Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

Elegiac and seductive, Belomor is the frontier where truth and invention meet—where fragments from distant lives intermingle, and cohere. A man seeks out the father figure who shaped his picture of the past. A painter seeks redemption after the disasters of his years in northern Australia. A student of history travels into the depths of religion, the better to escape the demons in his mind. A filmmaker seeks out freedom and open space, and looks into the murk and sediment of herself.

Four chapters: four journeys through life, separate, yet interwoven as the narrative unfolds. In this entrancing new book from one of our most original writers, we meet European dissidents from the age of postwar communism, artists in remote Australia, snake hunters, opal miners and desert magic healers. Belomor is a meditation on time, and loss: on how the most bitter recollections bring happiness, and the meaning of a secret rests in the thoughts surrounding it.

Genres: Fiction, Australia

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 2013

About the author

Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Wings of the Kite-Hawk; The Red Highway, Journeys to the Interior and Another Country. He is the northern correspondent for The Australian.

Reviews

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A second reading.

Through his spare melodic prose Rothwell plummets us into the largest scandal in the history of civilization, which is the history of civilization. In four stories, his well honed skills as a writer, though he is barely present, shows us that civilization, the life we have always known is open to serious question and doubt. Is life and everything which comments on it including culture, the arts, something created by humans to survive on this planet? Has it evolved in falsity? Is there a truth but not one which may be reached by any common avenues? Only available to one who has flossed off the impediments of culture, finding their bare selves? No goals or will? A recipient of themselves or is everything in this life and world symbolic and metaphoric of something else? Fragments to be decoded?

When a person lives within a system, within the perimeters of the circle of that system, only the system's perceptions, beliefs and language are available. There are no means of stepping outside and viewing it. This may be all we know of the world, of life. Every day interactions, markets, interchanges, instigations, quests, words. All removed yet seeming a part of the universe. It provides comfort, safety, belonging and well being. We fill our lives out to take on a wished for form. Our degree of acceptance depends on the degree the form is filled within the bonds and acceptance of our culture. Living in the past or future we are removed from what is. Even our language, the very means of communication, is only words which are only letters. We can call a flower by its name but it is not the flower itself. People may talk about it with each other yet all see it differently but calling it the same. All day long agreed upon signifiers, references, allusions, metaphors, are in sync with removal from the removed. Do we ever know what is?

The artist paints whatever she or he sees. However what they see in the visible is not real but their perception, interpretation. Then the painting is an attempted representation of their initial false perception in trying to locate a reality. It is never reached, trapped within the circle of civilizations false teachings, beliefs, mores and conventions. What are those things beyond ourselves, really?

Something called time obliterates. As Musil, Queneau wrote on, the all so important present crumbles, disappears. It becomes dated and outmoded to be replaced by the new insistent, rebellious present which too will soon vanish and be replaced by the next.

We walk amid a world populated by competing illusions. The one’s best able to manipulate the falsities to their advantage win receiving a trophy laid upon their laps of comfort and security.

Is there any subject more important to talk about?

Each story perfected, is unique yet linked to Rothwell’s overall quest. We begin with the Venetian painter Bellotto in 1747 crossing the alpine passes, in search of the the kings of Saxony, Dresden. Ultimately he is in search of a perfection through painting with a greater accuracy. “He reached beyond the description of the components of a landscape.” This technique of accuracy differs from his mentor and uncle, Giovanni Antonio Canal who had a, “…warmth and gauzy softness: in his brushstrokes.” Bellotto’s accuracy was deployed when after the destruction of Warsaw the desire was to rebuild it as it once was. No maps existed. Bellotto’s painting of the city, so completely detailed was used to complete the new reality. The ironic problem was that in his paintings of Saxony Bellotto’s accuracy was so complete that it was over-accurate. In the visible world no ones eyes took in, could see all of that. It was not the reality of a person looking out on the scene. If so then what was it?

In another story we find ourselves in the divided Germany right before the wall was torn down, the state united, the east Germans crossing over gobbled up or spit out by the competing free market world. Two journalists are visiting a dissident professor, philosopher. What one journalist, the narrator of the tale recalls through much of his life, changes his life, is the professor standing by the window, his back to them, and saying that nothing out there is real. All the objects false. There is something greater, more important, not seen but beyond them. He was right. The changes in time demolished his life of dissidence. Just as the cities in the instability of Saxony during Bellotto’s time were demolished with their ways of life. The replaced well of customs by the victors soon disappeared by other conquerors. As our own lives will disappear and in a short time be forgotten. Man versus time. The quiver of instability.

Then we are escorted into and through the post unification of Germany’s art market. Moving through galleries where the value of paintings, at least two steps removed from the reality of what is painted, then another by the viewer bringing all of their preconceptions, assumptions, biases, fluctuates according to wealth and status not their intrinsic value. Markets are created not found. There we find a painting by an indigenous artist of the Australian outback. It differs. It is of value in that it is closer, almost touches the untouchable.

