La versión de Nelly

by Eva Figes, Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen (Translator)

Observé cómo mi mano se deslizaba por la hoja al firmar en el registro del hotel con un nombre y una dirección falsos. Admiré mi propia frialdad: lo había visto en tantas películas, y ahora era yo la que lo estaba haciendo. En serio, era bastante fácil. Me observé al pie de las escaleras y admiré mi propia apariencia, la manera en la que estaba ahí de pie, relajada y segura , impasible ante las miradas escrutadoras.

En esta intrigante novela, entre las primeras obras de Eva Figes publicada en español, la protagonista, Nelly Dean, una mujer de mediana edad que padece una amnesia temporal -también conocida como «estado de fuga»-, se registra en un hotel de una pequeña localidad inglesa, con una maleta repleta de dinero y sin saber quién es o por qué está ahí. Entre la paranoia y la confusión, la percepción de Nelly invita al lector a entrar en el extraño y misterioso universo de esta inteligente y divertida mujer, y a no dar nada por sentado. El particular estilo de LA VERSIÓN DE NELLY, que combina magistralmente el humor negro con la novela de misterio, la convierte en una lectura adictiva que el lector no podrá soltar.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, British Literature, College

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Eva Figes (born Eva Unger) is a German-born English author.

Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother. Figes is now a resident of north London and the mother of the academic Orlando Figes and writer Kate Figes.

In the 1960s she was associated with an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall, which included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

Figes's fiction has certain similarities with the writings of Virginia Woolf. The 1983 novel, Light, is an impressionistic portrait of a single day in the life of Claude Monet from sunrise to sunset.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

A simple conceit keeps the pages turning here: a woman has checked into a hotel in a nondescript town, having no recollection of her identity. In her luggage she discovers a large quantity of cash, which she feels compelled to hide in her room. Over the coming days she struggles to adjust to her self-anonymity, even as certain other people begin to recognize and expect things from her. As time progresses she appears to be either the direct cause or catalyst of a number of troubling events. She begins to read books that appear oddly reflective of her own experiences. Her altered reality constantly reconfigures in an attempt to accommodate people she encounters and actions occurring around her. Recognition is distorted as later memories of her early post-amnesiac times fail to align with her present reality. The text is comprised of her daily notes written in two notebooks, though it reads more like a fluid narrative than a series of collated notes. The mostly unremarkable prose renders a groggy underwater feeling, effective at channeling the experience of a person who could be suffering from a form of dementia. Unfortunately, the mysterious quality of the story is muted by the lack of any true menace—any time it starts to rise it just as quickly fades away. For that reason alone the book failed to completely captivate me, though it did keep me interested enough to continue reading until the end.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Opens in a particularly thrilling kind of existential noir confusion (a women checks into a hotel under an assumed name with a case of money -- and promptly realizes she has no idea of her identity or how she came to be there), and begins exploration of its world amid a portents equally of impending doom, and of the impending utterly mundane. The narrative goes through many reinventions -- first an erosion by that mundanity, which carries the narrators plight from initial mystery into a kind of slow-resolving pathos and struggle against a kind of doom in mundanity. There's an occasional leadenness to the prose and descriptions, but this may be a symptom of that horrible mundane world itself, stealing across the pages -- in one particularly post-modern segment, Nelly encounters lyrical reinterpretations of scenes she has just lived in randomly-selected library books. Later, just as the gears seemed set to gum entirely: a discontinuity, a shift in perspective, events that cryptically reiterate and recompose all that preceded them. In total, rather a deft and disconcerting analysis of societal shifts and disaffection in the post-war period, and a pleasant surprise after some rather less impressed reviews from friends. Eva Figes was part of the same 60s British experimental lit circle that Tom Mallin, Ann Quin, Alan Burns, and BS Johnson were involved in, and seems similarly worthy of further investigation and unburying.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

