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Let the Dark Flower Blossom
Praise for Norah "A splendid, leisurely meditation on the meaning of fame, identity, and love."— Kirkus Reviews , starred review "Labiner, narrating in several distinct and haunting voices, proves herself a metafictional adept. She succeeds in crafting an ambitious, poignant and sharp-tongued novel filled with secrets and ghosts, jealousy and love."— Publishers Weekly Sheldon and Eloise Schell are twins, orphans, and the estranged college companions of the rich, scandalous, celebrated Roman Stone. Now Roman is dead, murdered with a pair of scissors in his living room, and Eloise and Sheldon must separately tease out the secrets—a burning house, a murdered girl—that were the one story they could never tell. Moving between the muffled plush of wintry Chicago, the fogbound darkness of a Lake Superior island, and the even darker precincts of memory, Let the Dark Flower Blossom is a book about the pull of the closed door. It is about the small pleasure of being right, the tremendous thrill of doing wrong, and the lengths writers will go to—lie, steal, kill—to get the perfect story. Norah Labiner is the author of three Our Sometime Sister , Miniatures , and German for Travelers . She has received a Minnesota Book Award for Literary Fiction and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been recognized by the American Library Association, the Jewish Book Council, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series.
- GenresFiction
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
10 people are currently reading
346 people want to read
About the author
Norah Labiner
7 books9 followersAcclaimed for her ability to write "heartbreaking and vastly original tale[s] of literary intrigue." (Time Out New York), Norah Labiner's debut novel, Our Sometime Sister, was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Her second novel, Miniatures, was an American Library Association Notable Book, a Minnesota Book Award winner, and a selection for both the Minnesota Monthly and Utne Reader book clubs. She lives in Minneapolis."
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September 2, 2013
In Greek mythology, Pandora, the first woman, was given many gifts from the gods. Athena gave her clothing; Aphrodite endowed her with beauty; Hermes bestowed upon her the gift of speech. Zeus was not so benevolent. Seeking revenge after Prometheus stole fire from heaven,
Zeus presented a beautiful box (some say jar) to Pandora with one caveat. He instructed her not to open the box for any reason. Compelled by curiosity, Pandora could not resist, and, one by one, she unwittingly unleashed evils all over the world. The story of Pandora illustrates that we have a universal desire to seek and know the truth, no matter the cost. Sometimes, though, on our quest for fact, we discover ugly, unwelcome truths and malevolent, horrible acts.
Twins Sheldon and Eloise Schell have a box of their own in Norah Labiner’s dark, cerebral, and labyrinthine novel Let the Dark Flower Blossom. What secrets are the mysterious pair keeping? What evils lurk inside the box? And what monsters can be found in each of us who call
ourselves readers?
Metafiction, or writing about writing, features prominently in Let the Dark Flower Blossom. When the story opens, celebrated novelist Roman Stone, former college friend of the twins, has died. He was murdered in an attempted robbery. When Eloise first met Stone in college, she remarked, “Roman Stone was born to be murdered.” Although Labiner shows
Stone’s character only in flashbacks, he figures prominently in the story. Roman ironically “wrote of fate and then fell to it.” Later in the book, Labiner reveals that Stone “was murdered. And he deserved it.” Considering his rocky past with the twins, one cannot help but wonder if they played a role in his death.
Very early on in the novel, the author deftly illustrates Sheldon’s jealousy of Stone, who wrote the bestselling book Babylon Must Fall on Sheldon’s typewriter. Roman “was big and brash and relevant as hell. Even his death was relevant. America’s literary zeitgeist cut down in the heartland? What did it mean? Was it a metaphor? Or a symbol? It was more than an ending; it alluded to godlessness and dark times ahead.” Labiner hints his death might also unravel her characters or at least make their lives messier.
Varied perspectives allow the reader to get into each of Labiner’s bold and unforgettable characters. In addition to the twins serving as narrators, Labiner also chronicles her tale from the points of view of a young woman named Beatrice who lives on an atmospheric island in the
middle of Lake Superior and another young woman named Susu who wants us to know there are rules to telling a story. Because of Labiner’s multiple voices, flash fiction is a worthy and effective narrative form in Let the Dark Flower Blossom. Sometimes the author gives us only
one sentence from a character and then changes the point of view to another narrator; in other instances, one raconteur may tell the story for several pages.
Using different storytellers enables Labiner to show the unreliability of memory. For example, the author alludes to a horrible secret the twins are keeping about their childhood—a mystery that involves a fire, a locked box, and death. While Sheldon remembers an incident one way,
Eloise recalls something very different. To get to the truth, we must sift through clues and symbolism. If humans have a natural curiosity, like Pandora, then humans also have a biological inclination to lie. Let the Dark Flower Blossom overflows with unreliable narrators, some of whom are downright liars. Employing various plot twists and red herrings throughout her story, Labiner makes an already intriguing and beguiling tale much more so. As the author reveals to me through email, “Novels deceive and seduce; this is an inherently and unabashedly dishonest form. Every novel is lying to you. Every novel wants to get you into bed. Every novel will pull the chair out from under you.”
The narrative occasionally meanders with strange though beautiful streams of consciousness, but this is done purposefully, to throw the reader a curveball, to keep her off-track. Labiner’s work of fiction never bores. Instead, Let the Dark Flower Blossom accomplishes something very few novels do these days—the tale forces the reader to think not only about the book itself but also about writing, reading, and even the nature of being human. “A story is a labyrinth, and all paths lead to the monster,” Labiner writes. “Who is the monster? Is it the storyteller? A good storyteller must be a monster. The best stories tell of the worst of human nature. The worst, our broken laws. Our nightmares realized. To write of such things, an author must commit the act himself; if only on the page.” “What of the readers?” she asks. “In the real world, we read our newspapers. We butter our bread. We read of murder and we are sickened. But in fiction, in the story: we want the dead girl. So—who is the monster?”
