Sigma by Julia Deck (review)

Everyone knows Konrad Kessler (1887–1955), the greatest Swiss painter of the twentieth century. But wait—he was actually a German, born into a bourgeois family in Hamburg. In fact he was trained as a naval engineer, not as a painter. After four difficult years at the front in the First World War, he was sent to Geneva to regain his health, and it was there that he began to paint seriously, registering the carnage he had witnessed in abstract color and line. Very little remains of his work: thirteen "magnifiques grands formats" (23) housed in the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, and a handful of much smaller minor works. Rumor has it that another canvas may exist, however, perhaps the most magnificent of all—and the most terribly eloquent. The possibility that it may emerge is distressing to "Sigma," a nebulous organization headquartered in New York whose business is to police international ideology in ways as subtle as they are ruthless. Sigma pairs its agents with carefully selected targets in Geneva, four people who may take a hand in bringing the lost Kessler to light, and those latter individuals are a pleasingly quirky quartet. Alexis Zante, the most saturnine among them, is an art collector by vocation, and one of thirty-five vice presidents of the Banque Berghof. Pola Stalker is a movie actress. Her career is in the ascendant, and she frets about whether to take the route of high art or low. Her sister, Elvire Elstir, runs a gallery that has seen better days. She hopes to revive its fortunes with a show whose centerpiece is the lost Kessler. Lothaire Lestir is a neurobiologist specializing in sexology, whose personal crusade focuses upon orgasmic parity for women. Julia Deck paints this novel on a canvas significantly larger than that of her first two books, Viviane Élisabeth Fauville (2012) and Le triangle d'hiver (2014). Her style here is less spare, less suavely architectonic, but her gift for crafting lapidary, pungent sentences is still very much on display, as is her dry sense of humor: "Maigrelet, surmonté d'un plumet filasse, Lestir présente un physique de tamanoir" (62). The epigraph, borrowed from John le Carré's A Perfect Spy, is clearly intended to coax us into the shadow world of espionage fiction. Yet Deck's version of that world will remind many readers more of Jean Echenoz than of John le Carré. Readers looking for something beyond a standard spy intrigue will be well served here, as Deck muses upon the myth of the artist, the status of the work of art in an advanced capitalist society, and how radical, uncompromising aesthetic statements can be appropriated, domesticated, and thus largely neutralized by that same society. In other words, if stories circulate freely here, so do those particular kinds of stories known as parables. But of course that has always been true of the best spy fiction—and indeed of the best fiction of any other kind.