What Stella Sees

by Sarah Kornfeld

In a story that reaches from San Francisco to Bucharest, Israel to Paris, this story follows two people, defined as "disabled" and explores what being "broken" truly is in society. WHAT STELLA SEES is Sarah Kornfeld's debut novel about love, art and forced exile.

"Why ever did they take their epileptic child to Paris? Had they imagined it would suck Stella’s obsession with the creativity of the sea away from her? Had they not heard of the fallibility of geographical cures? Whatever the reasons—her parents never saw it coming—this love affair with a man even more marginalized than Stella herself. Mo’s body, altered by cerebral palsy, drags around a curatorial ability which showers the delicate core of imagination embodied by Stella. Like a sea urchin, she blooms. What exactly are her parents to do when all they long for goes pear shape.

347 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 30, 2018

About the author

Sarah Kornfeld is an American author, playwright, and producer. Her play, THE LOVEDEATH OF CLOWNS was produced at the iconic Theater For The New City in New York. Her debut novel, WHAT STELLA SEES was published in 2018 and received high praise in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her writing has been featured in independent literary journals including Vol.1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy, and Heavy Feather Review.

Her forthcoming narrative non-fiction book, THE TRUE is published by Editura Integral and will be launched at the National Theater Festival of Bucharest/UNITER in November of 2021. The True is being published in Romanian, English, and French. The book will be solid in a box-set of all three languages in 2021-2022 with the title, “The True: A Trilogy of Ghosts”.

Sarah was born and raised in the experimental theater of New York City where she performed with the Judson Poets Theater, The Bread and Puppet Theater, and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College where she studied writing (poetry and prose with Kate Knapp Johnson) and choreography (master teachers Viola Farber and Bill T. Jones). She received professional training at The Royal Court Theater in London.

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘She was no longer normal—the girl had always been so poised for success in a world of losers.’

San Francisco author Sarah Kornfeld earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and choreography and as an author and creative producer working with artists at the intersection of art and science she sits on the Steering Committee of the National Writers Union (Bay Area) and has taught Cultural Curation at the University of San Francisco, School of Education, International/Multicultural Education Department. Her initial publication – WHAT STELLA SEES – resulted in offering readings on panels for social justice in literature at San Francisco’s storied LitCrawl/LitQuake. She will repeat this honor at San Francisco's Booksmith/Bindry, The May Day Festival/Oakland, The Writers Project/SUNY Adirondack and a public reading in Bucharest, Romania with Laboratorul de Arta.

Though placing Sarah’s writing in the fantasy/magical realism genre seems to narrow a division for her unique talent, the manner in which she writes offers the reader insights into not only fantasy but also into the realm of the psychological stresses of disabled people and what feels like an insider’s view of the mind of those who struggle with incapacities and who find their own manner in which to make the world make sense.

Before opening her storyline Sarah offers a reflective letter: ‘Paris, France (Nowhere!) June, 2000 something Me, To hell with you, Mo, Lenny would tell you how you don’t know how to love. He just didn’t love you. That’s got nothing to do with what you’ve got and how you need to find a way back to life. Don’t talk back to me! None of your excuses—don’t say it’s because you’re a sick person. Sure, you fall, literally, though you fall harder with love than most ’cause you know what it’s like to be on the outside. So, get real. Your life is like a ripped up canvas you’ve got to fix. Now, you have to survive the tyranny of boredom that’s so bad it makes your skin melt if you weren’t so ridiculously, abnormally, obsessively used to it. That’s your fault. All I’m saying is don’t chicken out. Make your life better. Wait for a miracle: someone must be coming to save you. Just… wait. Merci or Mulţumesc (I don’t care, you choose the word!) Me, Mo’