Let the Dark Flower Blossom is wholly original and brilliantly imaginative. Labiner says she wanted to “to write a story about the things I love: gardens gone to ruin, dogs and cats, about chocolate and oranges and mythological punishments for unspeakable crimes. It’s an ode to Poe, Hawthorne, Hitchcock, and Hollywood….” In her words, Let the Dark Flower Blossom is “an unrequited love story about an unrepentant writer and an unreliable reader.” She tells me she is
currently “working on a novel about Lizzie Borden and little dogs and trains and hatchets and the history of the corset. It’s called I Murdered Philip Roth: A Love Story.” If it’s as powerful a story
as this, count me in.
Equal parts satire, tragedy, and comedy, Let the Dark Flower Blossom may be fiction, but Labiner offers us insight into universal themes and emotions—such as jealousy, memory, sibling bonds, celebrity, violence, and morality— in her novel. The author has created a living narrative,
one that almost seems to grow, change, and breathe right before our eyes. It is almost as if Labiner’s story has a mind of its own. You’ll never read a book the same way again. And you may think twice before you open any more boxes, especially those that are meant to stay closed.
Zeus presented a beautiful box (some say jar) to Pandora with one caveat. He instructed her not to open the box for any reason. Compelled by curiosity, Pandora could not resist, and, one by one, she unwittingly unleashed evils all over the world. The story of Pandora illustrates that we have a universal desire to seek and know the truth, no matter the cost. Sometimes, though, on our quest for fact, we discover ugly, unwelcome truths and malevolent, horrible acts.
Twins Sheldon and Eloise Schell have a box of their own in Norah Labiner’s dark, cerebral, and labyrinthine novel Let the Dark Flower Blossom. What secrets are the mysterious pair keeping? What evils lurk inside the box? And what monsters can be found in each of us who call
ourselves readers?
Metafiction, or writing about writing, features prominently in Let the Dark Flower Blossom. When the story opens, celebrated novelist Roman Stone, former college friend of the twins, has died. He was murdered in an attempted robbery. When Eloise first met Stone in college, she remarked, “Roman Stone was born to be murdered.” Although Labiner shows
Stone’s character only in flashbacks, he figures prominently in the story. Roman ironically “wrote of fate and then fell to it.” Later in the book, Labiner reveals that Stone “was murdered. And he deserved it.” Considering his rocky past with the twins, one cannot help but wonder if they played a role in his death.
Very early on in the novel, the author deftly illustrates Sheldon’s jealousy of Stone, who wrote the bestselling book Babylon Must Fall on Sheldon’s typewriter. Roman “was big and brash and relevant as hell. Even his death was relevant. America’s literary zeitgeist cut down in the heartland? What did it mean? Was it a metaphor? Or a symbol? It was more than an ending; it alluded to godlessness and dark times ahead.” Labiner hints his death might also unravel her characters or at least make their lives messier.
Varied perspectives allow the reader to get into each of Labiner’s bold and unforgettable characters. In addition to the twins serving as narrators, Labiner also chronicles her tale from the points of view of a young woman named Beatrice who lives on an atmospheric island in the
middle of Lake Superior and another young woman named Susu who wants us to know there are rules to telling a story. Because of Labiner’s multiple voices, flash fiction is a worthy and effective narrative form in Let the Dark Flower Blossom. Sometimes the author gives us only
one sentence from a character and then changes the point of view to another narrator; in other instances, one raconteur may tell the story for several pages.
Using different storytellers enables Labiner to show the unreliability of memory. For example, the author alludes to a horrible secret the twins are keeping about their childhood—a mystery that involves a fire, a locked box, and death. While Sheldon remembers an incident one way,
Eloise recalls something very different. To get to the truth, we must sift through clues and symbolism. If humans have a natural curiosity, like Pandora, then humans also have a biological inclination to lie. Let the Dark Flower Blossom overflows with unreliable narrators, some of whom are downright liars. Employing various plot twists and red herrings throughout her story, Labiner makes an already intriguing and beguiling tale much more so. As the author reveals to me through email, “Novels deceive and seduce; this is an inherently and unabashedly dishonest form. Every novel is lying to you. Every novel wants to get you into bed. Every novel will pull the chair out from under you.”
The narrative occasionally meanders with strange though beautiful streams of consciousness, but this is done purposefully, to throw the reader a curveball, to keep her off-track. Labiner’s work of fiction never bores. Instead, Let the Dark Flower Blossom accomplishes something very few novels do these days—the tale forces the reader to think not only about the book itself but also about writing, reading, and even the nature of being human. “A story is a labyrinth, and all paths lead to the monster,” Labiner writes. “Who is the monster? Is it the storyteller? A good storyteller must be a monster. The best stories tell of the worst of human nature. The worst, our broken laws. Our nightmares realized. To write of such things, an author must commit the act himself; if only on the page.” “What of the readers?” she asks. “In the real world, we read our newspapers. We butter our bread. We read of murder and we are sickened. But in fiction, in the story: we want the dead girl. So—who is the monster?”
Let the Dark Flower Blossom is wholly original and brilliantly imaginative. Labiner says she wanted to “to write a story about the things I love: gardens gone to ruin, dogs and cats, about chocolate and oranges and mythological punishments for unspeakable crimes. It’s an ode to Poe, Hawthorne, Hitchcock, and Hollywood….” In her words, Let the Dark Flower Blossom is “an unrequited love story about an unrepentant writer and an unreliable reader.” She tells me she is
currently “working on a novel about Lizzie Borden and little dogs and trains and hatchets and the history of the corset. It’s called I Murdered Philip Roth: A Love Story.” If it’s as powerful a story
as this, count me in.
