Jan Wiese - The Naked Madonna

Jan Wiese's The Naked Madonna is a frustrating novel that begins with a fantastic premise, and then resolutely fails to do anything with it. It is not a novel that tries and fails, instead, bizarrely, the novel fizzes away any potential by detouring down avenues that can only charitably be called tangentially related.

The Naked Madonna utilises a number of different framing techniques to tells its story. It begins with the opening with the collapse of a new church in Perugia, killing seven hundred people, including

...a number of prominent representatives of church and state: cardinals and bishops, several cabinet ministers and many guests from ecclesiastical and cultural circles throughout Europe.

Wiess is quick to note that,

...even yesterday's football league match has been given less space than usual.

And then leaves it to the reader to note the irony. At any rate, within the rubble a painting is found that is soon hailed as a masterpiece. It is a painting of the Madonna, but nobody exactly knows who painted it, or how it came to be in the new church. The narrator, telling his story in 1989 from within a prison (though we don't yet know why), gives a little bit of background to what little is known about the painting, but spends most of the opening pages explaining himself. He is a scholar, particularly but not exclusively interested in ecclesiastical history. The painting becomes an obsession, and then the diaries of the painter are discovered within the Vatican library. Enter the first framing device.

Now we are within the painter's mind. It is long ago, and the painter has been commissioned to paint something by the church. He is already successful, and still young, but for some reason inspiration remains unwilling to visit. Soon he sees a beautiful woman in the marketplace, and it comes to him in a dream that he should paint her as the Madonna. He notes that,

I've never been very interested in the Virgin Mary. I've never before thought of the conception and birth as a miracle. Not until now, having seen the finished painting. I'll probably be in a state of confusion from now on.

And this is generally true. He becomes, we are told (and it is, unfortunately, always told – it's hard to actually ever be shown something in Wiese's novel), obsessed, and soon he cannot think of anything but the Madonna, both in her corporeal sense, and as a biblical figure.

There is just here a rather nice little section where, for an instant, the descriptive power of the novelist comes through and it seems a calming hand has placed itself on the steering wheel. The painter writes that,

I have started grinding and blending colours in a different way from before. It must be the light out here by the sea that gives me new abilities. I've managed to retain the clarity of the colours while at the same time giving them a special surface when they dry. It adds a delicate tone to the painting that enhances its elevated subject-matter.

But for the Madonna's face I use the old method that my master taught me. First two brush strokes with a mixture of green ochre and white lead in a tempera of glue and egg. Then I mix the flesh colours, for which I have to take care to use eggs from a town hen. The yolks are lighter than those from country hends and are thus more suitable for the skin of a young person.

These paragraphs mix information with obsession, and just for a second it works. But then the painter begins to doubt himself, and the novel, so briefly righted, tilts. The next and most damaging framing device comes by way of the storytellers in the market. The painter, unable to paint the Madonna the way his obsession demands, procrastinates by listening to various storytellers tell their tales. These are presented as fables and take up the greater part of the last two thirds of the novel, which is to say they really are the novel, in that the stories, and the painter's reaction, comprises more by way of page count than the murderer from 1989 (remember him?) and the actual painting itself.

These stories are ones of vengeance, of wronged love and the damaging effects of desire and lust. They are set in a timeless place where names, places, and technology do not exist, and the simple connections of village life are all that exist. The effect of this is that the stories are able to act as universal statements, in that the situations and characters are easily reproducible and understandable in any culture or time period. The story of the cuckolded husband cares little for borders or language; similarly, explosions of love at a very young age are, by and large, an understanding of humanity as much as they are an expression of individuality.

The author, alas, cheats. In a novel of obsession, it behooves the author to at least show some of the desire burning within the obsessed character. Unfortunately, the most we get is a diary entry that reads, “Never before have I painted anything like this.”, and the statement comes after a series of nightmares and doubts. The problem of Wiese' work is that too much of it is taken up with tales of other things, and while the fable-like quality of the stories keep the novel interesting, their application serves to provide the story with meaning, rather than to enhance a meaning that is already there. From a novelist such as Hesse, who was also fond of using abstracted, universal stories in his works, the stories acted as clothes for the man of the novel, they are as intimately involved with the work as a greater whole as they are self-contained and aesthetically valuable on their own. Wiese's stories follow traditional and familiar subjects (though primarily desire, vengeance, lust and love), but they primarily act as sleight-of-hand tricks designed to make the work seem to have more depth than it actually does.

These stories, turning in on themselves, remove us from the murderer, and then the painter. They are interesting, but the disconnect is too strong and the sense of a continuous and coherent whole is lost. In the final pages of the novel, Wiese returns to the painter and then the murderer, rushing us back out of the stories and into the frames. But it is too late – any sympathy or curiosity is long gone, and the importance of the painting never really gels with the reader.

The Naked Madonna shows Wiese a storyteller of small moments, but as an author he isn't able to connect enough of the dots to make a completed piece. The angle of obsession, coupled with religion and art, is a potent one, but he doesn't do much with it. Instead, the novel plunges down into story after story, and as it does the focus of the novel disappears. It is a shame, really, for The Naked Madonna begins so well, with such an impact, that the subsequent disappointments seem much stronger than if the whole novel was consistently mediocre.

Author	Jan Wiese
Title	The Naked Madonna (Original Title: Kvinnen som kledte seg naken for sin elskede)
Translator	Tom Geddes
Nationality	Norwegian
Publisher	Harvill Panther
Published	1995 (English) 1990 (Norwegian)
Pages	159
Availability: ---Amazon (US)