A girl gets a crush. The guy is older. Things go direly awry; the tale ends with a corpse. It’s an old story, but this time, the body isn’t the girl’s. This time, the girl who loses her innocence not only survives—she gets to play detective, unravelling a tryst that altered the trajectory of her life decades before.
In Natalie Lemle’s debut novel, Artifacts, a protagonist succumbs to the sybaritic thrill of surrender, fostering feverish crushes both romantic and intellectual. Lena, a type-A college student, spent a summer on an archeological dig in the Italian Alps, where she expected to learn the rules of excavation and instead discovered the pleasures of reading between the lines. Historical currents harbor rip tides too, and Lena washes ashore breathless, drenched in desire, dripping in lies.
Almost 20 years later, a mid-30s Lena has abandoned art history for the law. She finds herself on a case related to an ancient goblet possibly looted from the very dig she worked on all those years ago. She’s thrust back to what she calls her “Orphean summer,” spent lovestruck and searching for answers to historical mysteries, and ends up cracking another cold case: her own buried desires.
Artifacts excavates the very notion of looting, revealing that not only archeological sites are vulnerable to raids: historical narratives, literary canons, and our personal histories are ransacked by biases and inherited traumas. If history is written by the victors, reinterpreted by historians, and archived by archeologists, it’s novelists who translate, and, in turn, punctuate the record.
Lemle pens voluptuous prose about unearthing, theft, and change: the stolen glances that permanently shift your perspective, the fragile friendships that trigger tectonic shifts in a personality. The novel is a shapeshifter too, at once a high-octane crime thriller, a bildungsroman, and a dispatch from the rarified world of antiquities dealers. By illuminating the broken economic systems that motor criminal artifact looting, Lemle also reveals the fractured, oppressive systems that organize our romantic lives, feeling for the slivers of space where we can still move freely, towards each other.
Ahead of her novel’s publication, Lemle and I met to discuss plundering, latent desire, murky museum morality, shame, and more.
This novel is about looting—of an actual architect, but also: how do we loot our personal histories? How do historians loot cultural histories by their choice of emphasis?
With ancient objects, we want to tell stories about them because we want to understand how they were used in the past, but it’s impossible to separate them from our biases. It’s the same with individuals. I’m German and Sicilian, but I prefer the idea of being Sicilian, so I lead with that. [Laughs] It comes down to narrative, and looting is a part of that. A character in the novel almost defends looters, arguing that they’re based in colonized countries where their own heritage is being taken from them. I don’t think any of it is black and white.
The book is also a romantic bildungsroman for the protagonist, who is learning to listen to her bodily desires within the structures of a very heteropatriarchal culture that might require her to lie to herself about certain things to experience pleasure in an oppressive system. That parallel lent a tender layer to your argument in defense of looters. Might looters be taught to mistreat their own cultural heritage in the same way women are taught to mistreat their bodies?
There’s a moment when my protagonist and her lover are in bed in the morning, discussing a sculpture which might be Venus, but she has her head cut off. I’m obsessed with the inheritance of myth, the way that so many Greco-Roman myths are inherited from Etruscan and Druid things. That’s a form of looting. To me, the Romans picking and choosing what they want and being like, “Okay, we don’t have a goddess of horses, we’ll take that one, but we’re not gonna take their goddess of love.” Even something like that to me is stealing, but is it wrong? Lena is coming of age and asking these questions, but she’s young, she’s naive, she’s dumb like a fox.
At one point, Lena “head-to-floor faints” in front of a painting; art incites a reaction so powerful it becomes physically untenable.
That is a real thing that happens to people! It’s called Stendhal Syndrome. Looking at a work of art can move you so much that you lose consciousness. I wanted to show that Lena is the type of person who would do irrational things when confronted with a work of art. She is under the spell of these things and people who appreciate them. Her love interest is trying to do the right thing on behalf of these objects, even if what is “right” to him is not what she’s been taught to understand as right.
Lena describes the dig as her “Orphean Summer,” something she had to forget in order to escape and to find pleasure in it. There’s a privileging of the texture of history over the facts. Is there a parallel between her voluntary amnesia and the mental gymnastics museumgoers and art professionals must do to enjoy seeing artifacts acquired via questionable means?
