Positions with White Roses

by Ursule Molinaro

After twelve years a young woman returns home to settle accounts with her doformed twin sister Laura. But Laura is inexplicably absent, and the visiting daughter's parents are enmeshed in their own emotional warfare. With the deceptive simplicity that has become Molinaro's literary hallmark, the stage is set for an explosive confrontation as the parents and visiting daughter take their positions around the traditional family table, with its centerpiece, an elegant arrangement of white roses.

Genres: Fiction

101 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1983

About the author

Ursule Molinaro (1916, Paris -10 July 2000, New York City) was a prolific novelist, playwright, translator and visual artist, the author of 12 novels, two collections of short prose works, innumerable short stories for literary magazines and dozens of translations from the French and German. She lived and wrote in French in Paris until shortly after World War II, when she came to New York in 1949 to work as a multilingual proofreader for the newly formed United Nations. Just a few years later, having realized that she would stay in the United States, she made the decision to systematically retrain herself not only to write, but to dream, think, and speak, in the language of her new soil. In the latter part of her life, she developed a method for teaching creative writing that relied wholly upon the oral and taught creative writing at several universities and in her home until her death in 2000.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Bill Hsu]

Molinaro doesn't get much love these days. Why? She has such a distinctive voice. Positions is stylistically intriguing (though maybe less overtly experimental than some of her other work), an intense exploration of complex family dynamics. I can't decide if the ending is too heavy; you tell me.

Update 9/24/2024: buddy read with Marc. Notes here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[tia]

"Positions With White Roses" is one of the most unnerving books I've come across.
Molinaro presents us with TWO main characters, first the unloved, unknown daughter (who remains unnamed throughout the novel) and then her missing/MISSed sister Laura. From birth, Laura suffers from extreme physical pain. Because of this suffering, she is elevated to the level of adoration, perhaps as a form of atonement for her panic-stricken mother and her abusive mortician-father. Because Laura is the center of her parents' universe, the unnamed daughter's life becomes parasitically bound to that of Laura's, with no exceptions. Laura and the unloved sister forge a unified identity from their two separate halves (Laura representing the mind and the unnamed daughter the body) and as a result, share the experiences of the Other as One. Because of Laura's fragile physical condition and inability to have sex, she is compared to an angel and becomes the ideal(ly), the intangible... the unloved, misused daughter then becomes a stand-in for Laura's impossible sexual fantasies. As a result, the unnamed daughter (only) has sex with men Laura has chosen for her... because Laura is in reality choosing them for herself... and only by fantasizing about Laura do the men agree to have sex with the other daughter, who in turn reaps the benefit of fleeting love & affection.
After the unnamed daughter goes off to college, leaving Laura behind, she becomes lonely and depressed and attempts suicide. After dropping out, she mindlessly travels the world like a lost spirit, painting murals on the walls of brothels and prostituting herself for cash to survive. She refuses to ask the parents for help and embellishes her success as a "painter," hoping to elude her parents' doubts and suspicions: that she is a failure in comparison to Laura, who has become a successful lawyer. The unloved daughter's failure is presented as a consequence of leaving her sister; meanwhile, Laura is absent from the family reunion that has prompted the unnamed daughter to return home.
In the end, the sisters share everything, including the ultimate sacrifice...

[harmony]

unique and fascinating. the narrative feels like observing a painting: static but buzzing with detail and emotion.

[Meghan]

When a book is written explicitly in a "form" (the subtitle for this novel is A Novel in the Shape of Cross) there is often a danger that the form will come to predominate the text, the style, and ultimately the impact. Not true in the case of this book. The form appears natural, even with sentences crossing each other, ideas vivisecting other thoughts, and the action-poetry that interrupts the ethereal, cerebral prose. That prose shifts between 3 present character and the absence of a fourth character. It's an amazing piece, touching, chilling, and a reminder that form need not always be something that detracts from the writing itself.

[Emmanuelle]

Loved Molinaro’s exploration of the brokenness of being a woman in a family - mother, daughter, sister… Her weird writing (good thing) highlights how we truly know little about other people, and misinterpret most of what is or isn’t spoken.

