Hymn to Moray Eels – Mireille Best

[Seagull Books; 2025]

Tr. from the French by Stephanie Schechner

This infatuation is the kind that feels like being underwater. Far underwater, far enough where all the water above you is pressing on your chest, where you’ve already exhaled all the air you brought down with you, where if you can get some oxygen you’ll live, you’ll be fine, after all, every day of your life you are just as dependent on oxygen as you are at this moment.

This is the infatuation of youth, the feeling of being down bad, with a so-called “crush” that leaves you steamrolled by yearning. This is how it feels to be Mila-Whatever-Her-Name-Is—as she is dismissively referred to by her, Paule, with her black and white gaze and her hot and cold voice and her inexplicable magnetism. In Mireille Best’s novel Hymn to Moray Eels, Mila is a mixed-race sixteen-year-old girl enduring her time at a French sanatorium in the 1950s, and Paule is the monitor she is obsessed with.

Best’s novel was originally published in France in 1986. Nearly forty years later, Hymn to Moray Eels is available to anglophone readers for the first time, thanks to its inclusion on Seagull Books’ The Pride List, a curated collection of international queer literature. The novel is translated by Stephanie Schechner, a professor of French and a scholar of Best who entered the field as a translator to make Best’s work available to the anglophone world. Schechner is the translator of Best’s Camille in October, which is also included on the Pride List. This new English translation of Hymn to Moray Eels recreates Best’s elliptical lyricism and will dazzle readers who continue to strain against the strictures of gender essentialism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy.

Mila has begun to sprout wings, and they will need to be surgically removed. But the specifics of this physical aberration and its pending intervention are almost never addressed directly. While she waits for the operation, Mila lives in the petri dish of the sanatorium, where she and her peers are under constant observation by strict monitors and the infinitely patient, blue-eyed director, Miss April. “We all have time to waste,” Mila says, “while waiting for our wings to fall out… So standing on our shrinking island, we bawl, or else we laugh hysterically.”

In this vacuous asylum, there is nothing to do but forge associations. The administration routinely reassigns roommates, and the novel is punctuated by moving days. The current of Mila’s internal monologue flows around these boulders of circumstance. The constraints of the plot become a transparent vessel to hold Best’s material: a portrait of female adolescent desire, frothing and surging, overflowing its banks.

The minimalist setting of the sanatorium provides a rigidly controlled environment, as if Best’s novel is a thought experiment about how adolescent girls behave when isolated from society, but not from its expectations. In the same way that Best’s setting is defined by all that it does not admit, her prose is fragmented and elliptical, distinctive in its omissions: “Immobile gaze. Soft. Leaning into mine but barely. Given over only to a very slight depth. Readable only on the surface, there where the light of day lays over the dark of night without the least overlap.” Each unit of sensation deals its own discrete blow. The gaps between phrases allow the reader to move through Best’s prose as one would a tentative interaction, shaped more by subtext than explicit exchange. If read inattentively, it would be easy to get lost, to lose the narrative thread. The novel prefigures Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, a novella so trimmed of superfluity that the reader must actively assemble meaning as they read. In terms of rhythm, Best’s writing calls to mind the scarcely punctuated paragraphs of Portuguese novelist José Saramago. Best jumps around in time, employs pronouns with unclear antecedents, uses nontraditional spacing, ellipses, and em dashes in the middle of sentences to change tone, speaker, or advance her scenes. Best is queering prose in her queer coming-of-age novel.

Mila’s queerness is originally indicated by her strange tendency to keep strings in her pockets. “But that didn’t provoke much curiosity,” Mila states. “It was accepted, in a pinch, that girls had the right to have strings in their pockets. They just called us tomboys.” At the sanatorium, Mila gains the trust and affection of most of her peers, whose fondness they express through the recurring lamentation, “If only you were a boy.” Mila, for her part, seems quite content not to be a boy, since she primarily defines boys by the damage they wreak. “They always break everything, with their big red ears: girls and cars, and they never do it on purpose. Afterwards, they hunt, to feel masterful and impressive, and are going to massacre birds.” When Marie, another resident, expresses her eagerness to lose her virginity to a boy, Josette seizes on the strangeness of such an imprecise condition. “I understand someone who wants to make love, like that, in theory,” Josette says. “But that someone wants to do it with any individual, no matter who, as long as he belongs to a certain group, that’s beyond me.” Josette goes on to illustrate the absurdity of Marie’s criteria. “Why not a doc? A Black guy? A parish priest? A taxi driver?”

