My first reaction on starting to read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab was annoyance. It’s written in the present tense, and that always annoys me. It always strikes me as pretentious, as a flimsy code for “this is not light reading, this is a serious piece of literature”. But I kept reading — and decided that was the only thing I didn’t like about the book.
Adeline LaRue, born 1691 in Villon-sur-Sarthe, France, has made a deal. A deal to get out of an arranged marriage to a man she doesn’t love — actually she doesn’t want marriage at all, she wants to be free to do what she likes with her life. In exchange she’s willing to offer her soul, but only once she’s tired of having one.
And she gets what she asked for, but not really what she wanted. She is free, but the reason she’s free is no one remembers her, nor can remember her. Her parents insist they have no daughter. Her best friend treats her as a stranger. When anyone meets her, as soon as she’s out of sight, they forget her.
She can’t go home, and she can’t rent a room — the landlord will throw her out as a squatter the second time they see her. She can’t get a job. She has to get by on theft and stealth. On the upside she doesn’t need to buy food, strictly speaking, because nothing can kill her, including starvation. But she can still get hungry.
Three hundred years later, in New York City, she’s been having a months long affair with a musician — she meets him for the first time every evening and spends the night with him, lather rinse repeat — when she meets a man, Henry Strauss, who runs a bookstore. When he meets her again the next day he says “I remember you”, a sentence she has not heard in three centuries. Somehow, Henry, alone of all the people she’s ever met, can’t forget her. The reason has to do with the fact Henry, like Addie, has a secret.
The chapters alternate between the story of Henry and Addie in 2014, and Addie’s life from 1698 to 2014, focusing mainly on her strange relationship with Luc, the… God? Demon? Devil? who gave her her freedom, or her curse, and will take her soul when she is done with it — if she ever is.
It’s a beautiful story, beautifully told. It asks, if you never leave a mark on the world, have you ever really lived? And it is one of those books whose ending isn’t the one you wanted, nor the one you dreaded, but the one it needed.
I’d never heard of Schwab before, let alone read any of her books. I may need to correct that, if Addie LaRue is any indication. Probably the best book I’ve read so far this year.
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