Rothwell travels us to the small artist colonies of the outback. These areas on the verge of change as the artists and paintings are beginning their discovery by city galleries. Then he accompanies us into the out-outback. A land little traveled. Arid. The plains stretch toward the horizon featureless but for the rising hill, mountain, residing at the flush of their meeting. Climbing, few paths exist strangled by the scrub growth. Rothwell’s spare prose fits the terrain and the quest. Removed from all that we call life, within its silence and the marking of time by natures rhythms, a hand is reaching. We may sense its warmth. So close to the feel of its touch. Can we stand it? It is civilizations compulsion to overtake and destroy the threat of anything not itself, or is nature’s quiet bid to wait for our arrival, to meet ourselves, comprehend the real beneath, the stronger match?

Rothwell, through his finely lit and what seems easily traveled stories, explores the largest of all questions. Readily he would admit, I believe, that he is working only with words, (representations in letters crossed together) but oh what words. In his, the author’s disappearance, words too move toward vanishing. We are sequenced inside and outside of ourselves to arrive at a masterful conclusion.

But is it fiction or biography or travelogue? Does it matter? At all? They are only labels. But I pondered this throughout. Until the end I saw it as fiction. Even experiences he was there for were run through the eye of fiction. Its curled ventures allowed for the display of our dissonance from what is real. Reporting wouldn’t do. He is looking for something more. Something else..

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review published in Open Letters Monthly: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/rui...

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

The first thing I did when I brought Nicolas Rothwell’s Belomor home from the library was to Google its title. I skipped the few reviews because I didn’t want to read any of them until after I’d written my own, but I couldn’t make a connection between the image on the front cover and the title. I was also curious about the frontispiece image of the Belomor Channel. Where was this book going to take me?

Well, (thanks to the photo credits) I was able to find out that there’s a Byelomorsko–Baltiyskiy Kanal in Russia that was constructed by convict labour in the 1930s between the White Sea and the Baltic. Under Stalin’s forced labour program, many of these convicts died, though the numbers are disputed. There was also a brand of Soviet cigarettes called Belomorkanal which was introduced in 1932 to commemorate the building of the canal. What’s not clear until you view the original image at Photodom is that those shaggy bits are not a beard; the image is of a man whose head is bent upon his filthy hands, and the title of the photograph Belomor Thoughts (Crisis) hints at why he might be in this pose. I thought that the book designer might have done better to show the whole image not just a bit of it.

Except that as it turns out, the image, the cigarette and the canal are mere fragments in the most fragmented book I have read in a long time. What’s more, there are so many allusions to people, places and history that were unfamiliar to me, that my brief quest to discover meaning from these images turned out to be emblematic of the frustrating experience of reading this entire book.

Anyway, armed with this information I began reading…

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/04/17/be...

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Belomor is an unconventional and stunning work in four chapters with a first person narrator about whom we discover very little. He travels the world during the course of the novel, visiting East Germany and Vietnam amongst other places, but a lot of the novel takes place in the Australian interior. The narrator has long conversations with people that often centre are art and landscape and they relate their own stories to him, giving a series of stories within stories. We also roam freely in time as well as space, and there are sections describing the lives of people such as the artist Bernardo Bellotto and the art historians Aby Warburg and Johann Joachim Winckelmann. At least some of the people the narrator meets and converses with are also real people, such as the Australian gallery owner Tony Oliver.

The connections between the historical and modern figures and between the different sections are subtle and not always obvious. It's a really intriguing work and if I had to find a comparison I would probably think of the work of WG Sebald, although it's not really the same.

Check it out!

[4ZZZ Book Club · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing up, Nicolas Rothwell attended school throughout Europe, before studying at Magdelan College at Oxford. He worked as a foreign correspondent through the 1980s and the early 90s, reporting from the Americas, Western and Eastern Europe, before settling in the Northern Territory in the 90s, where he continued to write for The Australian, winning a Walkley in 2006 for his coverage of Indigenous Affairs. All of these experiences weigh heavily on Belomor, Rothwell’s sixth book, a mixture of memoir and history lesson, couched as lyrical fiction and composed of four stories with interlinked themes: of place, of art, of straining for transcendence.

Nicolas joined Sky to talk about the nature of story-telling, historical figures and journalism.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was not entirely sure how I felt about this book. It was heavy-handed, creating a world in which every character was seeking the meaning of life, the essence, the secret. But why not? The author hardly made the book feel as though it was supposed to be otherwise. I wanted some banality, but why? Belomar went for it and got it that it could not get it but that some of us cannot really keep from trying.

[An · Rating 5 out of 5]

life not like cigarette fading but cigarette twisted trampled located in invisible destinations of smoke particles

[Greg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Belomor is a series of four tentatively linked stories through which Nicolas Rothwell examines the interactions of widely different lives. The settings shift between Europe, South America and outback Australia. There is little in the way of plot; the novel is mostly poorly-defined characters philosophising to one another, mostly about - as one character puts it - “What’s your part in all this? Who are you?”

The trouble is that these dialogues are forced, stilted and unnatural, and the characters barely believable. Road builders encountered by chance in the remote wilderness chat about Karamazov and Chekhov with an art dealer, for example. The whole thing is far removed from any sense of reality, which undermines the whole concept - what attention should be paid to philosophy that is spouted by such shallow and unbelievable actors?

There is a lot of good writing here - Rothwell excels at describing the Australian outback - but in the end I found this novel irritating and wished for it to just end. It’s a shame, because this could have been so much better.

[Sarah Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this - a slow read - reminiscent of Sebald ...