Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, Zayde is both the swan song of a literary tradition nearly two thousand years old and a harbinger of the modern psychological novel.

Zayde unfolds during the long medieval struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula; Madame de Lafayette (1634-93) takes the reader on a Mediterranean tour typical of classical and seventeenth-century romances—from Catalonia to Cyprus and back again—with battles, prophecies, and shipwrecks dotting the crisscrossed paths of the book’s noble lovers. But where romance was long and episodic, Zayde possesses a magisterial architecture of suspense. Chaste and faithful heroines and heroes are replaced here by characters who are consumed by jealousy and unable to love happily. And, unlike in traditional romance, the reader is no longer simply expected to admire deeds of bravery and virtue, but instead is caught up in intense first-person testimony on the psychology of desire. 

Unavailable in English for more than two centuries, Zayde reemerges here in Nicholas Paige’s accessible and vibrant translation as a worthy representative of a once popular genre and will be welcomed by readers of French literature and students of the European novelistic tradition.

Alice Friman writes her poems with a razor-like intensity. Her metaphors slice through comfortable conventions of nature, family, love, and history. Vultures flock to carrion and “[s]pread / their wings into a tablecloth of frenzy.” A male lion takes a dead leopard’s head “in his jaws, argues it like a cat with a mole.” With equal skill, Friman can also light up quieter moments. A neglected ceiling threatens to crash down “in a blizzard of broken sidewalks,” and in the middle of family tension sits the daughter “curled in the living room chair, the eye / of the storm drowning herself in a book.”

Whether she confronts the ghosts of family, the bewildering violence of nature, or the phantoms of love in the here and now, Friman tears away the gauzy veils with her diamondhard imagination. She never takes her eyes off the subjects, always aware that the beasts are watching, too. Line by line, she takes this frightening, beautiful zoo and offers it up to us in poems that contain but do not strangle the life out of it. The bars of her lines and stanzas bend and tense while animals roar inside. Zoo testifies to the ability of language to make the familiar new in the hands of a skilled maker.