Villa of Delirium By Adrien Goetz
/Villa of Delirium
By Adrien Goetz
New Vessel Press, 2020
Adrien Goetz’s Villa of Delirium is not merely a historical novel, it’s a novel about history. Belle Époque France, Ancient Greece, the two World Wars and the Holocaust: each provides the author his narrative setting but also the ideas he reckons with. Real-life figures like Gustave Eiffel feature in the book’s pages, though the most memorable character here is Kerylos, the grand house on Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera that gives Goetz his title.
The author, a teacher of art history at the Sorbonne in Paris and the editor of the Louvre’s quarterly magazine, puts his expertise on full display in this story of Kerylos, the man who built it and the historical currents it captured. Kerylos, Greek for “Halcyon,” was the crowning achievement of Theodore Reinach (1860-1928), a French-Jewish archaeologist in thrall to the classical world whose goal was no less than to capture Ancient Greece for posterity in his villa by the sea. “Theodore,” Goetz’s narrator Achilles Leccia observes, “wanted windows everywhere; that would be the main difference between his ‘Greek villa’ and the houses of antiquity; he was not going to imitate, he was going to create, to compose an entirely new text.”
The fictional Achilles is our Virgil here. Like Napoleon, he leaves the Corsica of his birth and witnesses Big Events on the Continent. His mother finds work as a cook for Gustave Eiffel, whose tower in Paris has recently been finished and whose own seaside home is near the one Theodore is building. After a chance encounter, Theodore gets the idea to teach Achilles Greek grammar and raise him as a protégé-of-sorts at Kerylos. We know from the first—the novel begins with Achilles returning to Kerylos as an older man, some years after the Nazis have looted it and his benefactor is long dead—that the boy has since become a well-known painter. As he surveys his former home, Proustian flourishes recount the building of the house and the love and loss he experienced there.
Goetz’s descriptions of Theodore, who was related through his wife Fanny to the Ephrussi and Rothschild families, are often as memorable as those of Kerylos. Achilles recalls that Theodore “knew by heart whole pages of dialogue from the trial of Joan of Arc. He knew who did what in the battles between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. He lived and breathed history as religious people lived and breathed prayer.” Theodore’s two brothers, Salomon and Joseph, were also well-known intellectual figures of the Third Republic (Joseph sat in the national legislature). As Achilles sums up, “Joseph, Salomon, Theodore: their initials formed a kind of motto in French, Je Sais Tout, meaning ‘I know everything.’ They were the embodiment of science, art, literature, politics—everything that made the France of that era.”
“At Kerylos,” says Achilles, “the visitor, gaze drawn far out to sea, could breathe. Guests awoke in rooms flooded with sunshine, pure white light dancing on ocher stone, the sea sliced into large rectangles. There was the smell of salt, freshly starched sheets, olive oil, and resin.” Such passages abound throughout the book, and in Natasha Lehrer’s skillful translation from the French, they are often exhilarating. Exhausting, too. References to Ancient Greece and architectural ephemera are a near-constant; after a while they begin to grate.
As we watch Achilles grow up, we watch him discover the wonders of history and Greek grammar, watch him size up the exotic home he lives in. We see him befriend Theodore’s nephew Adolphe, go to war, fall in love and discover painting. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, but rather than confuse things, it instills the novel with an elegiac tone that it maintains throughout. For all of the effort and ambition that Theodore puts into this home, he, his family and his masterpiece could not escape the twin scourges of war and anti-Semitism.
The plight of Alfred Dreyfus on Devil’s Island remains front and center in the narrative and the minds of the Reinach clan (“Joseph became the self-appointed official historian of the case,” Goetz writes). Theodore’s son Léon perishes in Auschwitz in 1943, and the Nazis plunder Kerylos. For Achilles, apocalypse comes a generation before, when he and Adolphe set off for World War I and Adolphe is killed.
Goetz will occasionally tease out the strongest thread of his book, namely, the ultimate folly of human endeavor under the ruthless torrents of history. Achilles, in Paris in 1945, learns of the Holocaust and laments how “the Reinachs’ culture, all their knowledge, all that they knew and taught me, had not protected them from hell.” On the day Achilles returns to Kerylos, he rebels at the house he once called home, finding it utterly ridiculous. In his anger he recalls a line from “Cyrano de Bergerac” that Theodore used to quote: “No! No! It is far more sweet when it is all in vain.”
Was it indeed all for naught? Today Kerylos is a tourist attraction, named a monument historique by the French Ministry of Culture. The shadow of Ozymandias falls both on the house and the pages of Goetz’s book. It’s a remarkable feat of storytelling. And if the hero’s name is a bit on the nose, perhaps there’s hope in the fact that Achilles may still see something worthwhile in Kerylos after all: “I might have turned my back on this...ship on the ocean of time...but it still stirs something in me. It was the setting for all the stories I made up when I was still a boy.... It is the mosaic of my life. Joy marked out in tiny fragments of stone.”
—Benjamin Shull is a writer and editor in Park Slope, Brooklyn.