Oh, My Precious / Review of Nalda Said by Stuart David - V22 Mar/Apr 2003

Oh, my precious...

Stuart David is busy. When he's not making records, scoring independent films and organizing music festivals with his little band called Belle and Sebastian, he still finds time to make records with his very artsy side project Looper, and now, even write the occasional book. This March sees the American publication of his debut novel, Nalda Said (Turtle Point Press), a work that is ultimately as sweetly sad and innocently otherworldly as his musical output. In the novel, a nameless narrator hesitatingly relates the story of his life and tries to explain the peculiar circumstances that keep him constantly on the run and in perpetual fear of all human contact. The storyteller, we learn, is the son of failed jewel thief and has spent most of his life in the care of his aunt Nalda, a woman of questionable sanity who exists "in a complicated array of rags and tatters, silent and afraid." Nalda's childhood stories, while fancifully explaining away the horrors of the world, have left the narrator in a state of perpetual fairy-taled delusion. Convinced that he lives with the most valuable of his father's stolen jewels still hidden in his belly, .the story reveals his struggle to interact with a world all too eager, he believes, to seek out his specialness and steal the priceless secret he keeps hidden inside. Deeply allegorical and, perhaps, frustratingly sad, the novel, like it's narrator, reveals it's secrets slowly. And while it might not break your heart the same way spinning your well-worn copy of Tigermilk does, Nalda Said provides a similarly satisfying does of imaginative melancholia. A lovely rainy day read.

- T. Cole Rachel