Equal parts satire, tragedy, and comedy, Let the Dark Flower Blossom may be fiction, but Labiner offers us insight into universal themes and emotions—such as jealousy, memory, sibling bonds, celebrity, violence, and morality— in her novel. The author has created a living narrative,
one that almost seems to grow, change, and breathe right before our eyes. It is almost as if Labiner’s story has a mind of its own. You’ll never read a book the same way again. And you may think twice before you open any more boxes, especially those that are meant to stay closed.
July 21, 2016
Two Stars Rounded Up to Four
I could easily imagine myself throwing away this book at almost any time, in disgust at its choppy sentence fragments, its repetitions, its passages of pop-fiction lushness, its willful obscurity. It took me almost two days to read fifty pages. But then something took hold; I stayed up late to read as much as I could of the next three hundred pages, and woke up early to finish them. Mind you, the book itself was accelerating by that time. You only have to open it to see; the type is dense on the page at the beginning, while much of the last half is set in four-or-five-word paragraphs like a poem:
Stone, paper, scissors. There are numerous references to the game and its obvious symbolism: the writer, the writing, and the scissors of Fate. Later in the book, one of the characters takes a literal pair of scissors and cuts a beach photograph in half, angrily separating the man from the woman. She continues to cut and cut, then scatters the fragments into the air. Norah Labiner's novel seems comprised of such fragments, multiplied and repeated. She sweeps them into piles with her witches' broom, the fragments eddying and falling back into new patterns: stories, memories, symbols, rich classical allusions, moments of desire, betrayal, tragedy, and fleeting happiness. It's a crazy way to write a book, but it sure kept me reading!
I could easily imagine myself throwing away this book at almost any time, in disgust at its choppy sentence fragments, its repetitions, its passages of pop-fiction lushness, its willful obscurity. It took me almost two days to read fifty pages. But then something took hold; I stayed up late to read as much as I could of the next three hundred pages, and woke up early to finish them. Mind you, the book itself was accelerating by that time. You only have to open it to see; the type is dense on the page at the beginning, while much of the last half is set in four-or-five-word paragraphs like a poem:
Wren was waiting for the story to end."What a story could do." Yes. For this is a meta-novel: a novel about stories and how stories get written, made up by liars, stolen by other liars, changing each time they are told. But the truth is in there somewhere, and truth can kill. The novel opens with a murder, that of the popular novelist, Lothario, and bon-vivant Roman Stone, stabbed in his Iowa hotel room while preparing for a commencement address at his alma mater. The story is told by another novelist (or would-be novelist), his college roommate and sometime sidekick Sheldon Schell. Sheldon has a twin sister, Eloise, who dated Roman for a time at college. And that is just about all I can say about the plot, for Labiner is very canny about what she reveals when. Other characters will come in, of Stone and Schell's generation and the next, but she will keep you in suspense about how they all fit together in this complex puzzle of sexual encounters, stories, and lies. There will be other murders too, buried long in the past, but to say that the truth is elusive does not diminish the pleasure of each subsequent revelation—or is it merely another permutation of the lies? Schell often quotes the three rules of storytelling: "Be true," "Don't kill off your protagonist," and "Never talk about truth in a true way." Labiner lives by the third of these; she cheerfully breaks the second, and flirts outrageously with the first. But there a certain fascination in her doing so, provided you don't linger too long.
It was nothing without the ending.
And there was nothing like an ending.
Wren's lips parted.
Her mouth opened.
Wren said, "Oh."
"Ro," she said.
"Oh," she said.
And here I saw.
I could feel.
And see.
What a story could do.
Stone, paper, scissors. There are numerous references to the game and its obvious symbolism: the writer, the writing, and the scissors of Fate. Later in the book, one of the characters takes a literal pair of scissors and cuts a beach photograph in half, angrily separating the man from the woman. She continues to cut and cut, then scatters the fragments into the air. Norah Labiner's novel seems comprised of such fragments, multiplied and repeated. She sweeps them into piles with her witches' broom, the fragments eddying and falling back into new patterns: stories, memories, symbols, rich classical allusions, moments of desire, betrayal, tragedy, and fleeting happiness. It's a crazy way to write a book, but it sure kept me reading!
May 16, 2022
An obsessively allusive murder mystery (that's a bit narrowly focused) without much attention paid to the details surrounding the murder of a well-known author. That event sparks a series of ruminations, lies, stories, reminiscences, and emotions among a male friend (another writer) of the dead man and his twin sister, as well as a younger novelist who is pursuing everything he can find about the celebrity corpse and his relationships with others, and a poetic-minded younger woman. Some fine language, in places, with lots of emphasis on myths, legends, typewriters, and the importance of stories.
June 14, 2016
I wrote a detailed review of this book a while back for a site that seems to no longer exist, so I'm reposting below:
This is a story about a brother and sister.
This phrase acts as a refrain throughout Let The Dark Flower Blossom, Norah Labiner’s densely layered, self-reflexive novel that is about much more than just a brother and sister. The siblings are complex and troubled and each is in a state of personal crisis, but the most compelling thread is the book’s investigation of stories themselves: how they work, why we need them, and what it means to have your story stolen.
Although the characters seem unaware of the existence of modern technology—they exclusively use typewriters, for example, and communicate via letter and postcard—they all confront, on a smaller-scale, questions that are central to the digital age, specifically those about how to shape our public identities and who owns our personal information. In an era in which we have been reduced by algorithms and search engines to accumulations of metadata, we face a cultural crisis in which every bit of our personal information can be appropriated by third and fourth and fifth parties and used to shape a narrative of ourselves that may be factually true, but doesn’t feel true.
