Mythic shadow over London and Latvia

Strange Heart Beating

Granta, £12.99

Reviewed by Madeleine Kingsley

SNOW IS never just snow to the Eskimos who, it is claimed, have 50 words to describe it. Likewise laughter to humankind: debut novelist Eli Goldstone suggests it has multiple manifestations and triggers, of which the saddest is Homeric — “the unceasing laughter of the gods, who look down upon us to see our suffering and delight in it.”

Strange Heart Beating chronicles such suffering in the bitter bereavement of Seb, a Jewish lecturer who has lately lost his wife. His beautiful, beloved Leda drowned when her small boat was overturned by a swan — a strange brand of tragedy for North London. But the women in Leda’s family are prone to improb- able deaths. As he sorts through her belongings, Seb discovers a cache of letters suggesting that Leda, from Latvia, was altogether someone other, someone far more foreign, complex and mysterious than the woman he thought he’d owned and adored.

You needn’t be steeped in Greek myth to recall that Zeus, disguised as a swan, supposedly raped — or perhaps simply seduced — the Princess Leda who then gave birth to Helen of Troy. In some versions, Leda slept with her husband the same night, and so became mother to two pairs of twins. Some versions say that the swan restored Leda to her husband, others that he kept her forever in thrall. W B Yeats enshrined Leda’s ambivalence, her terror of being overwhelmed by “great wings” polarised by deep feeling for “feathered glory” and the eponymous “strange heart beating”. Goldstone’s retelling of the myth — an ambitious theme that fascinated such artists as Michelangelo and da Vinci — addresses the fluidity of truth, passion and possession. Unlike her mythical counterpart, this novel’s Leda bore no children, so Seb is left alone to obsess about Leda’s identity before they met, the significance of her lock of hair,

Eli Goldstone: ambitious theme returned to her in a hidden envelope. At considerable risk of losing his university post, Seb flies out to claim the woman he never knew. In another tense, another country, Leda was Leila, a girl of inaccessible talents and thoughts, possibly the property of other men. What begins as a bleak, lonely and interior tale, becomes a dark, Eastern European romp, inhabiting a richly imagined natural world and enlivened by alcohol, wild boar hunting, earthy women and men of dubiously violent intent.

It is all foreign to our narrator, temperamentally “drawn to the quiet order of living unremarkably”. Interleaved as a tender counterpoint to all this uncustomary action are extracts from young Leila’s secret diary.

If the Coen Brothers had a sister, she would likely write like Goldstone, her pen dipped in weird black ink, piquant with fantasies and dread delusion.

Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance writer