Circular logic, circular reasoning, and cast shadows people Eva Figes’s 1977 novel of an unreliably narrated account of a woman’s descent into dissociative forgetfulness. Told by a woman—presumably middle-aged, though her age seems to fluctuate based on her interlocutor—named Eleanor, Nelly’s Version follows her past-less arrival in a new town, only for the truth of her interpretations to unravel when countered by the other townsfolk.
Far from a guileless face, Eleanor—who gives her false name at the hotel desk as Nelly Dean—is plagued by never-ending doubts and skepticism about her identity: who she is, where she is, and how she got there, an amnesiac ramble set to rival a philosopher’s lunch. And where did the suitcase filled with cash that she is traveling with come from? Accompanying the insular self-questioning, however, is her building suspicion of those ordinary folk around her. Why is there a young executive named David who is so adamant that Nelly is his mother? “Then you don’t remember me?” seems to be a constant refrain throughout the novella, a questioning of worth and meaning through memory.
Prone to spells of paranoia and uncertainty, Nelly is left alone to solve the mystery of herself and who she is becoming—in contrast to who the others say she is in their pasts—while responding to the probes that her curious neighbors make on her. Told in a laconic and meandering style, Nelly’s Version is not complete without a lingering sense of postmodern paranoia, and inches along with attention to minutiae, gardens and store stock and old women in rocking chairs—mimicking life in a small town without a railway station, stray clues dropped here and there for the reader to pick up like tasty morsels.
Nelly, despite her central instability, is a sympathetic narrator, thoughtful and precise. Her close examinations of human interactions, on the street, in the stores, are seen from a detached, near-clinical perspective, and allow for the town’s strangeness to unfurl. We are given to ask whether the town, in Nelly’s absence, is already so unpredictable, odd occurrences challenging its apparent dailiness—or, whether, refracted through the prism of Nelly’s fragmented mind, what is ordinary happenstance becomes imbued with the uncanny, coincidences difficult for her to parse alone. The dependence she develops on the townsfolk, how their normal lives anchor her days, seems to cement their unlikely but—mostly, aside from the bank robber and a possible arsonist—heartwarming importance to her fierce streak of individualism.
Nelly’s presence seems to engender a small chaos, from police and detective inquiries to mislaid storekeepers, all of the unruly activity appearing to exist on a plane far away from her innocuous visitations to various kindly randoms, where she asks them questions in search of more of her unknown identity. Or, in the case of the gruff George Wilkinson, an unexpected tail and love interest, getting close to the townsfolk becomes another way for her to deal with the viscous, melting passage of time, a distraction to fend off boredom and ill-temper. How do we account for Nelly’s resorting to drink (“In the rooms downstairs I found a sideboard containing several bottles of alcohol, which I finished within days”) to raise her faltering courage, or her overwhelming moments of despair (“Sometimes I buried my head under the pillow and shook with sobs or curses”)?
Forgetful Nelly wanders around, bumping into people she’s just met, like a hairbrush salesman, a reckless driver, or a private eye; and yet, the eerie sense of inevitability shadows her—as when the bank gets robbed shortly after she deposits her bills, bad news she reacts to with a minimum of surprise, almost as though she had expected or planned it, her enclosed mind spinning in a chain of causation, where she is the unknowing beginning and end of everything that goes on around her. Her sense of self is continuously in dissolution, made whole again by minor characters that serve to frame her slide into a fugue-like madness.
As Nelly’s mental state slips in and out of lucid wakefulness, bright with clarity one moment and foggy with self-recriminations the next, her body is given to us as a product of age: if there is one thing we do know about her person, it is her identity and physical appearance as an older, elderly woman, on the one hand courted by George Wilkinson, and on the other claimed as a “granny” by David and his young family, getting on with the other older ladies she interacts with on her walk or invites in for pudding.
Drolly amusing, Nelly’s interior monologues are peppered with levity and questions about who these people are to her, and whether they are who they seem to be. She ponders her own shaken memory when hugging a child: “Her flesh smelled sweet. The smell reminded me of something, though I did not know quite what.” In instances like these, we’re left to question whether Nelly’s madness is less a fugue or amnesia, and simply common dementia. What, then, was she doing with all that cash? And can her own muddled interpretations be trusted against those of the scheming townsfolk after her billfold?
Nelly’s disordered mental state, told through chapters sectioned into two notebooks, makes the input of these voluble secondary characters necessary for the mystery to work. We are drawn her long interior journey, from dalliances with suspicious strangers to a fearful avoidance of becoming spectacle, the matter-of-fact prose register becoming poetic at turns: “Could somebody go demented with grief after decades of undisturbed dreams, a night tide eating at the cliff façade until it finally collapsed? Or would decades of ordinary days filled with mundane and ordinary things wipe the beach clean of yesterday, both castles and bones?” For Nelly, her hours point to a reliance on the banal as a form of distraction, hiding the “castles and bones” of yesterday that have become submerged in her lost memory.
Nelly’s unconscious—or better yet, guilty conscience—leads her straight from the hotel bar to library books that seem to be narrating her exact situation when she opens them up to random pages. She writes in her notebooks as a way to manage her illness, believing it a corrective: “Everybody should have a story which is coherent, with a certain consistency”; however, she admits that she cannot vouch for the total accuracy of her own writings—with time slipping through, happenings miraculous or disastrous, a multiplicity of events falling outside of her control.
With thoughts shot through with bits of horror—fear of the unknown jumping out of mirrors, or an aversion to a florid wallpaper like The Yellow Wallpaper—Nelly brings to the table a healthy curiosity about her confusion of circumstances, a “sneaking desire to snoop in cupboards and drawers.”
A gradually unfolding origami fortune-teller of a mind gone mad, Nelly’s Version considers the psychological horror of waking up one day in an unknown place and not knowing how one got there—left to rely on strangers’ interpretations of the past. And with a suitcase full of cash. It may well be a meditation on aging, gone wild.