Best often inverts expectations to marginalize what is typically centered. For example, Mila’s queerness is never explicitly interrogated, but the book does problematize this idea of automatic heterosexuality. Why love a boy just on the basis of his boy-ness? What about that qualifies him for loving? The boys and men in the novel are consistently depicted as flawed, sniveling, selfish, and distant. Yet, Best is unwilling to falsely valorize or flatten her female characters. The girls are a bawdy, troublesome bunch of outcasts, with peculiar affectations and habits. Josette goes around singing and playing her accordion all the time. There are two Nicoles, and at least one of them is usually crying. For a book that seems to exist somewhere between the literal and the figurative, I kept expecting the girls to represent something discrete, but the tenor of the metaphor never materialized. Instead, I felt myself pulled deeper into the bleached, hallucinogenic days of the institution, where only sensation carries any meaning. “So Josette opens her accordion, and we’re inside her voice, inside her chest, and I see that Josette has eyes that are green or blue or gray depending on the light, depending on the mood that they reflect, or according to some yet more mysterious alchemy, and I feel myself temporarily nailed in place by a kind of irradiation that might be happiness.” Beauty does happen here, Best reflects, and it appears like flashes of rainbow light: prismatic, fleeting, but real.

Mila’s narration is deeply internal, but she orients herself around another and locates herself in the scope of their interactions. In her family, she became the unwilling caretaker of her younger brother Tristan. In primary school, Mila was the target of playground bullying for her obvious crush on another girl. She gravitated toward a kind teacher who protected her from the indifference of the world. And in the sanatorium, there is Paule. Paule is spectral and threatening, harsh, captivating, an authority figure barely older than Mila:

She’s right in front of me, hands shoved deeply in the pockets of her white coat, the outline of her fists visible beneath the fabric. She’s white and black, with her funny tuft of hair that’s falling over one eye, her mouth a flat horizontal line that casts a shadow over her lower lip, her gaze dark as night. She’s standing, stiller than a stone erected on the moors. Hostile to the tips of her fingers.

As Mila pines for Paule—watering her plants, teasing her, tiptoeing through the creaky halls to knock at her door at night—the life of the other girls swirls around her.

The threat of violence permeates the book. The ever-present oppressive context of patriarchy is potent enough to color the interactions even in an all-girls institution. The story is set in a working class context in post-World War II France. Mila’s placement at the sanatorium is predicated on the promise of body-altering surgery for the sake of social conformity, which struck me as an antithesis to gender-affirming care. When Paule and Mila first meet, Mila notes the “voluntary brutality” of Paule’s hands. Physical encounters seethe with consequence. In one scene, Mila bites someone so hard they need stitches. The sanatorium dog, Slim, is constantly pulling a Houdini, slipping his chain, and murdering the neighbor’s chickens. The neighbors insist that because of his wildness and his sins, Slim should be sent away. However, Mila develops a fondness for that “puddle of red fur,” that “fluid shadow,” the “great red flame amid the last rays of sun that play on the field.” Mila gradually attaches herself more and more to the dog, until the dog becomes a kind of witch’s familiar.

The sanatorium is merely a holding vessel for the girls before they are returned to society, hopefully stripped of any disruptive instincts. The model is to break their spirits. Mila has seen her mother walk this path: “My mom shuts up, but as for me I’ll never shut up, better not count on it.” The novel powers forward like an inexorable passage to adulthood, a train that cannot be delayed. One resident, Marie, is eager to leave and find a boy to take her virginity, but after a few months, she returns with an upsettingly predictable tale “of a GI with wandering hands that grope everything with a brutality worthy of a proper beating.” One night, some neighborhood boys clamber onto the sanatorium roof. One of them gets stuck, and after being rescued, later initiates a secret tryst with Mila’s roommate, Lili. Mila disdains Marie’s romantic fantasies and Lila’s sordid actions:

I drag by the collar of her dress this crazy girl who let herself be screwed in the grass like in the Middle Ages, without a thought, not even asking, without even formulating the question—imagining maybe that you would just hold hands, with eyes cast toward the stars—acting like an ancient virgin in the realm of the marvelous and the magical, where only an indecipherable Destiny guides your steps, not yet having decided if it will leave you dead or alive.

Mila knows that to be female is to be at risk. She has already seen her mother mistreated at the hands of a series of stand-in step-fathers. A kind of furious, queer-inclusive feminism ultimately forms the backbone of the novel, as Mila grows toward womanhood, but seeks to refuse its burdens and its liabilities.      

Tenderness is what empowers these characters to continue on in the face of such blank disregard. In scenes of sudden sweetness, Best’s prose shatters into prisms of sensation. In one scene, two girls descend a staircase side-by-side, and they achieve fusion. “I’m overtaken by the desire to linger so that this descent would end at the last possible moment or never, her leg-my leg bending straightening in the void bending again, become one, indissociable… Then, in the silence and the darkness and the fire of my body, something turns inside me seeking space in which to undo itself to unknot itself to lose itself…” The novel invokes forms of intimacy that go beyond the limited categories available to the heterosexual project, even while acknowledging the universality of heartbreak.

McKenzie Watson-Fore serves as the executive editor for sneaker wave magazine and the inaugural critic-in-residence for MAYDAY. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Offing, Bridge Eight, Christian Century, and elsewhere. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.