Except for Breath – Lucienne Bestall

[Karavan Press; 2025]

Lucienne Bestall’s essay collection, Except for Breath, is a sprawling debut, encompassing such diverse themes as limerence and liturgy, migraine and suicide, the car crash that killed Princess Diana and the city of Beirut. A motley crew, one might say. As Bestall notes in her prologue, she is a “gleaner,” a magpie, the collection a work of “pastiche.” Nevertheless, there are throughlines. Images, for instance. For Bestall, who works primarily as an art writer, this should come as no surprise: paintings and photographs punctuate her pieces, either literally in reproductions, or recalled in memories.

Interestingly, out of the eleven images included in the collection, more than half depict corpses. In the first essay, “All the Dead,” there is Sally Mann’s photograph of a body in the late stages of decomposition; Walter Schels’ side-by-side shots of the terminally ill, initially lucid, then recently deceased; an undated mourning portrait from the nineteenth century shows the corpse of a couple’s daughter, propped up beside them as if she were alive; and finally, Robert Wiles’ photograph of Evelyn Francis McHale, who died by suicide after leaping from the top of the Empire State Building on May Day, 1947. Then there’s “The Pricking of Love,” an essay on depictions of Christ’s torture and crucifixion. There’s Christ’s corpse splayed across Mary’s lap in Michelangelo’s Pieta and, in Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ, Nicodemus and John the Evangelist straining under its weight.

Macabre subjects, you might say––corpses. But in Bestall’s hands, they are handled with gentleness––even, at times, romanticism. The hand of Mann’s corpse “appears untouched by decay, bright white against those autumn leaves.” McHale is the image of “perfect calm, as if her body had come to rest gently on a bed of twisted metal and shattered glass. As if she is only asleep.” Christ’s blood is described somewhat erotically as it “runs from his forehead, wetting his eyelashes and cheeks, and pooling in his clavicle.” This tension is another throughline that runs across Except for Breath. The subject may be difficult (grief, death, heartache, migraine) even extreme (violence, torture, war) but Bestall’s prose remains poised, delicate, soft. 

Take the following passage as an example. This is from Bestall’s reflections on her time in Beirut, an essay called “Our Lady of Lebanon”: 

There is a saying in this country, tomorrow we will see. Paired with the city’s desire to forget its past is a stubborn refusal to consider the future. Here, where everything is taken for granted and nothing is certain. I have read that the city was destroyed seven times, and seven times, like some mortar phoenix, rebuilt. The threat of war is never far off there, but why ruin this halcyon afternoon with the smoke of future fires? A supplication to fate, then: let us see tomorrow, let us survive the night. 

When it comes to talk of war––the city destroyed, the city inflamed––Bestall is attracted to Beirutians’ cool detachment, their resilience that shies away from heroism, their elegant remove, which characterizes so much of her writing. Why? Lately, I have been thinking about an interview with Rachel Cusk, in which she claims that a writer can identify truth because shame sits on top of it. This is a formula that Bestall uses to great effect: identify shame, peer at the truth beneath. 

To this end, my favorite essay in the collection is called “The Snake.” It’s about a crush unrequited, a fixation on a man with “a reputation,” a love with nowhere to go. The narrator is haunted by bad omens––an owl sighting, a tarot spread, a stranger who forewarns, “You will forever be unlucky in love.” A cousin upbraids her: “Clearly you should have never gone home with him.” Her mother admonishes, “Isn’t this the definition of casual sex?” “It was never going to last,” the narrator admits. “And yet.” And yet. The crush saturates her days, turning the sky “a brilliant blue.” It instills within her “a certain heat.” She makes a wish under the full moon. Reads her horoscope. Asks her sister to cast a spell. She is somewhat abashed by this display of “magical thinking,” and yet the crush possesses her, takes her for a ride as it searches for signs, as it relishes in springtime. Longing is embarrassing, especially when its object is impossible, but underneath the longing, there is something true: “What did M see, looking at my face? Some mark of my bad fortune, certainly. A want of affection. An absence of power. The lack of an apple.” The implication is this: only by moving through longing’s pleasure-pain can she catch a clear glimpse of herself––a judgment, aloof but kind, delivered in quick, staccato sentences. 

As another example, this is Bestall writing about the postdrome that follows in the wake of migraine: “And after that pain, the sweet stillness… The hateful mood has passed, the restlessness, the nausea. Instead, there is an overwhelming sense of equanimity.” Equanimity is a good word for what I think she is after in this collection. Calm in the face of difficulty. This results in prose that is shaken through the sieve of vulnerability to fall on the page––light and refined. 

In the prologue, as I noted, Bestall calls herself a “gleaner.” A “gleaner” can refer to those who collect the scattered bits of produce leftover in the fields after harvest. Etymologically speaking, it’s suggested that “to glean” comes from the Old Irish do-glinn, “to collect, gather” and Celtic glan, “clean, pure.” This collection, as such, is not merely a work of pastiche. It is an attempt to glean through the harvest of one’s life, to gather the uncouth leftovers––the sticky, uncomfortable, hard-to-digest bits, like death and pain––and do one’s best to purify them. 

Keely Shinners is the author of the chapbook The Agonies and Ecstasies of Saint Marguerite (2025) and the novel How To Build a Home for the End of the World (2022). They live and work in Cape Town.