She spritely brings her main character to our conscious as follows: ‘ (A Seizure from Stella for Stella from Someplace Below the Sea) The constant bleat of the siren made no impact on Stella. The emergency vehicle rocked as she lay perfectly still, a long, clean piece of aluminum. Paramedics had placed oxygen in her nostrils. From their professional perspective she was officially in crisis. They urged the driver to put some speed into the equation. Stella was underwater. Inside her mind she was floating within a cave that lived within a platelet right below the Golden Gate Bridge. In this cave she was petting the many seahorses that live there; all of them confident in their place in the bay. She looked at the small, groaning fish, and found there a rare form of tuna that make noises when petted by humans. This form of fish was to be one of her many personal discoveries (unknown to anyone), one she would draw in a small book at home—yet in this first state of seizure she was delighted to meet them in her water-filled neural crisis. That seizure was her first experience with her ability to interact with her new forms of fish and mammals: they swam with her confusion and her love of them—her self-created moaning fish, lion-headed clams, twilight seals, chanting kelp, and all the rare, twisted freedom crabs, with their rotating heads, joined as her brain took on a new shape. Here was home, the true sea she would continue to create from her imagination—and believe it was real. Here lived her body in the wet depths of the shakes. (She knew nothing of her life, and she had no voice. She knew nothing of a cure. She knew nothing of the machine to come, of love or of how many times she will come to fall. She was submerged).’

Imaginative, eloquent, poetic and profoundly insightful of how injured minds work, the entire book reads with like grace. The outline of the story is offered – ‘In a story that reaches from San Francisco to Bucharest, Israel to Paris, this story follows two people, defined as "disabled" and explores what being "broken" truly is in society. WHAT STELLA SEES is Sarah Kornfeld's debut novel about love, art and forced exile. "Why ever did they take their epileptic child to Paris? Had they imagined it would suck Stella’s obsession with the creativity of the sea away from her? Had they not heard of the fallibility of geographical cures? Whatever the reasons—her parents never saw it coming—this love affair with a man even more marginalized than Stella herself. Mo’s body, altered by cerebral palsy, drags around a curatorial ability which showers the delicate core of imagination embodied by Stella. Like a sea urchin, she blooms. What exactly are her parents to do when all they long for goes pear shape.’
In a word, inimitable. Gorgeous writing in a story that deserves our empathy and admiration. Very Highly Recommended.

[Priyanka Athavale · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first began reading this book, I constantly kept going back in my mind to Rain Man. And when I read reviews that other readers had posted, I realized it wasn't just me. What Stella Sees is such a beautiful book because it, once again, tells us to break preconceived notions about disability and paints a stunning and heart-rendering picture of the 'daily' of living with someone challenged.

The book is, on its face, a love story between two 'disabled' young people. But it is so much much more. I have never ever read a story that explored the ocean as more than a body of water before. I do love the beach, but reading Stella's special connection to the ocean was extremely intriguing and very mesmerizing. I realized there are so many things that are more profound than we make them out to be. And we don't even realize it.

Read this book for some such profound literature and depth. It will stay with you forever.

[Emerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Stella Sees is a beautiful story by Sarah Kornfeld that takes you on a journey with four characters. Micheal, Rachel, their daughter Stella and her lover Mo. Stella has incurable seizures but takes solace in the sea and making art of out shells. The story has a somewhat abrasive but intriguing beginning with a letter from Mo to himself and then a scene of Stella in therapy but as the story progressing and you get to know the characters the flow of the story is interesting and beautiful. I found the writing style to be beautiful to read and was facinated but the artsy feel of the book and characters. This book was not what I expeted but I enjoyed it a great deal and would definity recommend it.

[Jack Messenger · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Stella Sees, Sarah Kornfeld’s complex debut novel, is about convergence and displacement. Above all, it is about perception: the consequences of its absence and the obligations of its presence. Young Stella is ill, it seems, with a peculiar form of epilepsy that eludes diagnosis and treatment. Her parents Rachel and Michael are in the throes of divorce, increasingly estranged from their own selves as well as one another, while they careen off specialists and medical regimes, a process that takes them from New York and San Francisco to Paris in search of a cure for their daughter. Yet Stella sees other things, too. Her seizures are a kind of vision-state in which she is able to explore the ocean depths, discovering real and imagined creatures that inform her art – the art of creating worlds of meaning inside the tiny whorls of seashells.
At its most basic, what Stella sees is What Maisie Knew – that the adults around her are an inconstant and unreliable bunch, prone to objectify (later, commodify) her as the sum of her symptoms. Importantly, however,  what Stella sees is also the return of the repressed or, at any rate, the suppressed. The past – never dead, never passed – catches up with Michael and Rachel, and later with Mo, whose cerebral palsy sculpts his body into agonizing deformations. His body and Stella’s brain enjoy a mutual self-recognition that leads to catharsis of sorts, where that which has been forgotten or buried is brought to consciousness, examined and integrated.
In truth, Stella is not drowning but waving; not simply an artist but also a scientist:

Rachel, it’s something we’ve not seen. After each seizure she comes out ready to learn! She’s not deadening, see? She reads advanced books on biology. She reads graduate and postgraduate-level research on the marine and tidal patterns …

Michael, eager to love and be loved, is able to recognize his daughter’s gifts earlier than is Rachel, who is consumed by rage at each unsuccessful treatment. The world does not always bend to our wishes, but Rachel and Michael are graduates of Yale, movers and shakers in contemporary Art with a capital dollar sign, and they are used to telling others what to think and who to buy. Yet Rachel’s rage is also a symptom of her own shame and guilt, the deep causes of which lie buried in Israel–Palestine.
There are many pleasures in What Stella Sees that one might call incidental. Rachel herself is one of them – an elegant woman whose carefully maintained façade of urbane sophistication and skin-deep friendships cracks before our eyes. Her lengthy conversation with Julian, an ageing aesthete once friends with Peggy Guggenheim and an Art Whore if ever there was one, is masterly in its delineation of character and a shifting balance of power. They both get what they want, which is somewhat less than they need and always open to reversal. Perceptions support reputations which garner income, but the whole edifice is only as solid as the latest deal, the most recent recommendation. ‘Then it happened. She forgot for a minute why she was there, what she was angling for, and what she was pretending to be. A dealer? An historian? A personal shopper; high-end, like Julian?’
What Stella Sees provokes us to ask what, exactly, is the good of art to those who cannot really see it. Isn’t it supposed to make us better people than we would otherwise have been? I am reminded of the affluent gallery trustee I once saw interrupt her conversation about the architecture of the new wing in order to stamp on a spider that had the innocent temerity to scuttle across the spotless wooden floor – an act that immediately negated all her fine words about beauty and balance.
In novels as in life, incidentals are the things we tend to remember when what seemed important is long forgotten. Michael and Rachel, for example,

learned that the strangest things count for love in a hospital room … all of them showed different forms of neglect, but also often small bits of love. When the vending machine wasn’t broken and it gave Stella a chocolate; that was love. When the social worker asked Rachel a good question and got her through the paperwork quickly; that was love. When the night nurse (at 3:45 a.m.) brought Michael a Starbucks coffee – that was true love.

These little epiphanies are what art can also provide. Although I cannot quite visualize Stella’s own artworks, nevertheless I believe them, and what they convey is  very real:

Almost three years of shells: large, small, white, painted, glittery, wrapped like a miniature Christo’s or filled with poems painted carefully on the insides … the shells were artifacts and the answer to the riddle of her body: each seizure forced her into a private place that returned her just a bit harder; an outer casing that was growing calcified over time and protecting a discrete, private experience.

