Review of DOUBLE ROOM by Anne Sénès (New Release)

 4 Stars

I found this novel a perplexing, unsettling read.

In the late 1990s, Stan is a French composer living in London. He meets Liv with whom he immediately falls in love. They marry and have a daughter whom they name Lisa. Life is happy until a tragic accident. Totally bereft, Stan moves to Paris to live in a house, known as the Rabbit Hole, which he inherited from an aunt. He is joined by Babette and her son Téo. Though romantically involved with Babette, it is obvious that Stan does not have the same intense relationship with her that he had with Liv. To complicate matters, Stan built an AI assistant (like Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa) which he endowed with Liv’s voice and named Laïvely. When Laïvely seems to take on a life of its own and becomes a somewhat malevolent presence, things start to go awry.

Actually, awry is a good adjective to describe my thoughts about the book as I read: from the beginning I felt that something was amiss. Clearly Stan is a haunted man, unable to move past his loss and grief. When Laïvely seems to gain autonomy, Stan wonders, “had I imagined things that didn’t exist in order to fill the interior solitude in which I had been abandoned after the death of my lover?”  He asks, “Is this the first time that I’ve given the objects that surround me gifts they are far from able to possess? Is this parallel universe my downfall, or, on the contrary, my salvation? Does my equilibrium come from my belief in their talents, or is this the definitive proof that I am losing my mind?” Later, he ponders, “Is this electronic thing nothing but a receptacle for my wandering moods? Or is she gifted with what might be called a conscience?”

Stan is a synesthete. He explains, “Tastes, sounds and colours all form an amalgam within me” so, for example, he describes Liv’s voice as containing “the purity of a nightingale’s song, the grace of the gentle summer tide in La Baule, the lightness of the wind in the Corsican pines. It was powder pink, with a touch of raspberry red at its heart. It had the aroma of orange blossom.” Synesthesia is a different way of experiencing and processing information, but that is not all that makes Stan unique. He speaks about being a strange child and refers more than once to childhood visits to doctors. He mentions “I distorted reality when I was really caught up in a composition” and “Sometimes I’d have blackouts . . . when I remained focused on myself for too long.” And of course it could be said that, like Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a bizarre world, Stan is on a strange journey which becomes increasingly stranger.

The great reveal at the end didn’t come as a great surprise to me, but I’m not certain if I’ve figured out everything about what has been going on. I’m troubled by phrases like Stan feeling “the powerful sensation of being alive” and, at another time, stating “I was absolutely alive.” Yet at one other time, he describes himself as “nothing but a slightly delayed robot with a wobbly gait, powered by a jumble of wires and cords, some of which had been cut.” Near the end, he comments, “I no longer know where to situate my absences from the world, or my place within it. I no longer know what is dream and what is reality.”

This last comment, the epigraph quoting "The Double Room" by Charles Baudelaire, and the book’s final image leave me uncertain about what really happened and what did not. More than one possible interpretation seems plausible, just as there are three returns from Oxford. Am I overthinking?

As I said at the beginning, this is a disconcerting book. I think it’ll be on my mind for some time. And I know it’s one I will re-read when I have some time.