In the same way, Labiner’s characters are grappling with their own flawed memories and others’ apparent theft of those memories. The novel continually circles back to tell and retell a handful of pivotal stories from their lives, from a variety of perspectives, both clarifying and complicating the story with each retelling. Labiner demands a lot of her reader, challenges you to reassess your sense of self and to revisit your most important stories, asking the whole time: is this memory true? Does it matter?
* * *
Plot: It’s straightforward and not. Suspenseful and tense, it’s a sort of noirish mystery, a sort of modern morality tale. Eloise and Sheldon Schell are twins, orphaned as seventeen, and then roommates in a small college in Iowa, where they meet Roman Stone, a Bret Easton Ellis type who is on the verge of becoming The Next Big Thing in literature. Roman embodies all the worst aspects of the Great White Male Novelist: he is gluttonous, pretentious, shallow, and cruel. He is also extraordinarily talented, so he enjoys the great privilege of extraordinarily talented and charismatic white men everywhere: rather than condemning his boorish behavior, people celebrate it as central to his genius.
Eloise becomes his part-time lover, and Sheldon his sidekick. They spend a few years bouncing between from one party scene to another. Roman gorges himself on drugs and booze and women. Eloise eventually marries another man and gives birth to a daughter named Susu (who, the narrator notes, “has a very silly name”). Sheldon marries an artist who dies an untimely death, leaving him a massive inheritance from her family’s fortune. He uses the money to buy a cabin on a remote island and becomes a recluse.
Many years later, Roman Stone is killed—stabbed through the heart by an unknown assailant. The book opens with the news of his death, and we learn that everyone in his life had a motive to have killed him. By the time of Roman’s death, Sheldon is acting as a caretaker for Dr. Lemon, an elderly widower and Sheldon’s only friend on the island. Eloise’s second marriage, to an amoral defense attorney, is falling apart, and her own daughter has run away, in touch only via irregular postcards. The murder is the catalyst: the occasion for each of the principals to engage in reflection on their overlapping pasts, during which there was a murder (or two), a suicide (or two), an arson, broken marriages, drug abuse, and enough secrets to make all of these people strangers to one another.
* * *
Eloise has a husband named Louis who she doesn’t seem to love, and it’s easy to see why. A high-profile defense attorney, his most recent success was a not-guilty (“there has to be another word,” Eloise says) for a serial rapist and murderer. At a meeting of the Mnemosyne Society (an organization described as, “dwellers in the field of memory”), Louis brags about having won the case even though he knew his client was guilty and all the facts were aligned against him. How did he do it? By changing the story. He called one of the victims to the stand—she’d been raped and left for dead, but had miraculously survived—and questioned her in such a way that she didn’t even believe her own story anymore:
“He made her doubt herself.
Made her doubt more than her memory.
Made her doubt her own broken bones.
Her own blood.”
For Louis, there is no moral conflict; there is just the philosophical exercise of studying and manipulating memory. When Eloise tries to tell him a simple story about her youth—five years old, her mother baking an apple pie, singing the song American Pie with Sheldon—he pulls at every thread (American Pie wasn’t released until she was twelve, it may have been an apple cake instead of a pie, etc.) until she’s not sure any of the story even occurred. She tires of the conversation, but he keeps pushing:
“He said that it wasn’t the reality of the memory that was important, it was the fact that
her mind wanted to have this image—this idea—within its archives.”
Which underscores one of the key themes of the novel: the fallibility of memory, our proclivity toward turning unrelated experiences into a narrative, shaping them into a version of events that is almost right, but not quite (Sheldon: “This is how memory works: pearls that by virtue of string and proximity become a necklace”). Every character is haunted by events from their past, running up against the limits of their own memories. Can they believe the images in their mind, or have they invented a new story using the raw materials of the true, factual story? And does it even matter whether their memories are accurate? Who gets to determine which version is most valid? Eloise thinks these questions are “how the gods will make you mad… they will make you doubt your own reliability as a witness to your life.”
* * *
More plot: the twins rarely interact and spend most of the book isolated, performing minimal action in the present. They sometimes drink and sometimes eat. They engage in somewhat regrettable sex. Eloise throws a ball to her dog. Sheldon watches Dr. Lemon die. They reflect and they tell stories. Little about their current circumstances changes from start to finish; the point isn’t that they’re going to do something remarkable; all of the suspense derives from the interrogation of their pasts, the gradual reveal of new information, the moments when they have to confront long-buried truths.
When Louis leaves town to meet with the Mnemosyne Society, Eloise is visited by her ex-husband, Zig. They talk about their daughter and their fights and their divorce and they very rarely broach the subject of the future.
Sheldon, meanwhile, is visited by Benjamin Salt, hailed by the literary establishment a prodigy, the successor to Roman Stone. Salt is crippled by writer’s block while trying to draft his second novel and is convinced Sheldon holds the cure. Sheldon himself is a curiosity of the literary community; the onetime associate of Roman Stone and now-recluse who has been perfecting a novel manuscript for so long that it has taken on the mystique of an urban legend. After tracking him down in his in his island home, Salt makes several demands: he wants to see the manuscript, he wants to know everything about Roman, and he wants the typewriter on which Roman wrote his first novel.
* * *
There’s a clear pleasure we take in repeating our stories, for different audiences, for the same audiences at different times. Think about Thanksgiving dinner, the way so many people rely on retellings of the family canon to make these gatherings manageable. At the bar, we call upon friends to repeat stories we’ve heard a dozen times, as if shouting out requests at a concert. Even unremarkable stories get repeated—the time I was stuck at the airport overnight due to thunderstorms, the time I got a speeding ticket even though I was only going five over the limit, the uncomfortable conversation I had with the woman at the laundromat. There is a currency to these stories, maybe in part because they fill uncomfortable silences, but also because of our insatiable, primitive desire for narrative. There is no rational reason a child would need to hear his father read Green Eggs and Ham to him every night for two years, but the longing is pathological, the fervor is religious, the incantations as familiar as prayer.