[Marco Visciolaccio]

What a read. I’ve subjected myself to three (and counting) works by Molinaro and by far this novelette is the most engaging.

Positions can be read in a single sitting. I’d even recommend that it is. It may ramble, but it interconnects well. Like a conversation should. Picking it up and putting it down ruins that consistency. It’s only a few perspectives looking out over the same table, locked inside their own minds, and the quick pace of each word unsaid begs you to keep going until the end.

Be warned this is a Molinaro novel, and there’s patterns across her works: Adulterous men. Disenfranchised women denied artistic success. Never-been’s instead of has-been’s. Purposeful table seating, romanticized discussions of religiosity but never religion itself, long-standing metaphors to deceased characters as if their stories can be either relived or purposefully acted out in the present, ____experimentation of all forms which either jars: or works, if you can put up with the initial shock factor.

But unlike her other long-form pieces, it all works in Positions. Maybe it’s because the story is ultimately anchored to a recognizable form we often circle back to (a table, which we are reminded of each time the page’s margins shrink into a sturdy marble rectangle). Maybe because I’ve gotten used to her experimentation, or there’s noticeably more consistency to it. Maybe because it’s as easy as sub- or actual-vocalizing each page, to see how the sentences naturally ought to end, or where she may have placed a breath— which is, I think, a huge part of reading her work— and explains the limited word economy (“Modigliani necks” being in both this work and her short story collection 13), or the purposeful meaning behind the punctuation experimentation. After reading the opaque Encores and the scattershot 13, I think Molinaro hit her stride with Positions. She’d played with these above themes for so long, before and after this novelette, exploring them in different directions, but synthesized them here.

Personally, I think Molinaro would have been more recognized in a world of audiobooks. The form and punctuation does Positions justice in framing the narrative, which is something no audio piece could. But the gerunds, the prepositional sentence starters, the subtle differences between colon and semicolon and period in each line asks for a voice. I’ve yet to read any of Molinaro’s plays, and her poetry’s equally as difficult to find. So who knows if this is better showcased in more experimental venues like those. Positions already reads like long-form prose poetry— so how would it have been lifted off the page? It’s not like we can email her and ask.

Skip everything else and read this paragraph. The narrative is boxed out— we’re (structurally) at a table with a seat missing. In that gap, Molinaro’s lingering with us through each character’s voice, tonally distinct, each of her asides feeling human. Every narrator’s purposefully unreliable because of their limitations, sure. And we learn this through Molinaro’s literary gesturing, her eye rolls, her gossiping, her full-fanged bitching, etc. Positions is a tragedy in the end, as anyone can guess. And like any conversation, some of the tangents get old (especially in the final third). But it reminds me of home in those terrifying, timeless ways where you just have to be there to get a feel for what’s gone wrong already, and how it’ll inevitably get worse since even in their absence, the presence of family still lingers.

[Marc]

"A slim treaty on the joys of family!" - Jack Torrance

"Finally--a family who understands what it means to be a family." - Michael Corleone

"Molinaro knows how to set a table!!!" - Norma Bates

These are the type of reviews that must have poured in when Positions with White Roses came out in 1983. A never-named "visiting, normal daughter" comes home for Christmas after 12 years away. She's a twin and hoping to rekindle her relationship with her sister Laura (the ill, deformed, but quite successful one of the two sisters). Laura is absent, leaving the "normal" daughter to visit parents with whom she has very little in terms of a relationship. It's a taught, slim, incredibly psychological novella as most of it is told through shifting internal points of view (most of the exchanges between the characters take place in their heads instead of actually speaking to one another).

Molinaro was no fan of monogamy, and by extension, family, from what I can tell. The Wikipedia page states she was against procreation and while I first thought that might be mere hyperbole, there's actually an abortion doctor in this story who subscribes to the fringe, "heretical" medieval Christian sect of the Cathari who were against matter and for the spirit (anti-procreation). And, of course, visiting daughter is in love and living with this doctor when we first meet her in the book.

