Liz Norton

Liz Norton, a scholar of German literature in London, is one of the four critics whose shared devotion to Benno von Archimboldi becomes both an intellectual alliance and a changing web of intimate relationships. Unlike the men, she does not organize her life around ambition, systematic interpretation, or a long-term goal. Her story instead gives serious weight to pleasure, uncertainty, friendship, and desire—and to her capacity to choose, withdraw, and return without making those choices fit a tidy plan.

Identity and Approach to Life

The novel describes Norton as someone who does not ordinarily set herself a goal and pursue it with sustained determination. No ambition seems sufficiently appealing to claim her completely. She distrusts the phrase “achieve an end” when it is applied to personal life, preferring the less narrowly directed words life and, occasionally, happiness. A saying about finding it easier to quit smoking than to go to war stays with her because it catches this disposition: she is not driven by the social imperatives that can make a prescribed struggle feel more compelling than a private act of change.

Norton was told the saying as a student and loved it, but it did not lead her to read William James. That detail distinguishes her way of meeting ideas from the scholarly appetite of Pelletier, Espinoza, and Morini. For her, reading is directly bound to pleasure, rather than primarily to knowledge, enigmas, interpretive constructions, or verbal labyrinths. The difference is not a lack of intellectual seriousness: she becomes a formidable critic. It is a difference in what reading is for and in the terms on which she is willing to make it part of a life.

Discovering Archimboldi

Norton’s introduction to Archimboldi is described as the least traumatic and least poetic of the four critics’ discoveries. In 1988, when she was twenty and living in Berlin for three months, a German friend lent her a novel by a writer she had never heard of. The author’s name intrigued her for concrete reasons: it sounded Italian, yet had a von before it, and her friend could only guess that it was a pseudonym. He also remarked that masculine German names ending in vowels were uncommon. The book was The Blind Woman. Norton liked it, but not so intensely that she immediately sought out the author’s entire catalogue.

Five months later, back in England, she received another Archimboldi novel from the same friend. After reading it, she searched her college library and found only two books: The Blind Woman, which she had already read, and Bitzius. That second book affected her differently. Reading it sent her hurrying out into the rainy college quadrangle; the surrounding landscape seemed to shift into an argument between grass and earth, its unintelligible words likened to crystallized webs and a faint rustling. The scene makes her discovery neither a scholarly conversion nor a simple act of collecting books. It registers a sudden, almost bodily disturbance produced by reading, consistent with her more sensory, pleasure-led relation to literature.

Scholarship and the Archimboldian Circle

Norton’s own critical work eventually places her in conversation with the three men whose studies she had not encountered when she first read Archimboldi. In 1993, at a German-language literature colloquium in Bologna, Pelletier, Morini, and Espinoza met again. All three had contributed to the Berlin journal Literary Studies, which devoted its forty-sixth issue to Archimboldi. Norton also contributed an essay. Pelletier judged it brilliant, Espinoza thought it well argued, and Morini found it interesting; more consequentially, the essay independently aligned with the three critics’ theses and showed close knowledge of their work in specialist journals and small-press publications.

The issue marked the formation of two opposing groups of Archimboldi scholars: Pelletier, Morini, and Espinoza on one side, and Schwarz, Borchmeyer, and Pohl on the other. Norton’s essay did not join the first group at anyone’s invitation; its relationship to their arguments arose from her own reading and research. Pelletier considered writing to her, and Espinoza asked whether they should make contact, but uncertainty led them to consult Morini, who declined to comment. At that point they knew only that Norton taught German literature at a London university and, unlike them, was not a full professor. Their eventual closeness thus begins with work that speaks for itself before they know much about its author.

Love, Friendship, and the Right to Pause

The four critics’ public meetings give way to a private companionship that is neither merely professional nor reducible to a conventional couple. At night they dine together, sometimes with German professors who remain discreetly in the background. Later, the four walk Avignon’s streets: Norton pushes Morini’s wheelchair, with Pelletier on one side and Espinoza on the other, or walks backward in front of them, laughing while they imitate her. They also pause beside the low wall of a river and talk about their shared German obsession, testing one another’s intelligence and allowing long silences. Norton’s presence helps make the group’s scholarship a lived friendship, not just a contest among interpretations.

After returning from Avignon at the end of 1994, Pelletier recognizes the extent of his longing only in the solitude of his Paris apartment. Having put down his bag, poured whiskey, opened the drapes, and listened to the answering machine, he still cannot settle into sleep. In his bathrobe, after taking a shower, he turns on his computer and understands that he misses Norton and wants to be with her, not only talking but in bed, telling her he loves her and hearing that she loves him. Espinoza reaches a similar recognition on the plane home to Madrid: he has come to think of Norton as the woman he had always hoped to find, and the realization brings suffering. Their feelings are not presented as a decision Norton has made for them; each man discovers his own attachment through absence.

