I think about water a lot and the affinity we have for it ... But of course there’s also the danger that water represents ... it can take our lives.
Author inspired by compelling 19th-century mystery
Novelist Sarah Leipciger
Coming Up for Air
Sarah Leipciger House of Anansi
The young woman’s body arrived in the Paris morgue without identification. Legend suggests she died by drowning. Yet she would achieve an eerie fame when a death mask of her features took on a mythic power that has lasted well over a century.
Canadian novelist Sarah Leipciger felt that power a couple of years ago when she visited a strange workshop in a Paris suburb — a place dedicated to the making of death masks — and watched that mysterious, elusive face reborn before her very eyes.
And she kept thinking about how it all began — in the late 19th century when a pathologist in the city morgue fell in love with that face and proceeded to make a wax cast of it.
The legend of L’inconnue de la Seine (In English, the Unknown Woman of the Seine), provided Leipciger with the germ for her new novel, Coming Up for Air, published by Anansi. It’s a book that focuses on three unusual lives — a suicidal young woman who dies in the River Seine in 1899; a driven toymaker named Pieter in 1950s Norway; and, in the present, an Ottawa Valley journalist named Anouk whose lungs are disintegrating under the onslaught of cystic fibrosis.
In taking an abiding legend in a fresh and unexpected direction, Leipciger also ensnares the reader in a tantalizing mystery.
“That’s the problem in talking about this book,” Leipciger says. “The theme that ties it all together — you can’t say what it is.”
She trusts that her own narrative skills will keep the reader engaged. Her previous novel, The Mountain Can Wait, opened with an attention-grabbing hit-and-run accident. Coming Up for Air is even bolder. “This is how I drowned,” it begins — and that brief sentence compels you to read on.
“I like to hit the ground running,” Leipciger laughs. The 44-year-old novelist is on the phone from England, her home for many years. As a teacher of creative writing, she has firm ideas about the need for a strong opening. “I think it comes from my early short-story writing — where it’s important that you get into it right away.”
Meanwhile there’s the mystique of that death mask — and its strange relevance to a much later era when it would save lives. It’s here you find truth and legend now hopelessly entangled. Was this young woman really a drowning victim — or is there another explanation, now smothered in the mists of time? Leipciger notes that some authorities claim she couldn’t have drowned because “faces of drowning victims don’t look that perfect when they are recovered.” But for
Leipciger that simply heightens the mystery. “The fact that people still believe she had drowned and that she was so beautiful — that adds to the intrigue.”
It is a fact that her death mask would adorn an uncounted number of walls in Europe during the 20th century, and that it would show up in the works of such major writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Albert Camus, who famously compared her to the Mona Lisa. L’inconnue has also cropped up in film and dance — even in pop, where she’s celebrated in a 2018 Beach House album.
That enigmatic face had haunted Leipciger for years. “That’s why I ended up in this place in Paris where they still make death masks. They used a mould to make a copy of this young woman’s mask while I watched. It was wonderful.
“I felt very lucky to see her up close. She looked younger when I saw her in person — quite a young person, probably about 17 years. I was very conscious that I was not the first person to be taken in by her mystery. But to me, it looked like she had a secret, that she wanted to say something. That’s what got me really excited about writing a story where she would be the centre.”
Landscape is a powerful presence in Leipciger’s novels. In the current book she shifts back and forth between Paris in the late 19th century, the Norwegian coastline of 50 years ago and the contrasting worlds of the Ottawa Valley and urban Toronto in the new millennium. Her previous novel, The Mountain Can Wait, was set in the B.C. Interior, and its stunning evocation of place wouldn’t have been possible without the summers that the young Sarah spent planting trees.
She was born in Peterborough, Ont., grew up in Toronto and ended up attending the University of Victoria. Tree planting was her summer job for four years. “It paid for my tuition. It paid for a year of living. It was such a unique experience and such an intense experience. Most people who have planted trees kind of carry it with them for life. At the time you’re doing it, it feels like the absolute worst hell you can possibly be in. In hindsight, I have the fondest of memories.”
That formative experience ensured that landscape would occupy a prominent place in her creative imagination. And in this new novel, water plays a particularly significant role — whether it’s the Seine River, the North Sea, the Ottawa River or Lake Ontario.
“Water has always been very important to me in my life,” Leipciger says. “I grew up right next to Lake Ontario and for the last 12 years of my life I’ve done a lot of open-water swimming. I think about water a lot and the affinity we have for it — which of course comes through in the stories of Pieter and Anouk. But of course there’s also the danger that water represents … it can take our lives. And obviously it’s very important to all three characters.”
One early reader of Coming Up for Air surprisingly argued that the book was too preoccupied with death. But Leipciger contends that the novel is really about renewal.
“It’s about the whole cycle of life and death. You can’t have one without the other. The water theme comes into this as well because I believe water is very much about recycling and rebirth.”
It’s about the whole cycle of life and death . ... The water theme comes into this as well because I believe water is very much about recycling and rebirth. Sarah Leipciger