DISCOVERIES

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Letters of a Portuguese Nun

Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love

Myriam Cyr

Miramax Books: 240 pp., $22.95

THESE five letters from a 26-year-old Portuguese nun to a French officer garrisoned in her town, Beja, near Andalusia, are breathtaking enough. But the story of how the nun, Mariana Alcoforado, from an aristocratic family, entered the convent, Our Lady of Conciecao (run by a Franciscan order, the Poor Ladies of Claire) at age 10 and later met one M. de Chamilly, a count, a marquis and an extremely handsome soldier, is enough to make a girl stay home from the movies.

Mariana risked everything for Chamilly. When his regiment was called from Beja, she wrote the five letters that would become a manifesto for all betrayed lovers. “[L]ove me always and make me suffer greater woes,” she wrote in her first, hopeful letter, circa November-December 1667. “I am left with nothing of myself,” she wrote some days later. “[Y]ou filled me with a passion that made me lose my mind,” she wrote in June 1668.

Chamilly, back in Paris and a war hero, brought the unanswered letters to a salon one evening. They were circulated and finally published in 1669 by a crafty bookseller. Ten editions were printed in the first year, 63 by the time of Mariana’s quiet death in 1723. Scholars could not believe that a woman had written the letters. Over the years, dissertations, books, paintings (by Modigliani, Matisse, Braque) and poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning imagined the young nun. Finally, a Portuguese monk revealed her identity, almost 100 years after her death. Miriam Cyr has done us a great service by teasing the details of this story from mountains of historical fact and hysterical speculation.

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The Tent

Margaret Atwood

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 158 pp., $18

SHE’S come undone. Margaret Atwood, one of our most controlled storytellers; the novelist with the team of researchers helping her reconstruct the most intimate details of historical fiction has allowed herself to unravel before our very eyes. “I’m working on my own life story,” she says of these bits and fragments, some just a paragraph long. “I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing.” The fragments include thinly veiled rage and disdain for the young (orphans and writing students are her favorite targets: “How young are the young, these days?”), dreamy bits (“Our cat was raptured up to heaven.”) and extremely funny essays like “Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon” (“Worm Zero,” “Spongedeath” and “Beetleplunge”). A few, like the poem “Bring Back Mom,” simply defy categorization. It’s as if the author were trying out different vantage points from which to view her life -- our presence as readers is not mandatory. But it is a fascinating exercise. God knows she’s earned it.

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The Planetarium

A Novel

Nathalie Sarraute, translated from the French by Maria Jolas

Dalkey Archive: 220 pp., $12.95 paper

IT’S good, every so often, to check in on the state of the French novel. Nathalie Sarraute, who died in 1999, belonged to a school of French novelists, alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget and Claude Simon, who called themselves the New Realists and wrote what critics called the New Novel, which actually picks up where Virginia Woolf and James Joyce left off, exploring the paths of the subconscious on the page.

In this novel, first published in 1959, Sarraute goes further, delving painfully deep into human nature as it is revealed in the most trivial habits and gestures of daily life. We almost have to look away as Aunt Berthe opens a crack in her nephew’s marriage. It is too easy to topple the conventions that hold society together. “The Planetarium” begins with Aunt Berthe surveying a room she has decorated: the dark-green curtains, the beige walls “soft as chamois.” It is an apartment her nephew and his wife want desperately. How far will they go to get it? Sarraute reveals the bullying subtext in our most mundane conversations.