Nalda Said
by Stuart David
Turtle Point Press, 152 pages, paperback, 2003; US reissue of a book originally published in the UK in 1999
A young man who keeps his name secret lives in constant fear his identity will be discovered by those intent on cutting him open to steal the jewel he bears inside him. Never daring to stay in any one place long, he flits from anonymous job to anonymous job, finding casual labour most often as a gardener, and staying constantly clear of society's record-keepers. This novel, told in his own disjointed, not-quite-literate words, is a part of his story.
We slowly discover that he lost his parents in infancy, being taken in by an aunt, the Nalda of the book's title. Nalda was his sole source of knowledge as he grew, telling him tales he believed implicitly, because he had no authority other than her to draw upon. One of the tales she told him was that his father was a jewel thief who, on the run from bilked and consequently murderous fellow-thieves, not long before his death fed the most valuable gem he'd stolen to his infant son to hide it. That stone, Nalda claimed, was still there inside him, but one day it would emerge and his life would be transformed.
Unfortunately, Nalda was crazy.
Cast adrift after she has been taken away into care, the narrator entered his current ever-transient mode of existence. Each time he fears his secret to be on the brink of discovery by someone he has allowed to grow too close to him, he flees once more.
But now at last he seems to have found relative security, as gardener to a nursing home whose administrators take a friendly interest in him. The prettiest of all the nurses there, Marie, recognizes the goodness dwelling within this odd man, and becomes first fascinated by and then in love with him. Much of Nalda Said is taken up by an account of the faltering, fumbling, unconventional blossoming of love between these two very different dreamers.
This is a curious and affecting work. From the narrator's semi-literacy, Stuart David manages to weave a largely hypnotic web, much in the same way that Daniel Keyes did in his short story "Flowers for Algernon" (1959) and Elizabeth Moon even more so – although deploying more literate devices – in her superb novel The Speed of Dark (2003). David doesn't quite have the same control as those two authors, with one of his tricks (the substitution of "although" for "though" throughout) being both irritating and, in the end, implausible.
But to compensate for this he offers us the wild recalled fantasies of the narrator's one-time sole mentor, Nalda; these come to form, together, a sort of cosmogony of the microcosm that is the narrator's small world. Where his Nalda-derived precepts conflict with the facts, he tends to alter his perception of the facts to make them fit the precepts; there is thus a direct analogy with the moulding of children's minds by the religious fallacies drummed into them by the adults of their local culture.
Nalda Said is a thought-provoking novel and, despite the constant disruption of the reader's concentration caused by the silly although/though tic, an absorbing one. Its subtextual weight is impressive for such a slim piece. I much look forward to seeing more from this writer.
—Blue Ear