Book #75: The Last Rendezvous

Title: The Last Rendezvous
Author: Anne Plantagenet

While I was reading The Last Rendezvous I attended a fiction-writing workshop at the Segullah Writer's Retreat. In the workshop, Angela Hallstrom talked about how authors have to create a character that people care about, and that the events of the story should follow an arc building to a climax. Pretty much the basics of fiction-writing, right? As I sat in the workshop, I kept thinking about this book, and how it hadn't grabbed me, and how I found it deathly boring, and I recognized that Plantagenet doesn't follow a story arc at all. Instead, she tells the story of real-life French poet Marceline Desbordes. Although I expected the book to be historical fiction, it reminded me more of one of those bad childhood biographies, where the author lays out the biographee's (is that a word?) life, and focuses on the high points, using sentences like, "six years passed" to mark the gaps of time.

That's really not exactly fair, because Plantagenet's work isn't strictly chronological-- it jumps around a lot, but I really saw no definitive climax in the work to make it meaningful or interesting to readers who aren't familiar with Desbordes' work. It appears that the rising action is supposed to be centered on the conflict between her love for two men: Henri Latouche, with whom she carried on a years-long affair, and actor Prosper Valmore, her husband. The writing of the book is beautiful-- lyrical and poetic (possibly like Desbordes's poems?) but by the end of the novel, I was just eager to put it away. Plantagenet never succeeded in making me care about Desbordes.