‘I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning,’ writes John Updike in his memoirs, Self-Consciousness. Beginnings are ripe; they seem, potentially, the best place to stay. 

‍Nymph, by Sofia Montrone, is a coming-of-age, or Bildungsroman, that savours life’s beginnings. This is a story split into two parts. In the first, we have young Leo, age 10, who spends her summers working at the family hotel in northern Italy. In the mornings, she tidies guests’ rooms and is dazzled by the detritus left behind—a tampon, hair, a string of pearls. In the privacy of childhood, she imagines who these people are, their story and their myths. At the centre of her world is her father—a brawny man, never named, whom Leo idolises. In Part two, we meet Leo again, but now many years later. It is the summer before she starts college, the summer before the rest of her life. 

The term Bildungsroman was coined in the 1820s by Karl Morgenstern to denote ‘the hero’s Bildung (formation) as it begins and proceeds to a certain level of perfection.’ Like a hero’s journey, the Bildungsroman makes meaning of setback; suffering becomes essential to a more beautiful transformation. 

 In Nymph, this transformation is incremental. Leo grows like a small insect whose skin hardens, sheds, then softens to shed again. At no point is she complete. But along the way, the everyday joys and sadnesses thread together like a personal mythology that fixes narrative upon time. ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ wrote the American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, ‘We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story.’

Leo inherits from her father a love of Greek myth. Her father goads her to stay up late, to get lost in the tales of Odysseus, Telemachus, Achilles and Patroclus. For Leo, these tales are mesmerising. Her way of seeing people and the world is imbued with war heroes and temptress sirens. ‘Everything out of the West came out of Greece through the Iliad and the Odyssey and Greek philosophy, that’s half of who we are, and the other half is Jesus of Nazareth,’ explains author Yann Martel. ‘These are foundational stories of which we know nothing…Whereas something may have a billion facts attending to [it], but nothing about [it] lives in us…facts only go so far, then you want story.’ Ancient Greek fables still glisten today because of their extremes: foregrounding inexplicable catastrophe, war and suffering.

Compare then the brutality of the Iliad to the soft interiority of coming-of-age novels, such as André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. Aciman’s writing is deeply felt not because of what happens to Elio’s external landscape, but because of his internal one. Leo’s world is rich in motifs reminiscent of Elio and Oliver’s summer—ripe peaches, languid bodies and bicycles dropped in the grass. Nymph takes both these facets—tender, queer yearning and the brutality of Greek legend—and mixes them: balancing both tragedy and softness, grief and renewal.

Dolores, a beautiful, young American woman, comes to work at the hotel for the summer. Cleaning the rooms beside Leo, the girls become close. They play games in the windows of time between tasks, and their conversations unfurl into late afternoons. Dolores is astute, sure of herself and her sexuality. Leo yearns to both be her and be with her, to be near enough to crawl inside her skin. Who Leo chooses to become is taking shape, informed by the people she models herself after and the stories she collects as evidence.

‍Nymph scratches around a question, ‘Where does the story of one’s life begin?’ ‘Dolores could tell the story better,’ thinks Leo, ‘she would know how to put an order to things.’ 

The American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote that ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ We each generate our own coming-of-age narrative, or personal mythology, to make sense of ourselves. Who am I? Where am I going? Is there an arc to things? Leo wants Davide, the hotel’s groundsman, ‘to teach her how to arc the ball through the air like the midfielder, to anticipate, to see backward and forward through time.’ At night, Leo ‘looks out at the stars, trying to find the invisible lines between them that form the shapes of animals and men.’ Storytelling allows us to see things as a unified whole, to translate scattered experience into identity. ‘We tell ourselves stories to live,’ writes Joan Didion, ‘we live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.’

Either there is only the passing of time and the accumulation of experiences retroactively tagged with meaning, or there is a story to our life, with a beginning, middle and end. Perhaps we can follow that story with our fingertips like Braille. Or maybe we’ll choose to continuously begin, refreshing ourselves like a grasshopper nymph perpetually shedding its skin.