A sleepy novel about an amnesiac who wakes up in a strange hotel room and goes for long boring pastoral walks which are described in painful detail, and meets an old (maybe) friend who has an unlikely dialogue with her in a shop before being violently assaulted and then her (maybe) son turns up and she acts haughty towards him for the whole book and then she has wrinkly sex with her (maybe) husband and then looks in mirrors then does something or other but the book peters off with no real climax or interest and the dull prose sends the reader into a sleepy haze as the narrator walks through another dreary field and the trees are described and the plot is left to the reader to explain because the writer has finished now and has other things to do.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent amnesia novel: Woman in a hotel with no memory of what happened before she got there. Everyday encounters at the station and shop and cafe take on eerie significance, and I was caught up in the intrigue. I liked the fact that it was Britain in the 70s too. Towards the end her past does catch up with her but Figes doesn't tie up all the loose ends (eg what about that suitcase of money?). I liked that. A bit like the film Repulsion at times although more genteel - she tries to get people to visit her!

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Eva Figes novel and I was hooked. While not much happens I liked the foggy hazy writing of Nelly’s character. Sad and heartbreaking but this won’t be the last Figes I read.

[Amy]

I was really looking forward to reading this, but was so put off by a sentence regarding rape, very early on, regarding the pleasures of rape (for the girl) that I can't make myself pick it up again.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a quiet little masterpiece (less than 3% of my books get five stars). Somewhere between Camus' The Stranger and Stoppard's R & G are Dead, this depiction of being dropped into a middle-aged woman's body/life ex nihilo is heartbreaking, dark and absolutely hilarious.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I was alone, with myself, a stranger.”

What would it be like to wake-up one day and not know who you are or why you’re doing what you are doing, or even where you are doing it?

“He watched my hand slide across the page as I signed a false name and address in the hotel register. I admired my own coolness: I had seen it done in so many films and now I was doing it myself.”

Nelly has a forceful personality, doesn’t suffer fools, and has a keen sense of adventure. But she can’t quite understand why people she has never met have the gall to pretend they know her. Who are these tiresome fools she has to suffer? And whose clothes - along with a large stash of cash - are in the suitcase she carries? Not hers, that’s for sure.

So what would it be like to adopt an entirely different personality to the one that has served you into late middle age? Eva Figes explores this question of identity through Nelly’s small adventures in a completely unknown territory in which she has no past...at least, no memories of one.

Speaking of which...this novel sat on my bookshelf for a couple of decades waiting for me to re-read it. Which means I must have thought well of it. So why did my second encounter with it ring absolutely no mental bells? Ahhhh!

[Jesús Cardeña Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una historia muy buena, en la que durante todo el relato está girando la duda de quién es la protagonista y qué le ha podido pasar.
Lo único malo es que terminas el libro como lo has empezado, sin saber quien es la protagonista y que le ha podido pasar, queda un poco a la imaginación del lector.
Me ha gustado el desdoblamiento de la protagonista en las dos partes de la novela: en la primera narrado por su subconsciente que toma las riendas y en la segunda como el subconsciente aletargado por la personalidad real.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lonely old woman loses her sense of identity as dementia takes hold. Like B.S.Johnson's "House Mother Normal", we are seeing the same events from multiple, fractured perspectives, in this case the same human being recording her impressions in different phases of a deteriorating condition.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And yet...and yet...I have to admit to a certain nameless excitement, a change in temperature in tune with the weather. It could almost be called a quickening in the blood. Quite literally, as though my blood circulation had speeded up, gathered momentum, to cause a tingling sensation through my body. I do not know what to do about it."

Nelly, completely befogged, finds herself in a hotel room with a lot of money and seemingly no identity other than the (false?) name she signed in with. Initially, she doesn't recognize her own mirrored reflection. In a dreamlike state, Nelly wanders about town, every encounter strange and confusing. Yet she carries on with the everydayness of life, acting the part that seems right for the moment. For Nelly this strangeness is sometimes amusing, sometimes frightening, often boring. Memories, imaginings and current experiences seem to overlap, but what is what and which is which?

