Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo
Undeniably quirky, Diane Schoemperlen’s Our Lady of the Lost and Found (Viking, 2001; Penguin paperback, 2002) features a writer whose most recent house guest turns out to be Mary, mother of Jesus and mediator with the divine. Like the capital-letter subjects she tackles in her novel–Fact, Fiction, History, Time, Truth, Faith and Grace, among them–Schoemperlen’s tale is riddled with paradoxes. Encountering a Mary alive (well, not quite) today, the unnamed narrator must reconcile the little she knows of the Virgin’s history (the lowercase “h” type) with the woman who appears on her doorstep wearing a blue trench coat and white running shoes. This Mary fits comfortably into the narrator’s daily routine, which has been cultivated to perfection for an unmarried, middle-aged novelist who prefers a quiet, predictable but nevertheless interesting life. This writer welcomes attention from press and audience, in moderation; enjoys tasty but simple food; works steadily but with ample down time for ideas to gather and for naps; and accepts her solitary state cheerfully enough, her beloved book collection and television binges blotting out the anticipation and regret that, years ago, marred her dating life. Soon, readers will be assured of a reliable, steady and professionally confident narrator who is just as skeptical of Mary’s presence in her home as the most doubting of Thomases.
The format of the book alternates between descriptions of days and evenings with Mary; philosophical inquiries into life’s Big Questions; accepted and apocryphal tales of Mary’s appearances to future saints, lay people and children (which we learn the narrator has researched after Mary has left her home); and, eventually, the narrator’s confession of her own history. By relating even a fraction of the numerous recorded Marian apparitions, Schoemperlen demonstrates the concept of point vierge, or still point, the space between fact and fiction where anything can happen. The place of creation, this borderland is an opportunity for artists of any stripe to rent the veil and hold, if briefly, some part of their visions and dreams.
Along with the natures of fact and fiction, the concept of History (and history) bears great weight, for this author, in her search for the deeper dimensions of Truth. Schoemperlen draws comparisons between Heraclitus and Thucydides, two historians from fifth-century B.C. Greece, to back her own sympathy with the storytelling method of excavation. Chronicler of the Persian Wars (500-499 B.C.), Heraclitus peppered his reportage with myth, folklore and anecdote. He believed that time, place and culture shape facts, while Thucydides, historian of the Peloponnesian Wars (431-404 B.C.), dismissed all but the dry facts, cleaned of hearsay, personal opinion and cultural trappings. Clearly, Thucydides would have rejected the Marian mysteries; she is, after all, mentioned in the bible fewer than a dozen times. But we might expect that Heraclitus would be as consumed by the unfathomable gray areas in Mary’s story (as well as by the effect she has had for centuries on millions of people around the world) as Schoemperlen’s narrator.
In addition to the concept of point vierge, Schoemperlen describes history (and mystery) in terms of the writer’s palimpsest (a writing surface that has been written upon and erased, with layers built up over time) and the painter’s pentimento (areas in which an artist has erased or covered images with changed or new ones). For Mary, the Lady of the Lost and Found, a complete picture consists of what has been, what is and what will be. Mere facts cannot predict the future, yet the future cannot exist without the past. Ultimately, Schoemperlen’s novel questions what is real beyond tangible evidence. After Mary leaves, we assume to attend to others in need of her mediation, the narrator decides that a reality created of either/or opposites may be comforting but, like facts, denies the fingerprints of genuine experience: chaos, uncertainty, surprise and, thankfully, the possibility of revelation.
Scientifically, Schoemperlen tells readers, the principle of uncertainty has been accepted in quantum physics since 1927, when Werner Heisenberg proposed it. Does this help us, who fear the unknown, to accept it? Does it explain the coincidence that the narrator and her house guest both just happen to be reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits? Intellectually, perhaps, but not emotionally and spiritually. Readers may conclude, like the narrator, that faith is the key. Reflecting on her faith as a writer, the narrator says:
“I have always known that writing is an act of faith, the one which has been my own salvation. I imagined that, given time, I would find the perfect ending after all, the ending which would unlock the beginning and, when I looked back over the story I had written, everything that came before would be changed and it would all make sense.”
In matters of the spirit, it seems, tangible proofs (apparitions, weeping statues, stigmata) and objects (paintings, icons, miraculous medals, milagros) represent something that cannot be held, except in the heart.
Beyond the newspaper-like accounts of sightings (including twentieth-century Marian apparitions in Egypt, Japan, Rwanda and Bayside, Queens) and Vatican-sanctioned Madonnas (Our Lady of the Pillar, Our Lady of Einsiedeln, Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Guadalupe, for instance), Schoemperlen decorates her account with fine art (such as Raphael’s Madonnas, Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation and El Greco’s Mater Dolorosa). In her last chapter (”Gifts”), Schoemperlen mentions Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, a painting reproduced on her kitchen calendar for April, the month of Mary’s visit. This classic of surrealism, painted in 1931, is an image to ponder as one considers the borderlands in their own lives, the places in which the impossible becomes possible–faith permitting.
