Review of “Suzanne Delage” (1980)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2022.
The narrator considers a girl he should remember.
I’ve read fan theories on what is going on in this story, but the only one that makes sense is an allusion to Proust, in the name. Suzanne Delage is mentioned briefly, two thirds of the way through The Guermantes Way (1920), the third novel in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. That Delage is a girl whom Proust’s narrator almost meets, so I suppose Wolfe’s short story is about the possibility of another life in retrospect, another kind of “lost time”. It’s thin; so thin that it isn’t clear whether it’s supposed to be a mystery.