A woman's life moves to a surreal stage

May 26, 2005|Globe Correspondent

Thirty-Three Swoons, By Martha Cooley, Little, Brown, 312 pp., $23.95

Camilla Archer, 50 years old, divorced, and manager of a theater memorabilia shop in Greenwich Village, leads a seemingly tidy life -- until her cousin Eve unexpectedly dies. Suddenly Eve's daughter besieges Camilla with unwelcome questions about Eve and family history. And then the dreams begin, unsettling Camilla with people and images from her past.

Like her first novel, ''The Archivist," Martha Cooley's ''Thirty-Three Swoons" fuses history with a contemporary story, distilling similarities out of disparate experiences. Here she employs a playful premise: Camilla's dreams are the handiwork of the doppelganger of avant-garde Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. When she goes to sleep, it is like attending the theater and seeing a play starring herself. The doppelganger stages scenes with figures from Camilla's life juggling, dancing, and jumping on trampolines, all directed by Meyerhold, who appears as a masked man in a cape. Episodes from her past are replayed, but in eerie, disorienting ways.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Meyerhold rebelled against naturalism, seeking to startle audiences into seeing and feeling more intensely through innovative staging. Though a supporter of the Russian Revolution, he was imprisoned and murdered by the Soviets in 1940. In the novel, the doppelganger, filled with remorse that he was unable to save Meyerhold, is propelled by a sense of mission: to rechannel the director's mental energies. In Camilla, he believes he has found the ideal ''receptor": She loves theater, her father had met Meyerhold, and she carefully guards her memories and the emotions they stir.

Cooley skillfully rotates the narrative between the doppelganger and Camilla. The doppelganger conveys something of Meyerhold's irreverent ways, describing, for instance, the director reciting Hamlet's soliloquy while doing a handspring.

Camilla, telling the present-day story, is more contained. The contrast between the two narrators creates a tug of war -- commenting on Camilla's situation, the doppelganger prods and cajoles; Camilla resists looking too closely at past relationships, losses, and disappointments.

Camilla comes by her reserve honestly. She grew up in a subdued household with a charismatic but disengaged father, a maker of perfumes. Her story builds in suspense as family memories surface and revelations emerge.

Camilla's tale poses questions about how we learn about ourselves, and about how we confront uncomfortable realities. Meyerhold's presence suggests the power of fantasy; seeing our experiences in relation to someone or something strange and foreign, we reconceive what is familiar and assumed.

In the spirit of Meyerhold, ''Thirty-Three Swoons" is memorable for its offbeat approach. Yet while Camilla is sympathetic, it is difficult to take her plight to heart. At times, the doppelganger sounds like a lecturer arguing a thesis, with plot developments neatly supporting his points.

The gravity of Meyerhold's story, especially the account of his persecution by the Soviets, diminishes the contemporary tale. And the parallel drawn between Meyerhold's ambivalence toward the state and Camilla's toward her family seems strained. Separately, each story draws us in; joined together they seem more an attempt to play with an idea than to mount a full-fledged drama.