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SOME PLACE QUITE UNKNOWN is Jane Lazarre's most recently published novel. She is the author of several works of fiction, as well as a comparable number of works of nonfiction, all autobiographical memoirs.
The sense and style of memoir, in fact, pervades this novel and there are many autobiographical components in this purportedly fictional work. What makes this book notable, and appropriate for a book review in an analytic journal, is that it is actually a novel about a psychoanalysis, or at least about psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy (Lazarre herself studied at an institute for two years). The entire novel is essentially an (attempted) journey into the unconscious, with side forays into quotidian life, as it is elicited in an analytic treatment that seems to span about three or four years in the book. The novel and the analysis are woven around a pivotal childhood traumatic event, the suicide of the protagonist's mother. The protagonist's name is Celia; she tells us that her name is a limb of that of her aunt, Lucille, just as her niece, Lia, has been given a piece of her name. This name-play seems designed to underscore the generational connections between women and their female offspring, one of the motifs of the book.
“Some place quite unknown”—a line from a letter written by Celia's mother—becomes a metaphor for the journey of analysis. The one-page prologue practically summarizes the whole book.
A woman in her fifties begins to have unbidden, compulsive suicidal fantasies. She indulges them even though she has no conscious wish to kill herself, despite certain recent disappointments, despite the defining fact of her emotional life: her mother killed herself when this woman was a child of eight. Then one day she is crossing the street and is nearly hit head on by a car. She knows she saw the car, that the near “accident” was somehow intentional [p. 11].
She is a woman with a full, rich, and gratifying life; a wife in a stable marriage of long duration