To his credit, Michael is much more open to these incidentals than anyone else and is moved by them: unexpected kindnesses provoke tears. And he can still talk Art, even when it comes to Stella’s shells: ‘They’re good because they utilize an archetype – the hidden architecture of shells to explore personal narratives. OK?’ Yes, we see.
What Stella Sees avoids all sentimentality about Stella’s condition. Stella is not unreservedly ‘blessed’ to be as she is. ‘She suffers multiple seizures a week. Do you understand that’s like microwaving your head three times a week on “High”?’ The seizures make her ‘smarter’ each time, so that she arrives at a ‘deeper knowing’, but they render her vulnerable to accident and injury. Nor is the novel concerned to inspire us to greater understanding and ‘acceptance’ of difference by presenting us with a brave young girl, a savant. Instead, we are shown the human, and we recognize it, incidentally and thus for always.
Sarah Kornfeld’s writing is frequently surprising and audacious, with passages of sustained concentration. She is unafraid to report how people feel when they do not know it themselves; occasionally, she hints at a future with which they cannot possibly be acquainted. This is all excellent stuff, unabashed to ‘digress’ or to break rules that are there to be broken. Most of it occurs early on while, later, the writing can occasionally slip into naïvety and redundancy, suggesting a lot of time has passed in composition or else authorial indecision has clouded artistic judgement.
What Stella Sees is a bivalve shell that turns on a hinge, and I found the first half the most interesting. I should have been delighted had the novel remained within the family dynamic and chosen to explore it in more detail. It seems to me there was a great story to be written about Stella, Rachel and Michael. Instead, the scene shifts to Paris, where the novel becomes a little diffuse, with too many things to get through and out the other side. Mo, in particular, as important and as interesting as he is, often forms an obstruction, while lengthy passages about a luxuriant techno-medical apparatus fail to resonate (at least, with me), even at the meeting point of art, science and psychology.
In short, despite many excellent qualities, the second half of What Stella Sees attempts to cover too much ground for its own good and does not quite live up to its beginnings. However, it concludes on a note that is both satisfying and disturbing. It is to do with contamination and human responsibility, and brings us back to the fragile plenitude experienced by Stella in her oceanic wanderings. Suddenly, the world is too much with us, and in our end is our beginning. Life, exhausted and bewildered, once crawled out of the sea to look about in fear and trembling. Today, depleted and poisoned, those same oceans are rising to reclaim the very thing they spewed forth.

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Stella Sees: A Novel by Sarah Kornfeld is an inspiring story about a character named Stella who suffers from severe neurological seizures that are not able to be cured. Her seizures are seen as “disabling” yet the readers see just how much – how full – of a life Stella is able to live. She falls in love, travels the word, and shares her imagination and love for art through her work in an art gallery. I was challenged to question what the term “disabled” really means throughout reading this book. What defines disability? The condition or the person? Perhaps both? Often, people make assumptions about the life of people with certain conditions, but this book challenged those common stigmas and dared to show the true life of these people. The characters are very endearing, powerful, and inspiring. Overall, this book is great for any person interested in life inspiring stories and characters.

[Xuan Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What Stella Sees" is a story centering around Stella, her parents, Rachel and Michael, and her lover, Mo. Stella is plagued with seemingly incurable seizures and has an obsession with the sea. She spends a great of time studying the sea and the creatures in it and uses shells to create a series of artworks. The family moves to Paris in search of a cure for Stella. There, she meets and falls in love with Mo, who runs an art gallery and has cerebral palsy.

The story is moving, thought-provoking and very meaningful. It portrays the love within the family and between two individuals seemingly so misunderstood by the rest of the world. The story highlights how our society may intentionally or unintentionally marginalize or disregard those in our community who are physically disabled or struggling with certain medical conditions. It illustrates the emotional pain and challenges the family unit faces when one member requires long-term medical care. The story also challenges readers to think about how we may judge those around us based on their physical capabilities or limitations. But really, even if our physical being is whole, does it mean our hearts and mind are also whole? Is the reverse also true?

The story is emotional, heart-warming and beautiful. One to be remembered for a long time.

[Rachel Kester · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book by Sarah Kornfeld is an intricate story focusing on a family. Rachel and Michael, art critics, are parents to Stella, a young woman who is fascinated with the sea. However, Stella often suffers from sporadic seizures. She decides to move away from her family to live in various areas around the world that might be able to help her with her medical problems. Along the way, she meets Mo, a man with cerebral palsy who runs an art gallery. They start a relationship together, but must fight many problems that come their way.
If you’re looking for a unique read, definitely check this book out. It’s a great read that looks at important themes like love, relationships, and family. It’s about 347 pages, so it’s a little bit of a long read, but it’s a good one to check out if you’re looking for a fascinating story to add to your to-read list.

[Charles Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the looks of the cover, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised by the literary work of Sarah Kornfeld in her novel of people who are...different...and the challenges that come with living with and loving them for who they are.

The book reminds me a little bit of Faulkner’s Absalom, not so much in the way that story circles around an outwardly challenging but inwardly brilliant girl, but more in the narrative form of puzzle pieces that must be fit together in order to understand the whole picture.

If you like movies like I Am Sam or The Rainman and would like to read a similar story with a more literary presentation, I recommend What Stella Sees for you.