“Alice, Aliki, Kiki. Queen of Montparnasse. Model prized by artists of the School of Paris. The muse. The muse. The cheeky. The cheeky singer. The cancan dancer. The teaser. That’s basically what we’re saying. She was also a painter — that, history says less — and she wrote. His Memories appeared in 1929, first in French, then in English (Kiki’s Memoirs), preceded by an enthusiastic preface by Ernest Hemingway. This is how Denise Brassard sums up Alice Ernestine Prin, the protagonist of her story, presented with enthusiasm, empathy, if not love.
We feel on each page the attachment that transpires from this story, or rather this novel, sometimes also biography, but also essay. This confusion of genres is strictly voluntary and works perfectly, with such mastery that the transition from one style to another is fluid and smooth.
It should also be emphasized that this work of precise style is necessary given the approach, because Brassard is not content to confuse the genres, but she skilfully inserts the story of the heroine and that of the narrator, quadra who stays in Paris to write precisely about Kiki. This double proposal contaminates the two figures, to the point where the narrator discovers intrinsic kinship with this other who inhabits her.
Legendary Montparnasse
A fascinating game takes place as the various Kiki pass from one lover to another, from one painter to another, thus multiplying the opportunities for the narrator to sometimes do the same, but above all to draw portraits , more or less long, of All-Paris of the inter-war period, lingering on Man Ray, on Desnos, on Cocteau or the director of Boeuf sur le Toit. We stroll through this legendary Montparnasse, hypnotized by our own memories or our readings, sometimes in love with the pictorial work of one or the writings of the other. We enter each time in a maze of details that give life to this reconstruction.
The emotional and intellectual dithering of the narrator adds a contemporary vision to what has happened, highlighting the deep roots of our experiences in our act of living: “I came here to find Kiki, as well as to slow down time , look him in the face and, perhaps, reconcile with him,” writes the narrator.
Less successful, on the other hand, is the recourse to the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, to whose thought she devotes many pages. One wonders how to grasp, in passing, this assertion: “Unwittingly, I had just swung our idyll from aesthetics to ethics. »
But you have to go through these thoughtful pages to follow the path proposed by Denise Brassard, the lives of two free women who are looking at two different times, but in the same place, for their freedom and their fulfillment. A beautiful book from which we emerge enriched.