The prima donna of the title is a mysterious Slovenian woman, Lea Kralj, who suddenly rises to the top of the opera world. Little is known about her, and her reign is brief. The book starts after her inexplicable death. The narrator, a young gay Frenchman, her occasional companion and friend, has been given a series of questions by a magazine who are trying to decide if Lea deserves the title of Slovenian Woman of the Century. The rest of this short book is his answer to those questions.

The novel not only winds around the narrator’s relationship with Lea, but also the entanglements of his own love life - his unrequited love for a bookshop owner, Pablo, his relationship with the man he calls The Prince, and a later attraction towards Remek, which provides a brief love triangle with Lea. At the centre of the novel, however, is the mysterious Lea herself, and her relationship with her mother Ingrid. For all her success, Lea is a woman who can be brought down by a single word from her mother. She longs for Ingrid to visit her, to see her perform, but Ingrid has a way of finding last minute excuses to cancel.

A childhood incident appears near the beginning of the book - the young Lea in a freezing, snowy landscape, has wandered away from her mother. Her hands are so cold, she’s in pain. When she returns, Ingrid tells her off, but takes the girl’s hands and puts them in her mouth to warm them. It’s a memory that seems to haunt Lea.

Towards the end of the novel, when Lea has gone back to Slovenia for the summer, she lives with Ingrid. The narrator is shocked to see that Lea has lost weight. In fact, she is wasting away. At one point, she tells him that in this house, no one eats unless her mother says so. While Lea is obviously desperate for love and approval from her mother, what’s more difficult to understand is why she literally allows herself to die. She is not a prisoner in the house, and the narrator tries to get her to leave with him. The exact details of her death are never revealed. She dies while at her mother’s house. In the press release for the book, Lea is described as beautiful, warm, solar, while her mother is “a dark figure, a silent Queen of the Night, who belongs in the gallery of hateful women who’d rather kill their daughters than accept their success”. But Lea herself never seems that warm as a character. The image we have of her is too fragmented by the narrator’s account. She comes across as damaged more than anything. She’s known as “the prima donna who knows how to die”, a phrase that’s repeated a few times, and refers to her acting abilities on stage, but is also a foreshadowing of her own fate. Sometimes, the reference seems overdone.

The novel moves through Madrid, Paris, Milan, the countryside of Slovenia, to the city of Ljubljana. However, anyone expecting a real taste of these locations or the opera world itself will be disappointed. Svit sketches her backgrounds in lightly.

The earlier part of the book deals with how the narrator met Lea, but the narrative is lacking in focus and there are distracting diversions. This is partly down to the intermingling of different time frames, references to events before and after, and the narrator’s occasional address to his questioners. But there are also short chapters, fragmented scene descriptions, and quite a heavy use of ellipses. Consequently, it takes quite a few pages for this novel to warm up, but it holds the reader when it does. Brina Svit knows how to write, and her prose has a certain poetry. There are sections where each sentence begins with the same words, creating a kind of poetic repetition. After a while, though, the repetition becomes overdone. Fortunately, Svit limits this technique to a few sections.

’Death of a Prima Donna’ is a book that at first reading seems unsatisfying. It’s like a starter before a main course. However, it may be one of those novels that improves on a second reading. It certainly is worth reading, but the character of Lea is ultimately too elusive and distant, and possibly fragmented, for the reader to care about her fate. Many women might feel impatient with the character, for her inability to pull herself together and live her own life.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.