The Empty Bed Blues of William Wall’s seventh novel belong to Kate, an Irish woman who narrates in the present tense her flight of freedom to Italy – a journey she embarks upon to escape the financial ruin she inherits upon her husband’s untimely death. Driven by betrayal and despair, she abandons her home and career to contemplate a new life in her husband’s secret love nest in Camogli, a small fishing port.
An elderly upstairs neighbour, Anna – a former Resistance fighter and committed communist – becomes an unexpected adviser, friend and source of spirited solace as Kate experiments with a new identity.
An award-winning author, Wall has also written five volumes of poetry and three short story collections. His latest work is a quietly devastating expression of his strength – the precision of a poet’s worldview elegantly extended to achieve a meaningful narrative.
The novel operates as a sensuous love letter to La Dolce Vita for the middle-aged and spiritually bereft, but it is also a passionate ode to the power of literature itself. Kate is a Joycean scholar, and her musings are littered with quotes from “old J J” and myriad other sources.
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This self-awareness in the text – in addition to a particular fondness for extensive rhetorical questions and a tendency to over-explain – introduces an anxiety to the prose that seems more attributable to the author than the narrator. There are moments when Wall’s authorial voice seems to have overpowered Kate’s: at one point she sits in the sunshine and thinks of her life that she has “lived it like a naive narrator in a trivial novel”. Perhaps Wall shares Guido’s concern “that everything to do with pain has been said before”.
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Kate’s tendency to conjure up quotations to express what she feels but struggles to articulate reads authentically, but Wall does lean heavily on the device. This is a shame when he could so easily kick away that crutch. Nonetheless, the intermingling of languages, the searching for the perfect word in a quest for meaning, infuses this rich novel with a deep appreciation for language that is rewarding.
Through his lyrical style, Wall offers a moving account of a woman stoically refusing to unravel, with astutely drawn characters and moments of great levity. Ultimately the time spent with Kate in her Italian idyll has the potential to prove as restorative for the reader as it does for her. This is delicate storytelling that elevates the trivialities of life to something significant, as all great literature does.
