“Chicago on the Seine”
by Camille Bordas
from the June 17, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
We’ve had a lot of stories by Camille Bordas in The New Yorker over the past decade, and I’m always looking forward to more. I’m in a bit of a rush to get this up and get out the door this morning, so I don’t have a lot more to say to introduce the story. Here is the first paragraph!
I used to tell myself stories on the job, to make it feel exciting — spy stories, exfiltration stories, war stories. I used to come up with poignant little details that turned the repatriation cases I worked on into “Saving Private Ryan,” into “Johnny Got His Gun.” Repatriation—there’s such a ring to it, such drama. I imagined maimed bodies in dirty tents, nurses changing brown, bloodied gauze, bending over beds to tell the wounded, “The call came in — you’re going home.” Yet I worked in Special Consular Services at our Embassy in Paris. The Americans I helped repatriate mostly broke legs in Pigalle or crashed rental cars in Normandy. Miracles didn’t happen for them in Lourdes — people don’t talk about it, but those for whom miracles don’t happen in Lourdes tend to leave France in worse shape than they arrived in.
I’ll be reading it soon and posting my thoughts below. In the meantime, please share your thoughts below as well!
When I started reading the story, I imagined that the narrator was a woman—largely, I suppose, because usually the gender is same as the author. I wonder why Bordas chose to narrate as a man.
The title of the story represents what we discover about the narrator: he isn’t wholly present where nor with whom he is. He feels he’s somewhere else, as Chicago rather than Paris or any other city when he crosses a bridge. He feels the need to conceal himself or falsify himself with others, even people he’s supposedly close to. Off hand, I haven’t come up with a reason for this, but it seems to me to be the main theme of the story. I’ll be interested in what others have to offer on this.
As I commonly do after reading, I checked out the author’s reading of the story. I like to hear what authors’ voices are like and how they express their story. In this case, I wondered why Bordas even made an audio of it, and why The New Yorker accepted it. She read it too rapidly and without any appropriate expression—she simply blabbed it out.
Regardless of whether or not there’s an afterlife or such things as ghosts, I dont think the daughter was crazy. We don’t know how long it takes for full dying to complete. I cared for my mother at home and was alone with her for the last hours of her final coma until a couple of hours after I recognized that she had died. Both during the coma and after I spoke to her, and I delayed contacting anyone after, because I didn’t want her body disturbed in case she was somehow still in a process of release. I hope it was long enough.
I’m not prepared to comment on the reactions of the nurse at the morgue. Hope others will. In general, I’m still wondering whether there is much more to the story than primarily a portrait of the psychology of the narrator.
Has anyone read Bordas’ novel with the same main character?
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Just reread the story. I love Camille Bordas’ short stories, so I was happy to learn that she has a new novel out, although I was less than impressed with How To Behave In A Crowd.
Eddie, I liked your observation that the narrator “isn’t wholly present where nor with whom he is.” The word that kept coming up for me is “shimmering.” Old scenes imposing themselves on new ones, an old girlfriend continuing to act a bit like a current one, and the ghosts of old movies on the recorded-over tapes. The mortician was transitioning from being coupled to single, sitting in a room with a woman who was transitioning from alive to dead. Well, these observations seem a bit heavy –handed; but I finished it with a light feeling of shimmering and mystery. As if the narrator had a lot of possibilities, but it wasn’t clear whether he would take advantage of any of them. I think I wished he had a little more self-confidence.
I wasn’t going to read “New Material”, by Camille Bordas, from the May 2024 issue of Harper’s, because it’s an excerpt from her new novel _The Material_ … Then suddenly I was reading it. As third person narrator hovering around and within a writer named Maddy, the author wrote a creative portrait of this character (not neglecting other characters). Throughout I was struck repeatedly by what I hadn’t known about the characters a moment earlier. I like her style and inagination. I’ll wait and see what’s said about the novel. But I really wish they wouldn’t do that!