Twist and Shout

“Twist and Shout” is a recurring song title in the book’s musical interludes, most pointedly accompanying the narrator’s ambivalent remembrance of La Maison: a place where its women were admired and understood, and whose absence later feels like a loss. The title’s return links that recollection to the book’s closing sequence of song titles, making it part of the work’s musical framing rather than an isolated reference.

Recurrence and Placement

The title appears in a musical cue associated with the narrator’s reflection on the women’s standing at La Maison, then returns among the titles near the end of the book. In the earlier passage it sits beside an admission that the women are adored, desired, reputed, flattered, scrutinized, envied, and accepted there. The return near the close gives the title a structural echo: a song named in the context of the narrator’s attachment to the house reappears as the narrative approaches its ending.

La Maison in Retrospect

The recollection holds affection and irritation together. The narrator misses the morning sun on the old parquet and the women stirring as the house opened, as well as the laughter and the end-of-day atmosphere. At the same time, the memory does not present the women as idealized companions: they could be loud, foolish, bad-tempered, brutal, overbearing, or vicious. The narrator’s response nonetheless remains one of beauty and fascination, describing the women as a spectacle watched by a solitary audience of one.

Distance makes the memory suspect even to the narrator. The passage allows that separation may have made La Maison seem more beautiful than it was, yet preserves the intensity of the experience: being surrounded by women, some naked and some in garter belts, felt like a fleeting intoxication, almost a paradise that did not require death. That idealized image is placed beside the narrator’s recognition that the house may also be the crux of a problem. The song’s recurrence therefore accompanies no simple celebration; it belongs to a memory in which belonging, spectacle, frustration, and doubt remain inseparable.