I was just in London to see the new Victoria & Albert Museum [the V&A East], which is incredible and does a really good job of mixing objects from different time periods. Juxtaposing that museum style with the British Museum is intriguing, because that is a much more traditional encyclopedic museum—once you know that so many of these things are ill-gotten, it can change your experience.
It becomes about etymology: those items were looted, but they are not described as such because they were looted by the people who decide what we mean when we use that word.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. On the other hand, even knowing what I know, it doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of being in a big traditional encyclopedic museum like the British Museum. There’s a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who’s led the charge of returning many objects that were owned or made by American enslaved people. Some people’s reaction was: Why are you opening up the floodgates? The families aren’t demanding it; the MFA is voluntarily giving it back. It was a moral decision. The institution still benefits. The items remain on long-term loan to the museum, it’s just admitting that these items belong to these people.
This curator’s angle is: if you believe in institutions and don’t think these museums should be shuttered and all these things returned to their origin countries, the tension is then on the level of honesty around provenance. What do you lose by being forthcoming when the legal framework for repatriation is so fractured? Museum workers are always forced to ask themselves, what will the donor have to say about this? What will the family of the donor have to say about this? That’s the thing that keeps museums’ hands tied, and that’s not an individual curator’s fault. That’s a system-wide problem. It’s much more compelling to understand how an object was acquired, and let the viewer decide for themselves.
Lena describes her life as a series of reactions rather than choices, a worldview that felt rooted in the systems approach to history you’re mentioning: a reaction is a choice, if one attenuated by circumstances.
We imagine curators operating in their own silos, but they’re part of this much larger economy. Their work makes it possible for looted items to sell on the black market. Art is the only asset class where an object or a painting can retain its value even if it’s acquired outside of the regulated market. That motivates people to keep taking things from museums and archaeological sites, because organized crime groups can use them as collateral, because these artifacts retain their value.
Well, this relates to my evergreen defense of heist films. An audience’s impulse to root for the thieves is proof of how broken the system is; it very efficiently reveals the moral indefensibility of the economic system they’re scamming.
Yes, but in so many of those films, people are so focused on the how. How did they get away with it, how did they take these things? I’m more interested in the why. Why is there an incentive to take these things? Why do they still retain their value once removed from their context?
This is a story motored in part by debauchery, but not the kind we’ve come to expect, i.e. drinking and drugs. What strains of debauchery is this character compelled by?
She wants to be in dangerous situations, but she doesn’t want to lose control. She doesn’t want to be drunk, but she doesn’t mind being in the mafia’s radius. She intellectualizes things. As long as she can tell herself a story about what’s happening to her, she’s happy. One of the pleasures of being young is the unknown, the “still figuring things out” stage. We see this protagonist at 19 experiencing that freedom, and then at 37 being very regimented. Perhaps what caused her to bury this whole story in her memory might be the realization that she put herself in such danger. There’s an embarrassment around recognizing, I put myself in crazy situations, and it didn’t really get me anywhere. That guy never talked to me again, and my mentor vanished.
There is something strangely sensual, not to mention cathartic, in the eventual acknowledgment of one’s own self-sabotaging impulses, especially for young women. Perhaps Lena’s recognition of the ways she was taught to endanger herself allows us to see a phenomenon like people looting historical sites in their own countries, endangering their cultural histories, in a new light?
It comes back to agency. It does very much connect to the individual and the body, and reckoning with the narratives we’ve been fed. This character overrides so many rational impulses when she’s embodied physically. Sleeping with a stranger on the first date makes her feel good in a way, and she wants to lean into it, but also resists because she doesn’t understand it. The sensual spooks her.
She eventually realizes that the people she worked with at the dig were not looking for historical answers: “What they’re really looking for is a feeling.” What is that feeling?
The answer is different for everyone, which reflects the multiplicitous subjectivities around historical narratives I wanted to write through. The lead archeologist is interested in the sacred grove the Gauls chose to build on; he’s interested in holiness. He believes there is something underneath—under the ground, but also buried in history—that hasn’t been accessed yet. He feels the same thing about himself. He’s untethered and mysterious. He thinks if he can solve the mystery of the site, he might also find answers to questions circling the drain of his own psyche.
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