Stela
Anca Cristofovici
Ninebark Press, 2015
Paperback, 166 pp.
In her essay, “Form as a Response to Doubt,” Lydia Davis says that the fragmentary narrative “can be seen as a response to the philosophical problem of seeing the written thing replace the subject of the writing” (Davis 35). The wide spaces between fragments allow for a kind of thoughtful reflection on the part of the reader. In contrast to a “whole” narrative, the subject lives in those spaces. For Davis, the fragment is like a ruin that suggests “something left behind from a past original whole” (Davis, 36).
Stela, by Anca Cristofovici, is the story of Stela’s return after having disappeared for twenty years from an unnamed country ruled by a shadowy totalitarian regime and the effect of that absence on Stela and her daughter, Cora. The focus of the novel, if one can be named, orbits around Cora’s desire to decipher the mystery of what happened to her mother. Though she was told Stela had died in an automobile accident, Cora remained unconvinced despite being offered photographic evidence. When Stela suddenly reappears, alive, Cora attempts to unravel the circumstances of her mother’s disappearance with the help of Luca, a photographer and friend. Though a summary of the novel might suggest that this is a mystery, the novel is far from it. No hard answers are offered; instead, this is a story about searching and longing and the dissatisfaction of never really knowing.
Formally, Stela is built from fragments: compact, lyrical chapters, like glimpses of dreams, function to create an emotional and psychological space of longing. Stela, too, is a kind of fragment, having been lifted out of her life and narrative. Readers know her through triangulation—though she is present in the novel, that presence is spectral. Luca and Cora attempt to rebuild her from what remains, as if she has come back from the dead after a long absence, excavating what they can from memory. In that sense, Stela is a sort of ruin—a trace, both present and absent in her return. Cora is ruined, too, in that she can’t seem to move beyond Stela’s disappearance. The cut in Stela’s life is too wide—she is what remains of a “past original whole.” Stela’s absence creates a hole in both her and her daughter’s lives and though Stela has returned, the hole only deepens for Cora as she is unable to reconcile, unable to move forward. In the compelling middle section of the novel, Luca attempts to reconstruct Stela’s disappearance through found reels of security footage as if he might rebuild a version of her through visual fragments. In trying to reconstruct the past, to reconstruct Stela, and thus regain something of herself, Cora falters; one can’t undo a ruin.
While the city, country, and time period of the novel are never revealed, supplementary material provided by the publisher explains that the events of the novel are based on Cristofovici’s childhood in Soviet Romania. By leaving these details shrouded, the novel feels at first like so many novels of state oppression. What separates Stela, however, is that it offers an alternative. This isn’t a detective novel, at least not in the traditional sense.
The strength of Stela is in its multivalence. While Stela explores the emotional aftermath of disappearance and the complex mourning of a death-that-is-not-a-death, the complexity of Stela’s reappearance and resurrection is how, in the absence of concrete answers, Cora finds a kind of peace through art. Perhaps if the novel offers an answer in the end it is that: despite living under the threat of state-sponsored disappearance, erasure might be remedied through the ineffable fulfillment of art rather than concrete answers. Rather than showing us how a person might be rebuilt from ruin, the novel explores an alternative in which rebuilding is not about reconstruction, but about making something else entirely.
Each moment of the novel is like a splintered dream of lives interrupted, rendered in electric prose. Stela is a beautifully fragmented novel about a fragmented life and the desire to put something together, to form a whole where one cannot be found. In a place where the act of speaking and the threat of surveillance make saying too much grounds for erasure, the novel and characters telegraph meaning through lyrical cipher—they remain safe through silence. When Stela tells Cora that she wrote letters “to hide, not to reveal,” a reader might understand the strategy of the novel, too in the way that we are to read in the spaces in what isn’t said, that in the end, the absence created by a futile search for answers can only be filled by acceptance, feeling, and art.
Matthew Kirkpatrick is the author of Light Without Heat (FC2) and The Exiles (Ricochet Editions). His writing has appeared recently in The Rumpus, The Common, The Believer Logger, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. His digital collage, “The Silent Numbers” was included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. He is an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University.