BELLADONNA
by Anbara Salam
Berkley. 336 pages, $26.
THE TITLE is intriguing. Bella donna means “beautiful woman” in Italian and is ultimately derived from the Indo-European term for blossom. By the 16th century, “belladonna” as a single word meant nightshade, a poisonous plant with glossy berries, the juice of which was used to dilate women’s eyes for cosmetic effect. The same plant yields medicinal extracts that can block the nervous system to allay motion sickness. Consuming belladonna can kill you, but its extract might settle your nausea. Right from the start, the title of this engrossing coming-of-age novel implies love’s potential for both healing and upsetting.
Author Anbara Salam grew up in London, studied in Beirut and York, England, and earned a doctorate in theology at Oxford, where she is currently a research associate. She’s the daughter of a Scottish mother and Palestinian father and the great-granddaughter of feminist author and translator Anbara Salam Khalidi, reportedly the first Muslim woman in Lebanon to remove her hijab in public. Belladonna is Salam’s second novel.
Much of the story takes place at an art academy in northern Italy, with intersecting scenes in coastal Connecticut.
“I wanted to write about longing, and the anguish and entitlement of unrequited love,” Salam recently told an interviewer. As romantic fiction goes, Belladonna is not conventionally “hot.” Like Salam’s earlier novel, Things Bright and Beautiful, it looks at passion less through the high-powered lens of sex than through the subtler optics of intimate ambles over rough terrain and rendezvous in odd locales. Both novels offer fresh insights on the seductive power of religion as well.
Belladonna opens with Bridget’s June 1956 graduation from a Catholic high school in St. Cyrus, Connecticut. Aiming to escape her family’s preoccupation with an older sister’s eating disorder, she leaves on a two-year program at the Academia Di Belle Arti in the fictional town of Pentila, near Milan. Independently, her classmate Isabella (Bella) Crowley—wealthy, beautiful, and popular—decides to head there too.
Salam has traveled to the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, and her observant eye yields remarkably fresh images (“toasted grass” comes to mind). The art academy’s grounds are replete with yew, mountain ash, cypress, eucalyptus, and fruit trees crisscrossed with trails leading to vegetable gardens, a saint’s shrine, a cider cellar, and the remains of a former spa with peeling wallpaper and worn gilt mirrors, most recently a haven for tuberculosis patients. The setting is near-Edenic, both beautiful and strange.
The academy schedule is strict but allows ample free time, and soon after arriving Bridget and Bella decide on a walk to the spa. “The path became narrow, passing through blackberry hedges studded with blind stars where berries had already been plucked,” Bridget says. “I took a deep breath of air, coppery and sweet with rotten fruit, like old pennies dipped in honey. Isabella tipped her head back so the sunlight caught her face. She opened her eyes and found me staring at her. She smiled. ‘O.K., maybe not such a dreadful idea,’ she said, lacing her fingers through mine. I traced the outlines of her ragged thumbnail, my stomach jittering.”
In this environment of discipline and decay, the women become what Bridget calls an “unbreakable” pair. Within weeks they go from sunbathing together to nude swimming in the nearby lake, a nimbly described scene that evokes Elizabeth Bishop’s account of dips with Alice Methfessel in her North Haven Journal of the mid-1970s. Captivated, Bridget hopes her girlfriend feels the same way, a hope heightened when Bella shows up in her room one night and climbs into her bed. In the morning, a spellbound Bridget is sure that “everything” in her life will “be different” from then on. She is in love, Bella is apparently hooked, and fellow students see them as linked.
Given the setting in the 1950s, it’s puzzling that neither woman seems worried about the repercussions if their affair is discovered. On this point, Salam has said it was important to her “that Bridget’s sexuality is never part of her identity crisis, that her desire for Isabella uncompromisingly focuses her actions.” Also, Bella’s correspondence with a boyfriend in the U.S. about plans for their wedding provides available cover for the women’s fling.
Bridget doesn’t obsess about the boyfriend, but she does begin to doubt Bella’s commitment. Like Alison Bechdel in her graphic memoir Fun Home, Bridget finds it hard to see herself as desirable. Lacking self-confidence, she has been falsely claiming that she has family money, a second home, and a boat, and as her fear of losing Bella grows, so do her lies. Salam is aware of the contradiction in Bridget’s character: “I loved the idea of creating a character who behaves more and more terribly. It happens so slowly you almost don’t realize that you’re hoping their manipulations will be successful.”
In spite of Bridget’s desperate efforts, the relationship falls apart. Bella’s reasons for abandoning her lover are nicely woven into the story. Not to give too much away, but Belladonna makes it clear that nuns are women too, with actual names and desires. Salam also deftly portrays the hum and zing of women in groups—not only the clamorous gaggle of privileged art students but also the Innocent Sisters of St. Pentilian who live adjacent to the academy and whose lives form a quiet backdrop of female presence. Belladonna considers the contradictory effects of love in a slew of its guises in a captivating and intricate narrative.
Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
