your hair.

“Mistral” is a real rediscovery in this country, which we owe to the Provence lover Amelie Thoma. But even in France, Borrély hardly seems to be present anymore, except in the small towns where she lived. At the time, the book had influential admirers, such as Jean Giono or André Gide, who considered it a painting in which every single brushstroke had enchanted him so much that he no longer cared so much about what it might represent.

‘Sous le vent’ was published by the major Gallimard publishers, but like so many memorable works, this one fell into oblivion. In her enriching epilogue, Thoma describes Borrély’s life, from the reform pedagogical teacher in the provinces to the communist and later socialist, essayist and novelist, who became acquainted with Jean Giono with her husband Ernest, to the resistance fighter during the Second World War.

“Mistral” is in fact a painting in which, above all, nature is brought to paper in impressive colors and shades. Her figures are not at the mercy of this nature, but are shaped by it and subjected to its rhythms. Marie, a young peasant girl, is almost inescapably involved in this natural order, in village and family life. Right from the start she is described almost as part of nature: “Her eyes are the color of beautiful wild lavandin. The movement of her waist, her shoulders, is like the swaying of a young birch in the wind, which she resists with the supple strength of her loins.”

Now the wind blows a young man in front of her eyes, and Marie can’t and doesn’t want to forget him anymore: Olivier awakens a longing in her that other admirers can’t ignite. A kiss ensues, which for Olivier remains a fleeting episode on the road to a solid marriage; for Marie, however, it is the beginning of a dream.

Immense existential impact

The way Borrély stages the shattering of this reverie, the way passion appears as something natural and the betrayal of Marie’s hope as a natural catastrophe, has immense existential impact. And yet the disillusionment is described very delicately and quietly, the certainly overpowering emotions are only hinted at cautiously, they find their echo in the impressively suggestive landscape descriptions.

Borrély leaves many things in limbo, and in her translation Amelie Thoma preserves a sensitivity that corresponds to the poetic mystery of the text. The inevitability of Marie’s fate rightly reminds Thoma of an ancient tragedy in her epilogue. The wind occasionally lets out a sigh that sounds completely human, it is said towards the end. And a few lines later we hear Marie sigh, and she “hears death knells ringing in her temples in the roar and rage of the mistral”. In old novels not only the weather is important. You die of love in it.

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