"Perhaps I needed the added dimension of faith: 'All that is visible must grow beyond itself, extend into the realm of the invisible. Thereby it receives its true consecration & clarity & takes firm root in the cosmic order… '

"…if she believed Claire. Who believed that 'procreation was the cruelest act, because it forced a spirit to become body.' "

Molinaro sets trauma and dysfunction out in the narrative as carefully as the mother arranges her fine marble table and the accoutrements of status/wealth. In short, things--matter. But this family can't escape their broken spirits (the parents having originally fled WWII coming to America from Italy).

It's one of those books where everyday living is imbued with a threat behind each interaction. Narratively, it feels like all the "action" is internal but this wonderful increasing of tension moves the story along.

And whose mom didn't identify with Mary Stuart?!!

Thanks to Bill for continuing along our Molinaroian reading adventure.
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WHITE ROSE WORD/REFERENCE PETALS I HAVE DRIED & AIM TO PRESERVE
Ninon de Lanclos | Mary Stuart | senilitatem | Cathari | Spanish Loisada | mangonel | occitan | langue d’oc | endura (suicide by starvation; a hunger strike)

[Lex Smith]

4.5 rounded up. I don't even know where to start. This is an incredible poem of a novel, as much of a painting as the creations of the artists within it. I had a couple of qualms: not sure how I feel about how a disabled character was talked about (I acknowledge that this character served a literary purpose, but...disabled people aren't just a matter of literature), and I have mixed feelings about the ending. I soooooo wish this was a more widely-read book so that I had someone to discuss this with. Simply incredible.

[Zuska]

Among other things, this book shows how easily we spin (multiple) stories to explain the behavior and motivations of others.
I was also struck with the prescience of the author regarding her (character's) assessment of the suspension of welfare funding for abortions: "That's the first step. Soon it'll be illegal again."

[Jon Frankel]

Positions with White Roses is one of the best books I've read all year. Molinaro's style is austere and her imagination tends to formal arrangements. The novel is in the shape of a cross: it occurs at a dinner table, a long, grey marble table, with a bouquet of white roses in the center. A mother sits at one end, and a father sits at the other. In the middle, on either side, are two seats for their two daughters. Only one of these seats is filled during the book, by the "visiting, normal daughter". This daughter, the visiting normal one, is 30. Her sister, Laura,a fraternal twin, is not visiting. The two sisters are opposites: Laura has a severe curvature of the spine, which required frequent, frightening surgeries when she was a small child. She also has fragile legs that easily break. She is nonetheless extraordinarily beautiful, focused and accomplished. Unlike the visiting, normal daughter, she is a lawyer, with a practice in LA, of all female lawyers. The visiting normal daughter is not beautiful, but very plain looking. She couldn't complete college. She is an artist, a bohemian vagabond, and bi-sexual. The parents are Italian immigrants, Jews who escape Italy during the war. The mother was a successful fashion designer from a family of artists. the father was a doctor. In America he is an undertaker. The parents are alienated from each other and they are no longer speaking, so the few dinners the visiting, normal daughter attends (she is home for Christmas, after a 12 year absence)are tense and silent. The narrative shifts in perspective between mother, father and daughter. It is a taut narrative. Molinaro's sentences are crisp and minimal and she has a way of completing or extending the thought of one sentence with the next one. It is a brilliant device, handled expertly, and creates a propulsive narrative. Molinaro's perspective is detached, severe and analytical, but it is a pleasure to read this book. The layout of the text itself reflects the structure of a cross, as periodically paragraphs have narrow margins. It is surprising how much detail she fits into such a short book. Molinaro was an eccentric figure. She was a translator, wrote plays, short stories, novels and was also an artist. She came to the US in the late forties from Europe, and wrote exclusively in English thereafter. This book is an example of rigorously experimental fiction that is focused on story and character. There is nothing obscure or difficult about it, but it is emotionally and intellectually intense. Every sentence is packed with intelligence and the aesthetic never fails.