Someone like Louis discounts the value of stories— they are a means to an end, but they have no intrinsic value. But the others in here understand: stories need to be told, again and again, and they have the power to save, to ruin, to change lives. Governments have fallen, laws enforced wars fought due to the reinterpretation and recontextualization of endlessly repeated religious narratives. As Sheldon says, “If you don’t believe a story can kill you—you haven’t heard the right story.”
The novel’s preoccupation with mythology—references to the Classics abound—is revealing; stories millennia old still guide us, still illuminate and influence our decisions. Without repetition, it’s possible a story doesn’t really become a story, it just stays in the realm of anecdotes, and so one needs to keep it fresh through many retellings.
Over the course of a harrowing ten pages near the end of the novel, Sheldon tries and tries again to finally tell his story in a straightforward way. “I’ll start again,” he says, and begins in a new place, or reveals a new detail. “I’ll start again,” he says, and changes the facts. Even when he finally settles on a version of the story that seems right, he doesn’t seem satisfied, and we get another version, this time from Eloise.
Stories remain incomplete, no matter how many times we return to them and refine them. We can go through a hundred drafts, but there are always things to change, always new meanings to derive. Dr. Lemon, on his deathbed, his memory failing, demands every night that Sheldon tell him the story of the worst thing he’s ever done, forgets the details by morning. Every night for weeks, Sheldon sits at his bedside confessing, in an effort to comfort his dying friend but also to save himself.
* * *
A quick note about the prose.
Much of the book is formatted like this.
And as you might guess.
This approach could get tedious in the wrong hands.
But.
While sometimes the prose can be distracting.
It largely serves the fractured nature.
Of the narrative.
And.
As several references to Hills Like White Elephants demonstrate.
Labiner’s writing shows a strong stylistic influence from Hemingway.
In her reliance.
On deceptively simple prose.
To convey complex concepts.
Inviting the reader to exert energy on ideas.
Rather than untangling convoluted language.
* * *
“I never knew a rich kid who wasn’t a thief,” Sheldon says. Roman steals: packs of gum, booze, wives, stories. Writers have always stolen—it’s an occupational hazard of acquaintanceship with a writer that at some point some part of you will turn up in a short story, a poem, a novel, even if you don’t recognize that part of you after it’s been processed through another narrative. Sheldon knows this, but still has spent years nursing a grudge at Roman for having stolen his story. “I knew that the world was his,” Sheldon says:
“To do with as he wanted.
And my story—
Was no longer mine.
It was his.
And he could change it.
As he willed.
And as he wanted.
It was his.”
Sheldon’s despair is rooted in his awareness that he has lost control over a story that is central to his own identity. He has written his own manuscript, but hasn’t let anyone read it, because he wants to choose how and when the story is shared. Why, he wonders, can’t he be “the author of his own silence” if that’s what he wants?
Well, for one thing, because Eloise has these stories too.
And Roman already published his versions of them.
And because Benjamin Salt tries to steal the manuscript.
Salt’s female companion, Inj (also Roman’s former au pair), asks Sheldon why he finally got down to writing the story for himself. “It’s my story… who else would tell it?” he says. She responds: “Now who’s being stupid?”
* * *
In the most compelling extended scene of the book, Roman’s widow comes into possession of the handwritten manuscript of his latest novel. Grief-stricken, she sits at the typewriter and determines to type out the whole book for him. Almost immediately, she begins editing the book as she goes. It makes for a remarkable image, the widow at the typewriter, trying to perfect her deceased husband, to reshape him and to save him through revision and redrafting.
“And though she vowed, with a transcriptionist’s honest, to be true to the original—she had to make some changes, didn’t she? She had a responsibility to fix, to mend and to amend, to correct him, to repair his faults and flaws. His spelling errors, his stream of consciousness ramblings, his words blotted into obscurity with jam or coffee or was it blood?”
* * *
Some questions: Who owns your stories? Is it you? Your friends?
Facebook? Google?
Ad agencies (or is that redundant)?
The NSA?
Let’s posit here that much of the outrage about privacy violations in social media has little to do with most people having anything criminal to hide, and much more to do with the feeling of violation because our most personal possession—the one thing, besides our bodies, that we wanted to believe is exclusively ours—now belongs to someone else who we can’t trust. While it’s true that one can avoid the whole morass by opting out of social media and smartphones and credit cards and online retailers and all the trappings of the digital age, the people who actually commit to opting out are a small minority. We have collectively decided it’s okay to carry GPS tracking devices on our person at all times, to click “allow” when Google or some other company we barely know requests permission to access our location, our contacts, our personal information. We use Facebook to write love letters to advertisers. We turn our memories into data and send them to the cloud. Every time we log in, we broadcast the person we think we are and the person we aspire to be. Through photos and status updates and search engines and online shopping, we share our values and memories with the world and invite it to reshare those values and memories in its own way. The personal becomes public. We sacrifice ownership of the narrative of our lives
This is a helpless feeling, the notion that thousands of strangers have access to your stories and can manipulate them to serve their own needs. We take the facts of our lives and carefully curate them into an online identity, which is not quite the same as our real identity, and then someone else takes those facts and that distorted vision of ourselves to create a new version of us that they want to sell back to us. This is 21st century life and is it too trite for me to use a rusty metaphor like a reference to Pandora’s Box? Because I am using it and you can’t stop me.
* * *
This is the story of a brother and sister whose father taught them once that the first rule of storytelling is: be true. This is the story of a brother and sister who grew up and learned that this simple rule is much more difficult to follow than they’d ever imagined.
This is a story about a brother and sister.
This phrase acts as a refrain throughout Let The Dark Flower Blossom, Norah Labiner’s densely layered, self-reflexive novel that is about much more than just a brother and sister. The siblings are complex and troubled and each is in a state of personal crisis, but the most compelling thread is the book’s investigation of stories themselves: how they work, why we need them, and what it means to have your story stolen.
