Adolescent love in the time of war
Liberation, Joanna Scott, Little, Brown, 272 pp, $23.95
In the sad, wonderful novel ''Liberation," girl meets boy as war rages around them. The overriding irony is that the war is being waged in the name of liberation, but it is love, not war, that liberates.
A 10-year-old girl, Adriana Nardi, and a 17-year old boy from Senegal, Amdu Diop, meet on the island of Corsica as the Allies, using North African regiments, fight to liberate the island from German occupation in 1944. Not cut out for war, though he is the grandson of a general, Amdu has been separated from his company. Now he is hiding out, struggling to survive alone, and he comes upon a small boathouse on the Nardi estate.
Adriana has spent the night locked in a kitchen cabinet to protect her from the possible depredations of soldiers on either side. But there is too much life in Adriana to stay locked up for long, and she sneaks out of the house when daylight arrives.
She gets a glimpse of Amdu out of the corner of her eye and later imagines the soldier outside. He is her soldier. Proudly, she plays the piano so that he will hear. ''She played for an invisible audience of one, and because she imagined her listener had never heard anyone play the piano before and couldn't judge the merits of her playing, she imagined that he would think her brilliant."
The story jumps from Adriana's viewpoint to Amdu's, and occasionally to Adriana at 70, suffering a health crisis on a Long Island commuter train, shortly after remembering and pondering at length the soldier she met when she was 10.
Novelist Joanna Scott endows each adolescent with an abundance of energy and imagination. Amdu at 17 has developed his own belief system, ''a peculiar, combustive faith, a mix of folklore and papal doctrine, Koranic law and his own vivid imagination."
Adriana, too, is a child of singularity, courage, imagination, and cleverness. She dives into the ocean from high cliffs. She sees the animals of Elba as treasures, and she shares them with her soldier.
The world of the two adolescents is both magical and terrible. Each of them is aware of a nearby atrocity that has just occurred, the rape and murder of a young neighbor of Adriana's. They don't discuss this secret. Each has a different knowledge of the event. Adriana knows of it through rumors and from her own potential to be victimized, while Amdu actually witnessed the crime and ran away out of fear that his fellow soldiers would cut out his tongue to silence him. Each struggles to come to grips with a world in which such cruelty exists, and each, though nearly powerless, wonders what he or she might have been able to do about it.
The two can converse only in French, which Adriana doesn't know very well. Their communication develops with painstaking effort, but its depth, in just a week, is breathtaking. Adolescence as well as war brings rapid change to their lives.
Although the relationship of Adriana and Amdu never turns in a physical direction, Amdu, before returning to Senegal, thinks about marrying Adriana. He knows it's an outlandish idea, but after turning it over in his head for many hours, Amdu starts to compose a letter to Adriana's mother, proposing the union.
The reader knows from the start that this marriage either will not take place or will fail to last. On the Long Island commuter train 60 years later, Adriana has become Mrs. Rundel. Mr. Rundel sounds mundane, compared with Amdu -- wouldn't almost anyone? But if the meeting of Adriana and Amdu has not resulted in a lifelong union, this does not mean that Adriana has missed her only chance for love.
In her hospital room, Mrs. Rundel's husband leans over and kisses her. ''It is a long, desperate, loving kiss, a kiss containing fifty years of kisses, from the first kiss in the Place des Vosges in 1956 to the kiss in their first shared bed in that filthy hotel room to the kiss on their wedding day to all the routine kisses -- hello, goodbye -- kisses of congratulations, kisses of clever seduction, reviving kisses at the end of a long day, kisses of apology, kisses of gratitude, kisses of celebration, quick pecks in passing, kisses enlivened by the action of tongues, kisses filled with foreboding, kisses of relief, kisses to make up after an argument, easy kisses, tender kisses, grinding kisses, kisses before intercourse, during, after, wet kisses, dry kisses, kisses to comfort, kisses to persuade, kisses to punctuate a joke, kisses interrupting stories that would prove impossible to finish."
It's a Joycean catalog, and a fine illustration of Scott's technique. The novelist leaps between the general and the specific, abstract and concrete, commonplace and rare. There is a nice touch of self-reference at the end. And when Mrs. Rundel tells her husband, ''I'm fine," the reader experiences the ordinary word as a rich understatement.
