Madame Sosostris & The Festival for the Broken-Hearted

LoveReading Says

Riffing on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with shades of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s comedy, confusion and disruption of order, Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris and The Festival for the Broken-Hearted is an absolute dream of a novel, and dreamily witty with it. 

Though she’s since remarried, on the twentieth anniversary of the day her first husband left her, Viv, who sits in the House of Lords, comes up with the idea of hosting a Festival for the Broken-Hearted — a gathering she hopes will enable attendees to “free ourselves from our pasts and become new people”. 

After encountering clairvoyant and fortune-teller Madame Sosostris (she of The Waste Land fame) in the House of Lords, Viv invites her to attend the festival, which is to be held in the wooded grounds of a chateau in the south of France.

Come the evening, as guests gather in their masks and elaborate costumes, in a forest that feels tangibly enchanted, it seems Madame Sosostris might not be coming after all, though it was she who’d said ‘these woods change people”. 

As things turn out, Viv and her friend Beatrice, their husbands, and all the guests, do experience deep change during her seminal Midsummer Night event. For example, there’s talk of the liberation that comes of being loved by someone new, and of the liberation that comes of feeling like someone else. 

Huzzah for short fiction that showcases such true storytelling magic — every word counts in Madame Sosostris and The Festival for the Broken-Hearted, and the dialogue is especially divine — sublimely succinct, often comic, and always commanding, in that it compels you to stop and think; to re-read each word with extra care and wonder.

Joanne Owen

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