Although the characters seem unaware of the existence of modern technology—they exclusively use typewriters, for example, and communicate via letter and postcard—they all confront, on a smaller-scale, questions that are central to the digital age, specifically those about how to shape our public identities and who owns our personal information. In an era in which we have been reduced by algorithms and search engines to accumulations of metadata, we face a cultural crisis in which every bit of our personal information can be appropriated by third and fourth and fifth parties and used to shape a narrative of ourselves that may be factually true, but doesn’t feel true.
In the same way, Labiner’s characters are grappling with their own flawed memories and others’ apparent theft of those memories. The novel continually circles back to tell and retell a handful of pivotal stories from their lives, from a variety of perspectives, both clarifying and complicating the story with each retelling. Labiner demands a lot of her reader, challenges you to reassess your sense of self and to revisit your most important stories, asking the whole time: is this memory true? Does it matter?
* * *
Plot: It’s straightforward and not. Suspenseful and tense, it’s a sort of noirish mystery, a sort of modern morality tale. Eloise and Sheldon Schell are twins, orphaned as seventeen, and then roommates in a small college in Iowa, where they meet Roman Stone, a Bret Easton Ellis type who is on the verge of becoming The Next Big Thing in literature. Roman embodies all the worst aspects of the Great White Male Novelist: he is gluttonous, pretentious, shallow, and cruel. He is also extraordinarily talented, so he enjoys the great privilege of extraordinarily talented and charismatic white men everywhere: rather than condemning his boorish behavior, people celebrate it as central to his genius.
Eloise becomes his part-time lover, and Sheldon his sidekick. They spend a few years bouncing between from one party scene to another. Roman gorges himself on drugs and booze and women. Eloise eventually marries another man and gives birth to a daughter named Susu (who, the narrator notes, “has a very silly name”). Sheldon marries an artist who dies an untimely death, leaving him a massive inheritance from her family’s fortune. He uses the money to buy a cabin on a remote island and becomes a recluse.
Many years later, Roman Stone is killed—stabbed through the heart by an unknown assailant. The book opens with the news of his death, and we learn that everyone in his life had a motive to have killed him. By the time of Roman’s death, Sheldon is acting as a caretaker for Dr. Lemon, an elderly widower and Sheldon’s only friend on the island. Eloise’s second marriage, to an amoral defense attorney, is falling apart, and her own daughter has run away, in touch only via irregular postcards. The murder is the catalyst: the occasion for each of the principals to engage in reflection on their overlapping pasts, during which there was a murder (or two), a suicide (or two), an arson, broken marriages, drug abuse, and enough secrets to make all of these people strangers to one another.
* * *
Eloise has a husband named Louis who she doesn’t seem to love, and it’s easy to see why. A high-profile defense attorney, his most recent success was a not-guilty (“there has to be another word,” Eloise says) for a serial rapist and murderer. At a meeting of the Mnemosyne Society (an organization described as, “dwellers in the field of memory”), Louis brags about having won the case even though he knew his client was guilty and all the facts were aligned against him. How did he do it? By changing the story. He called one of the victims to the stand—she’d been raped and left for dead, but had miraculously survived—and questioned her in such a way that she didn’t even believe her own story anymore:
“He made her doubt herself.
Made her doubt more than her memory.
Made her doubt her own broken bones.
Her own blood.”
For Louis, there is no moral conflict; there is just the philosophical exercise of studying and manipulating memory. When Eloise tries to tell him a simple story about her youth—five years old, her mother baking an apple pie, singing the song American Pie with Sheldon—he pulls at every thread (American Pie wasn’t released until she was twelve, it may have been an apple cake instead of a pie, etc.) until she’s not sure any of the story even occurred. She tires of the conversation, but he keeps pushing:
“He said that it wasn’t the reality of the memory that was important, it was the fact that
her mind wanted to have this image—this idea—within its archives.”
Which underscores one of the key themes of the novel: the fallibility of memory, our proclivity toward turning unrelated experiences into a narrative, shaping them into a version of events that is almost right, but not quite (Sheldon: “This is how memory works: pearls that by virtue of string and proximity become a necklace”). Every character is haunted by events from their past, running up against the limits of their own memories. Can they believe the images in their mind, or have they invented a new story using the raw materials of the true, factual story? And does it even matter whether their memories are accurate? Who gets to determine which version is most valid? Eloise thinks these questions are “how the gods will make you mad… they will make you doubt your own reliability as a witness to your life.”
* * *
More plot: the twins rarely interact and spend most of the book isolated, performing minimal action in the present. They sometimes drink and sometimes eat. They engage in somewhat regrettable sex. Eloise throws a ball to her dog. Sheldon watches Dr. Lemon die. They reflect and they tell stories. Little about their current circumstances changes from start to finish; the point isn’t that they’re going to do something remarkable; all of the suspense derives from the interrogation of their pasts, the gradual reveal of new information, the moments when they have to confront long-buried truths.
When Louis leaves town to meet with the Mnemosyne Society, Eloise is visited by her ex-husband, Zig. They talk about their daughter and their fights and their divorce and they very rarely broach the subject of the future.
Sheldon, meanwhile, is visited by Benjamin Salt, hailed by the literary establishment a prodigy, the successor to Roman Stone. Salt is crippled by writer’s block while trying to draft his second novel and is convinced Sheldon holds the cure. Sheldon himself is a curiosity of the literary community; the onetime associate of Roman Stone and now-recluse who has been perfecting a novel manuscript for so long that it has taken on the mystique of an urban legend. After tracking him down in his in his island home, Salt makes several demands: he wants to see the manuscript, he wants to know everything about Roman, and he wants the typewriter on which Roman wrote his first novel.
