Briefly, A Delicious Life – Nell Stevens

Mae Briefly, A Delicious Life yn adrodd y stori o Frédéric Chopin a George Sands a’i phlant yn teithio i fynachdy ym Mallorca yn 1838, o safbwynt ysbryd yn ei harddegau o’r enw Blanca.

Roedd bywyd Blanca yn fyr ac mae hi wedi gwylltio. Wedi byw mewn byd llawn, yn ôl ei mam, o ‘ddynion hardd’, mae hi wedi darganfod mai mewn marwolaeth y menywod y mae’n syrthio drostynt, eu harddwch, a’r menywod a’r merched mae he wedi ceisio amddiffyn rhag sylw dynion, drosodd ei chanrifoedd yn y mynachdy. Ac yna mae George Sand yn cyrraedd, menyw brydferth mewn dillad dyn, ac mae Blanca mewn cariad.

Ond mae’r pentref yn amhes o’r ymwelwyr, ac wrth i George geisio cadw ei theulu a’i hun rhag syrthio’n darnau, wrth i Chopin ysgrifennu rhagarweiniadau ar biano di-diwn, mae eu harhosiad yn debygol o ddod i ben mewn trychineb…

In 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca. They are there to create and to convalesce, to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris days.

Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who has been at the monastery for over three hundred years. Blanca’s was a life cut short and she is outraged. Having lived in a world full, according to her mother, of ‘beautiful men’, she has found that in death it is the women she falls for, their beauty she cannot turn away from, and it is the women and girls who, over her centuries in the village and at the monastery, she has sought to protect from the attentions of men with what little power she has. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man’s clothes, and Blanca is in love.

But the rest of the village is suspicious of the newcomers, and as winter sets in, as George tries to keep her family and herself from falling apart, as Chopin writes prelude after prelude in despair on his tuneless piano, their stay looks likely to end in disaster…