Ophelias World

I remember getting this book from an old aunt. At that time, I loved French culture, and cooking, and the early 20th century. I opened the book waiting for a kind of Proust or even Colette Lite, all fashion, food, and aesthetic rapture. And indeed there is: the photographs, incredible in their detail, are made up of posed teddy bears dressed extravagantly in antique textiles and bits of lace and veiling, dried and fresh flowers, paper ephermata, and various intreguing props, arranged to depict a world of high camp enchantment achieved only by certain expensive gift shops (which is, in fact, the setting of the book) and the apartments of old and wealthy homosexuals. The book is arranged as a month-by-month diary of a year, with seasonal activities, story arcs involving various characters, descriptions of lavish costumes and food, social intregue, bits of poetry, more costumes and food, and so on. What makes this book frustrating is its lack of consistency: on one hand, we have charming, innocent, Ophelia exuberantly declaring "Too much is rarely enough!", in an insatiably luxuriant, bubbleweight manner reminiscent of 50's and 60's Hollywood comedies and musicals. On the other, several of the dozen or so subplots that thread through this book have to do in one way or another with addiction and obsession/compulsion, an emphasis that casts an appreciable pall on the frivolity. We're hardly ever straight on whether teddy bears are the equivalent of humans in this universe, or if they coexist, what the connection is (the simple differences in scale of the two races is enough to cause a lot of interesting problems). The bears speak in direct quotes, other animals are said to speak but aren't quoted, which makes me wonder how anyone knows what they're saying. We're given that Paris is at a stage of technological development similar to the Belle Epoque, but New York is contemporary to the writing of the book (on a trip to the States, they meet Mayor Koch and travel back on the Concorde). The problem isn't that it's "too cute": it's just that when Clise tries to give her work a serious edge to counterbalance the daintiness, it registers like a sewer rat in a royal nursery. (Come to think of it, much of 80's fantasy, particularly children's cartoons, seemed to have the same problem: sweet little pink and blue pixies in fantasy realms literally light years away from modern America were always coming forth with speeches about drug abuse and AIDS.) At the time, all these disjunctions made me cringe, and I gave it away after three or four readings in a general drift towards losing all cultural moorings whatsoever. Some time later, however, I acquired the collected short fiction of Colette, which reawakened an interest in continuing my reading of Proust, an on-again, off-again project that I take up every January and drop sometime before May. In order to get into the mood for the Big Read, as some have termed it, my mind turned towards Ophelia. N