* * *
There’s a clear pleasure we take in repeating our stories, for different audiences, for the same audiences at different times. Think about Thanksgiving dinner, the way so many people rely on retellings of the family canon to make these gatherings manageable. At the bar, we call upon friends to repeat stories we’ve heard a dozen times, as if shouting out requests at a concert. Even unremarkable stories get repeated—the time I was stuck at the airport overnight due to thunderstorms, the time I got a speeding ticket even though I was only going five over the limit, the uncomfortable conversation I had with the woman at the laundromat. There is a currency to these stories, maybe in part because they fill uncomfortable silences, but also because of our insatiable, primitive desire for narrative. There is no rational reason a child would need to hear his father read Green Eggs and Ham to him every night for two years, but the longing is pathological, the fervor is religious, the incantations as familiar as prayer.
Someone like Louis discounts the value of stories— they are a means to an end, but they have no intrinsic value. But the others in here understand: stories need to be told, again and again, and they have the power to save, to ruin, to change lives. Governments have fallen, laws enforced wars fought due to the reinterpretation and recontextualization of endlessly repeated religious narratives. As Sheldon says, “If you don’t believe a story can kill you—you haven’t heard the right story.”
The novel’s preoccupation with mythology—references to the Classics abound—is revealing; stories millennia old still guide us, still illuminate and influence our decisions. Without repetition, it’s possible a story doesn’t really become a story, it just stays in the realm of anecdotes, and so one needs to keep it fresh through many retellings.
Over the course of a harrowing ten pages near the end of the novel, Sheldon tries and tries again to finally tell his story in a straightforward way. “I’ll start again,” he says, and begins in a new place, or reveals a new detail. “I’ll start again,” he says, and changes the facts. Even when he finally settles on a version of the story that seems right, he doesn’t seem satisfied, and we get another version, this time from Eloise.
Stories remain incomplete, no matter how many times we return to them and refine them. We can go through a hundred drafts, but there are always things to change, always new meanings to derive. Dr. Lemon, on his deathbed, his memory failing, demands every night that Sheldon tell him the story of the worst thing he’s ever done, forgets the details by morning. Every night for weeks, Sheldon sits at his bedside confessing, in an effort to comfort his dying friend but also to save himself.
* * *
A quick note about the prose.
Much of the book is formatted like this.
And as you might guess.
This approach could get tedious in the wrong hands.
But.
While sometimes the prose can be distracting.
It largely serves the fractured nature.
Of the narrative.
And.
As several references to Hills Like White Elephants demonstrate.
Labiner’s writing shows a strong stylistic influence from Hemingway.
In her reliance.
On deceptively simple prose.
To convey complex concepts.
Inviting the reader to exert energy on ideas.
Rather than untangling convoluted language.
* * *
“I never knew a rich kid who wasn’t a thief,” Sheldon says. Roman steals: packs of gum, booze, wives, stories. Writers have always stolen—it’s an occupational hazard of acquaintanceship with a writer that at some point some part of you will turn up in a short story, a poem, a novel, even if you don’t recognize that part of you after it’s been processed through another narrative. Sheldon knows this, but still has spent years nursing a grudge at Roman for having stolen his story. “I knew that the world was his,” Sheldon says:
“To do with as he wanted.
And my story—
Was no longer mine.
It was his.
And he could change it.
As he willed.
And as he wanted.
It was his.”
Sheldon’s despair is rooted in his awareness that he has lost control over a story that is central to his own identity. He has written his own manuscript, but hasn’t let anyone read it, because he wants to choose how and when the story is shared. Why, he wonders, can’t he be “the author of his own silence” if that’s what he wants?
Well, for one thing, because Eloise has these stories too.
And Roman already published his versions of them.
And because Benjamin Salt tries to steal the manuscript.
Salt’s female companion, Inj (also Roman’s former au pair), asks Sheldon why he finally got down to writing the story for himself. “It’s my story… who else would tell it?” he says. She responds: “Now who’s being stupid?”
* * *
In the most compelling extended scene of the book, Roman’s widow comes into possession of the handwritten manuscript of his latest novel. Grief-stricken, she sits at the typewriter and determines to type out the whole book for him. Almost immediately, she begins editing the book as she goes. It makes for a remarkable image, the widow at the typewriter, trying to perfect her deceased husband, to reshape him and to save him through revision and redrafting.
“And though she vowed, with a transcriptionist’s honest, to be true to the original—she had to make some changes, didn’t she? She had a responsibility to fix, to mend and to amend, to correct him, to repair his faults and flaws. His spelling errors, his stream of consciousness ramblings, his words blotted into obscurity with jam or coffee or was it blood?”
* * *
Some questions: Who owns your stories? Is it you? Your friends?
Facebook? Google?
Ad agencies (or is that redundant)?
The NSA?
Let’s posit here that much of the outrage about privacy violations in social media has little to do with most people having anything criminal to hide, and much more to do with the feeling of violation because our most personal possession—the one thing, besides our bodies, that we wanted to believe is exclusively ours—now belongs to someone else who we can’t trust. While it’s true that one can avoid the whole morass by opting out of social media and smartphones and credit cards and online retailers and all the trappings of the digital age, the people who actually commit to opting out are a small minority. We have collectively decided it’s okay to carry GPS tracking devices on our person at all times, to click “allow” when Google or some other company we barely know requests permission to access our location, our contacts, our personal information. We use Facebook to write love letters to advertisers. We turn our memories into data and send them to the cloud. Every time we log in, we broadcast the person we think we are and the person we aspire to be. Through photos and status updates and search engines and online shopping, we share our values and memories with the world and invite it to reshare those values and memories in its own way. The personal becomes public. We sacrifice ownership of the narrative of our lives
This is a helpless feeling, the notion that thousands of strangers have access to your stories and can manipulate them to serve their own needs. We take the facts of our lives and carefully curate them into an online identity, which is not quite the same as our real identity, and then someone else takes those facts and that distorted vision of ourselves to create a new version of us that they want to sell back to us. This is 21st century life and is it too trite for me to use a rusty metaphor like a reference to Pandora’s Box? Because I am using it and you can’t stop me.
