Notes from a Regicide: A hell of a book about art and love

Notes From a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

If Notes from a Regicide were just a book about two artists who become involved in a revolution, it would be one hell of a book. If it were just a story about a man who learns to see his parents as people, it would be one hell of a book. If it were just a love story between two artists, dealing with addiction and mental illness, it would be one hell of a book, too. If it were just about a trans gay man navigating his life, it would be one hell of a book.

Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide isn’t any single one of those books. It’s all of them; set in a world nearly a thousand years in our future that is, in many ways, as familiar as your front door. Published in 2025, Notes from a Regicide explores addiction, marriage, parenthood, dictatorship and revolution, the power of art, transsexuality, and family. Of course, it’s about love; sexual love and the love between parents and children. I make it sound like it must be six hundred pages long, but Fellman carries us along for just over three hundred pages, shifting between two storylines; the lives of Zaffre and Etoine in their native city of Stephensport, and their later life as refugees in New York City. Both narratives are directed by their adopted son Griffon, a trans gay man and a journalist, who is editing his father’s journal for publication—or trying to.

This is, ultimately, an intimate book with a close focus on a family. Worldbuilding is intentionally sparse. To employ a painting metaphor (Etoine and his wife Zaffre are both painters), Fellman sketches in the background of the far future with a few carefully placed strokes. New York City is a city of canals, with no skyscrapers, although the neighborhood Griffon and his parents live in feels very much like a contemporary New York neighborhood. Stephensport, located north of New York, has its political structure and technology described in slightly more detail, since that is a big part of Etoine’s story. Slyly, Fellman has Griffon refer to New York, non-ironically, as The Eternal City, clearly communicating to the reader that something happened to Italy, at least, since Rome’s no longer in the picture. On their way to an art exhibit, Etoine talks to Griffon about the “ancients,” who relied on fossil fuels and built multistoried buildings that sank beneath the waves.

Stephensport is ruled by a monarch, and the city changes its name to reflect that monarch every time a new one is chosen. The ruler is chosen by a group of Electors. The Electors are buried in a yard, and seem to be dead, but they are resurrected whenever a new ruler is needed. Electors are seen somewhat like Catholic saints. There is the Elector for orphans, the Elector for tradespeople, the Elector for women, and so on. Etoine runs afoul of Stephen when he accepts a commission to paint Sebastienne Antonino, the Elector of revolutionaries. The Antonino family hires both Etoine and his awkward, brilliant friend Zaffre, and they end up collaborating on a portrait that is, in some ways, a masterpiece. This brings Etoine to the unwanted attention of Prince Stephen, and leads to his first stint in prison.

Etoine comes to Stephen’s attention because of the Sebastienne painting, which haunts him throughout the Stephensport sections. Before he is arrested, he is approached by Stephen’s eminence grise, Simon Cormé. Cormé explains why Etoine has been singled out, and explains Stephen’s spies, in one of the book’s many instances of very dry wit:

“…[Stephen] relies on their most unnatural paranoia—not inborn. Their job is to replicate how a paranoid person might think, because there are many threats to the prince’s body.”

“Why not just hire real paranoid people?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They’re ill.”

While Etoine acknowledges his physical attraction to Zaffre, it isn’t until he escapes from prison (with help) that he begins to admit he loves her. In some ways, Stephensport is egalitarian and liberal, and it allows people to dress as they please, and choose the gender they present as, being “sworn women” or “sworn men.” However, the city-state forbids physical surgery to alter your body, or taking hormones. No reason for this is given, just as the restriction on trans people is not justified in New York, later (and as the oppression and harassment of trans people in the here and now isn’t justified). As the Stephensport section continues, both Zaffre and Etoine find a contraband source of hormones, and each begins to feel like the person each was meant to be.

The book shares intimate and honest passages of what it’s like to be transsexual, at each step in a transition. One funny and thought-provoking example comes from Etoine:

I think Zaffre and I both tried to transition for years using only bad posture. Her hunch that made her shorter, my slouch that hid my chest.

The New York sections of the book face many issues head-on; alcoholism,; Zaffre’s struggle against the voices in her head, in contrast to the power of her paintings; the challenge of raising a child who came into your life as an adolescent, and the ghosts of a traumatic past. While Etoine and Zaffre did participate in a revolution, and (spoiler alert) see the title, it was, for Etoine at least, almost accidental. The murder he commits is for love, not politics. Zaffre is the conscious revolutionary in the story. An important revelation, late in the book, about the nature of the portrait of Sebastienne, resonates, but is no surprise.

Art gets nearly the last word here. Zaffre shares with Griffon a secret not even Etoine knows — that she made a deal with Simon Cormé to let both of them come to New York by agreeing to paint Cormé as a national hero.

…I made him this very nice, very heroic portrait. I gave it all the little Sebastienne touches — you know, his clothes were almost but not quite Sebastienne’s clothes, and I had him hold one of the guns we bought for the revolution… Like a real humble man of the people… It made him look ridiculous. The comrades who live would know it was a joke. But he would never have known that, because he had no sense of humor and no ideas of his own. That’s the thing about dictators. They fancy they have a lot of taste, but they have zero taste… I can’t tell you how easy it was to con him.

Art may get nearly the last word, but the book, which is about many things, is first about family and love. None of these people, including our editor/narrator Griffon, is easy to love or spend time with, and every one of them is worth the effort.  If Notes from a Regicide were just a book about love in the face of oppression, it would be one hell of a book—and it is.