Some will read this as a sort of amnesiac thriller, or as a peek into the experience of mental illness or dementia. Maybe. Really, this book is an extraordinary exploration of the concept of the Self, of our reliance on others for a sense of identity and how much of our past we are chained to when considering who we are today. How much of memory do we rework in order to fit in with our current concept of who we are? Can we choose to forget large parts of our lives and, if so, do we have responsibilities to those who were part of what we have edited out of the story of ourselves? Memory is tricky, but we rely on it so heavily.

Figes doesn't solve all the mysteries in Nelly's life, but certainly makes Nelly very alive on the page, even if the sense of that life is unsettling. Drifting along with Nelly in her haze was delightfully eerie. If you liked Eimear McBride's "Strange Hotel" (I did), this book might interest you.

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nelly’s Version is a hypnotic tale of a woman who walks into a hotel with no name or memory and a suitcase full of cash. From there she explores the hotel’s small town where she finds herself having surreal encounters with shop owners, bankers, drivers, and strange men who claim to know her. Is she suffering from amnesia or dementia? The writing is beautiful and mysterious. It slowly dawned on me that this novel is a feminist plea for women’s autonomy. Nelly is happiest when staying in the hotel without family or friends. Yet every encounter she has reinforces that women are invisible or seen as a nuisance if they do not have a husband, children, or a house to tend. As Nelly begins to gain all of these things, she finds herself more and more trapped back into the world she had escaped.

[Dave Kaphammer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really well written. A disorienting experience, wasn't sure where it was going, and then it was over!

[Myra Breckinridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing and utterly unique exploration of womanhood through the guise of one woman who remembers nothing and lacks the drive to find answers and define and shackle herself.

[Ally · Rating 1 out of 5]

one of the worst things ive ever read but i pushed through for my reading goal

[Auntie · Rating 3 out of 5]

unusual, intriguing

[Robert Wechsler]

Too hermetic for my taste. I much preferred Light.

[natura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rarito, muy rarito. No acabo de decidir si es una tomadura de pelo o algo demasiado enrevesado sobre enfermedades mentales/feminismo/clichés sociales...

[Molly Counihan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kept me interested enough to read to the end,
I really liked the book while reading it but any conflict that came about simply didn't follow through which left me disappointed

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eva Figues, on her birthday April 15
Alienation and the patholgy of disconnectedness, inequities of gender and systemic patriarchy, identity as a projection of others fears and desires, the ephemeral and transitory nature of time and being, the self as a function of memory and history; these are the themes which animate the works of Eva Figues .
Among the first wave of theorists and authors who created Feminism as a psychological and social consequence of Existentialism, and bearing the stamp of Otherness left upon her by her family's 1939 escape from Berlin to London, her later novels informed by her long friendship with Gunter Grass, Eva Figues stories bristle with a mission to end silences, to surface injustices, to redeem what has been lost, to reconnect us with one another, and to find new pathways forward. It is as though her world were suspended in an eternal Kristallnacht, and if we cannot find each other in the dark we are all lost.
Her early masterpiece Light is a prose poem of light and color, of fleeting moments made to live by our passions, the setting a day in the lives of Monet's family at Giverny and reproducing the insights and methods of his Impressionism. It is an unparalled translation of the visual coding of messages into language, a work of unique beauty and meaning.
There are also her essays, the excellent critical history Sex and Subterfuge: women writers to 1850, and the novels Tenancy, an extended metaphor of social malaise, and the dolorous chanting of woes in The Tree of Knowledge.
And then we have the Great Book, Nelly's Version, almost a parallel journey to Samuel Beckett's Malone Trilogy, a vision of near-solipsistic terror, an apotheosis of Rashomon Gate, which acts as a summation of her life work as a literary philosopher and feminist theoretician, engaging, illuminating, challenging. The film of Nelly's Version is filled with references to Hitchcock's Spellbound and its Freudian horror, as a touchstone of both inspiration and counter narrative, completing the circle of ideas between Freud and Feminist revisionism.