* * *
This is the story of a brother and sister whose father taught them once that the first rule of storytelling is: be true. This is the story of a brother and sister who grew up and learned that this simple rule is much more difficult to follow than they’d ever imagined.
June 4, 2021
3 stars. I'm not really sure what I thought of this book? The writing is very good, but is written in small fragments. At times it reminded me of free verse poetry.
I'd call this more literary fiction than a mystery. Like there's still the idea of who killed Roman, but the fragmented, non-linear narration made the book very slow. At times it was confusing.
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I wanted to like this so much! But the odd writing style, narrators I couldn't tell apart, and very slow story made me send this back to the library at 100 pages in.
Edit: I keep thinking about this, so I guess I'll pick it up again.
I'd call this more literary fiction than a mystery. Like there's still the idea of who killed Roman, but the fragmented, non-linear narration made the book very slow. At times it was confusing.
-------------------------------
I wanted to like this so much! But the odd writing style, narrators I couldn't tell apart, and very slow story made me send this back to the library at 100 pages in.
Edit: I keep thinking about this, so I guess I'll pick it up again.
November 10, 2020
This is a very interesting read. It’s extremely different from other “thriller” books in how it’s written. The entire thing is like a poem, and at the end you still don’t really get it. The way it’s written is more interesting than the actual story.
January 17, 2020
I have read this book a million times and I will probably read it a thousand more
Read
September 24, 2020I never think rating a Labiner book right off is a good idea. It takes a while for things to grow on you.
February 12, 2023
I really don't know what I think about this book, intriguing, thought-provoking but sometimes I struggled.
August 7, 2013
I would like to state for the record that if I had to crawl across a desert of broken glass to read a new Norah Labiner book, I totally would. There is something about her writing that clicks inside of me in a way I can’t wholly explain.
And, truth be told, there were a few times reading her latest, Let the Dark Flower Blossom, where I felt a little like I was crawling through that desert. I was broken, bent, bloody, and imploring Why, Norah? Why?
If had it been any other name on the cover of this literary murder mystery puzzler centered around twin orphans Eloise and Sheldon, I’d have chucked it aside. However, having a prior relationship with Labiner’s work, I was willing to stick with her and trust she would guide me to a safe landing.
Thankfully she did. Read more.
And, truth be told, there were a few times reading her latest, Let the Dark Flower Blossom, where I felt a little like I was crawling through that desert. I was broken, bent, bloody, and imploring Why, Norah? Why?
If had it been any other name on the cover of this literary murder mystery puzzler centered around twin orphans Eloise and Sheldon, I’d have chucked it aside. However, having a prior relationship with Labiner’s work, I was willing to stick with her and trust she would guide me to a safe landing.
Thankfully she did. Read more.
August 15, 2015
This has been on my shelf for ever - a strange almost murder mystery (I think there were three, maybe four bodies by the end, and two house -consuming fires) yet told in a totally fragmented way, constant shifts in time and pov, text laid out like blank verse, lots of references to Greek mythology and more coincidences and cases of mistaken identity than Shakespeare. Did I love it? No. But man, I was intrigued and can't wait to read another one of her books.
(fwiw - this is a time when the star rating system is an epic fail.)
(fwiw - this is a time when the star rating system is an epic fail.)
June 15, 2014
Disjuncture of storytelling and unreliable narrators create archetypes rather than linear characters; there's the feeling that these siblings, lovers, and murderers exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist as they continuously die and reborn in their infinite repentance. Romantically morbid, full of girls traveling in abstractly hospitable climates, plotting with sharp objects and eating fruit.
September 20, 2013
One of the foremost American practitioners of experimental meta-fiction delivers again. It's not the flawless masterpiece Miniatures was, but some of the passages are as haunting as anything I've read in years. I know that sounds like bogus back-cover blurbing, but I just really like it. God I'm eloquent.
November 3, 2013
I wanted to love this book. I found myself in a complicated time at the office that made it very difficult for me to concentrate on this. I put it down and picked it up later, but still had the same issue. Labiner can write.....I just wasn't able to embrace this book at this time.
January 5, 2014
Good writing style.Found the book interesting.Enjoyed it.
September 13, 2015
Truly beautiful prose (and verse) but the repetitive non-linear form and unlikable characters kept this from being a four star for me.
February 8, 2016
Kept my interest, kept me guessing. These "beautiful" people. Death, love, mystery. When I got to the end, I started all over and read it again.
October 29, 2014
I don't really know if I liked this or not. I kept turning pages, all the way to the end, so something about it must have appealed to me in some way? But mostly I'm confused.
September 12, 2013
Non-linear and choppy. Literary references unfamiliar to me
May 11, 2014
This took me forever to read because I kept stopping to read it out loud. It begs to be read in a quiet, insistent, and measured voice. Absolutely beautiful.
September 24, 2015
A slow read. Many literary allusions most of which I likely missed. Ultimately not very satisfying.
March 18, 2018
amazing. dense, dark, and beautiful. she challenges you, takes risks with form and builds a labyrinth of ideas and symbols on the page. not a beach read
September 9, 2016
The sign of a great book? Unable to put it down!
March 22, 2013
Will not disappoint you.
September 5, 2013
Interesting storyline...the style of writing wasn't my cup of tea.
Read
January 8, 2019I tried very hard to like this book. The actual storyline was good, and in the end most of it made sense, but the writing style was very confusing.
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