“The Three Incestuous Sisters” will come as quite a surprise to the legion of fans who propelled Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” onto best-seller lists. The new volume is unquestionably a lovely work, but it isn’t a novel in the expected sense of the word. It is, instead, a story told primarily in pictures.
Niffenegger, in the book’s afterword, describes the work as a “visual novel,” and it is stylistically far removed from what is found in the graphic-novel form. She writes that the first incarnation of this story was “an artist’s book, in a handmade edition of 10. I created the story in pictures, sketching page spreads much the way a director might work out a storyboard for a film. I wrote the text; as the images gained in complexity, the text dwindled until the weight of the story was carried by the images.”
Speaking by phone from her office at the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College in Chicago, Niffenegger said that this book was the culmination of 14 years of work. “I worked on it between 1985 and 1999. I started ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ in 1997, so there’s some overlap in the projects.”
“The Three Incestuous Sisters” is a story of siblings who live together in a house by the sea. Bettine is pretty, Ophile is smart and Clothilde is a woman endowed with a psychic gift. Niffenegger said the idea grew out of an image in a dream, three women, each with hair of a different color, sitting silent in a room. “I knew that these were the three incestuous sisters,” she said. “The whole story aspect I had to invent for them.”
Though the setup sounds like a fairy tale, here the long road to redemption is paved by tragedy. Two of the sisters fall in love with the same man, one’s affections are accepted and the other’s spurned. The plot unfolds in a series of aquatints, an antique process through which zinc plates are etched with acid and the resulting prints finished with watercolor.
Niffenegger’s artistic influences are wide-ranging. She points to Japanese print-making techniques and the illustrative work of Aubrey Beardsley as influences central to “The Three Incestuous Sisters.” This also is a work, though, with a theme much darker than that found in “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”
This could arise from what Niffenegger describes as a general interest in things that reflect death. She said, “I’m very interested in memento mori type art, and I do have a Victorian obsession with creepiness. I have a vintage clothing collection, but that doesn’t seem to worry people quite as much as the taxidermy collection.”
And while it’s not unusual for artists to assemble eclectic groups of stuff, few collect once-living animals. A very long time ago, she said, she found a stuffed toad at a garage sale. Now, “People give me stuffed minks for my birthday. It’s cool. I’m slowly assembling the Field Museum in my house.” However, she said, “anything bigger than a German shepherd isn’t welcome.”
It is difficult to imagine how two such diverse projects could share any common theme. But both “The Three Incestuous Sisters” and “The Time Traveler’s Wife” are love stories that incorporate an element of the fantastic. In “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” it’s a man affected with Chrono Displacement Disorder, which renders him unable to control his leaps back and forward in time. His future wife, Clare, meets Henry when she is 6 and he is in his 40s. From his perspective, they first meet when he is 28 and Clare is 20. In lesser hands, the element of time travel would be little more than a cheap trick. Niffenegger uses the device to create an evocative tale of longing.
That ache is equally clear in “The Three Incestuous Sisters,” even though the style of the telling is markedly different. And both books require the reader to suspend disbelief. Niffenegger said, “I think that the commonality has to do with a fascination with the impossible, whether it’s a time-traveling husband or a clairvoyant sister. There’s a kind of whimsy that’s in both of them.”
Both stories, too, are shaped by the style of the telling. “In words it’s so much easier to develop character. The nuanced people in ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife,’ it’s impossible to do that in images,” she said. She compares “The Three Incestuous Sisters” to a puppet show, in which the audience can see the characters with clarity, but also in which the kind of relationship that develops between the reader and the material is very different from one arising out of a narrative.
Niffenegger continues her work at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she is a professor, while working on new projects that take her down the seemingly disparate paths of writing and the visual arts. She has created the cover art for a gift edition of “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” which is coming out in October. She is working on her second novel, tentatively titled “Her Fearful Symmetry,” a story of mirror-image twins who inherit a London apartment from a recently deceased aunt. And there are also talks of bringing out another art book, “The Adventuress,” which was created before “The Three Incenstuous Sisters.”
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
