Sara Baume

Despite the NYT Book Review blurb on the front cover that Seven Steeples was one of the most beautiful novels the reviewer had ever read, the majority of the beauty dropped off for this reviewer after the first chapter or so and quickly turned into a tedious slog. Baume is a gifted wordsmith throughout, but Seven Steeples is far more of a delirious ode to rural Ireland in poetic cant than what I would consider a story, and the preciousness of her stylized prose quickly wore while I waited for something to happen. It never did, and instead we're drawn into the aimless lives of a young, rudderless couple who have retreated to a cottage by the sea beneath a mountain they just can't find the interest or energy to climb.

In fact, they don't do much of anything, and the absolute lack of ambition or joy in either of the main characters is progressively draining as the place-poem rambles on. Bell and Sigh are ostensibly anti-social, anti-family, and anti-capitalist, but all of this really amounts to anti-interesting as the novel slooooowly tells the story of their unwillingness to cook, to clean, to care for themselves and each other, instead preferring to turn their backs on everything joyful the world has to offer except for a routine walk, swim, or the occasional fishing trip in the sea. Meanwhile, everything is changing through the seasons and decaying all around them: the very structure of their rented house, their scant belongings, their appliances, their clothing, and their relationships with the outside world.

Everything in Baume's vignette gets slowly and ponderously used up, including my patience, as I struggled to find some redeeming qualities in these characters or a reason to care about the nanoscopic cycles of life and death around them while they frittered away their existences against the backdrop of the rural-gothic Irish landscape. I even felt sorry for their two dogs, who were easily the most interesting characters in the story, but only because they were totally hapless and existing purely at the whim of their heedless pet-parents.

Lovers of alembicated language and dilapidated-cottage-core might get more out of this than I did, but I was really hoping that Bell and Sigh would get off their asses and do something – anything – that might serve as an inspirational inflection point to counter the eulogistic reverence for self-loathing indolence that masquerades as the real main character of this novel. Like, climb the bloody mountain, already, gang. FFS.… (altro)