Norton’s relationship with Espinoza shows how little the language of exclusive partnership can contain her account of intimacy. When he invites her to Madrid, she answers that she will arrive the next day, surprising him because he had expected the invitation to remain only a wish. They spend a Sunday together and go to bed that night. There, Norton tells him that she and Pelletier are lovers, though she uses a less definite word—perhaps friends, perhaps seeing each other. She says she has always had many friends, without separating friend-friends from lover-friends, and that this has been true since she first made love at sixteen with a thirty-four-year-old musician from Pottery Lane. Espinoza wants to understand exactly how she sees love and sex, but he does not manage to ask. Her disclosure leaves the relationship open rather than translating it into a clean hierarchy.

The triangular relationship does not remain unchanged. When a television report shows a plane wreck and Pelletier fears for Espinoza, Norton is still on the phone. She recognizes within seconds that the burning plane is not Spanish; Espinoza arrives twenty minutes later. Over lunch, Norton tells him that Pelletier had mistaken the accident for his plane. The meal is sad, though her behavior seems ordinary, as if the three had met by chance. Before she says so directly, Pelletier and Espinoza sense that she wants to end her romantic involvement with both of them, at least for the time being, because she needs to think and regain her bearings. She asks to remain friends with each.

Neither man presses her for an explanation. Espinoza accepts what she says without a question; Pelletier wonders whether her ex-husband is involved in the decision but, following Espinoza’s example, keeps the thought to himself. On the drive along Cromwell Road, Norton suggests that perhaps she should sleep with both of them that night. Espinoza treats the suggestion as a joke, while Pelletier is unsure whether she means it and less sure that he is ready to take part. The three then watch the sun set near the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, sitting by a giant oak that Norton has loved since childhood. The scene holds together affection, uncertainty, and an unsettled boundary: the pause does not erase their friendship or make desire easy to interpret.

Reunion and Recognition

After the London episode, Pelletier and Espinoza eventually return to work and resume contact with Morini, whom they had sidelined and then forgotten during their adventures. They begin calling Norton again. Deeply affected by their reunion, Norton, Pelletier, and Espinoza meet in the tiny cafeteria of an unorthodox art gallery on Hyde Park Gate, near the Dutch embassy. The place is scarcely larger than a bar: it has two tables and a counter that fits no more than four people shoulder to shoulder. Paintings share the space with used books, clothes, and shoes. Norton says the gallery makes the best margaritas in London; the men, who care little about the distinction, pretend to share her enthusiasm.

The reunion begins awkwardly. They are the only customers, and the employee or owner appears half asleep, moving dresses from a rack into a back room and returning with identical or nearly identical replacements. Pelletier and Espinoza watch Norton, still as pretty and seductive as before, while the conversation struggles to get started. The room’s repeated exchange of dresses gives the scene a quiet counterpoint to the relationships’ uncertain return: appearances recur, but the people have come back carrying the consequences of what happened between them. The evidence establishes the reunion and its hesitations, not a sudden resolution of the trio’s past.

Norton’s relationship with Morini finally becomes explicit in the intimate account of her return to him. After learning of Edwin Johns’s death, she calls Morini in Turin late at night; the call is described in her letter. She turns out the light as she dials, as though darkness could keep him from seeing her face, and asks whether he knows Johns is dead. Morini already knows that Johns died months earlier, while Norton has only just learned the news. The conversation brings her to Morini at a moment when death and distance have made the need for contact immediate.

In the aftermath, she tells Morini, “How could it have taken me so long to realize you loved me?” and then, “How could it have taken me so long to realize I loved you?” Morini answers, “It’s my fault,” and admits in the dark that he is hopeless at such things. Norton’s questions establish a mutual love that had been present but unrecognized, not an affection invented at the moment of confession. Her return to Morini gives her changing relationships a new form without reducing her earlier attachments to Pelletier and Espinoza to a mistake: the account instead makes recognition, timing, and her ability to reconsider central to the arc.

Narrative Significance

Norton is intellectually central without being defined by ambition, and emotionally decisive without being made to conform to the men’s preferred definitions of a relationship. Her essay can join the three critics’ arguments without being solicited by them; her intimacy can include love and sex without being neatly sorted into exclusive categories; and her withdrawal from two affairs can be a pause for thought rather than a final judgment. Those shifts make her more than a figure around whom three male scholars organize their desires. She retains the authority to describe what she wants, to admit what she does not yet understand, and to change course.

The narrative repeatedly places that authority beside the men’s attempts to interpret her. Pelletier and Espinoza infer her decision before she announces it, speculate privately about its cause, and struggle to know whether a provocative suggestion is a joke. Yet Norton tells them what she needs, returns to their friendship, and later names her love for Morini in her own words. The contrast between their anxious interpretation and her direct, if sometimes deliberately imprecise, speech gives uncertainty a positive role: it is not merely a mystery the men must solve but part of the space in which Norton lives.

Her changing attachments also echo her resistance to a life organized around achieving a single end. She does not present intimate life as a plan with a guaranteed destination. The story allows her to move among attraction, friendship, distance, and renewed recognition, while leaving the Archimboldi scholars’ shared intellectual world intact through rivalry, travel, conversation, and return. In that structure, Norton’s independence is not separation from others; it is the capacity to remain a participant in those bonds without allowing any one of them to dictate the whole meaning of her life.