Notes on Falling

by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

Thalia, adrift in a small university town in South Africa in the nineties, heads to New York to study photography and to pick up the faint trail left for her by someone she has never known. The city helps her to find her way as an artist, but it never quite provides the answers she is seeking. Only years later in Johannesburg is she able to make sense of who she is and what her work might mean.


Robert is a photographer in New York in the 1970s, desperate to make memorable images in a time of spectacular experimentation in dance, music and theatre. He intuits the importance of what he is photographing, but finds it almost impossible to transcend the troubles of his own life and achieve something great through his work.


Paige leaves South Africa in the seventies to pursue her dream of being a ballet dancer. She does not anticipate the ways in which this pursuit will challenge her understanding of the art that she has known and practised all her life, and she is ill prepared for the catastrophic moment that will undo everything she has worked for.


Unbeknownst to them, Thalia, Robert and Paige share a story that links them to one another, to the turbulent worlds of New York in the 1970s and South Africa in the 1990s and, finally, to the photographs that hold the secrets of their lives.


Notes on Falling is about the hope that art will challenge perceptions and orthodoxy so that the world can be reinvented through new forms. It is also about trying to reconcile the large pictures of history with the small snapshots of our individual lives.

371 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 1, 2022

About the author

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is the head of Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand and the editor and co-founder of Fourthwall Books. She received her doctorate from New York University, where she taught writing and literature. She has edited books on art, design and architecture, and published essays on South African art and photography. Her short stories have appeared in New Contrast and Aerodrome. The Printmaker is her first novel.

Reviews

[Beryl Eichenberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Notes on Falling ‘ by Bronwyn Law-Vijoen is a rich novel if sometimes a little confusing, or maybe challenging is the better word as the reader is required to concentrate, to follow the threads even when they appear to unravel.
What it gives us though is a creative arc and a lens through which to view the turbulent creativity of the 70s in New York and the lives of those who pursue the arts as a career, as it intersects with the challenges of 90s South Africa and an archival search to find a parent.
The characters are complex, as those involved in creative industries often are. Their depths mined intricately for the reader. Thalia is an art photographer in South Africa in the 90s, daughter of a newspaper editor in Johannesburg, she wins a scholarship to New York to study her craft. Her photographs are of construction and architecture – immovable pieces and yet not - but it is when she sees a photo of a dancer that she understands her need to search for her mother, Paige, who left her with her gay father in a pursuit of a ballet dancing career . New York is where the faint trail leads.
‘It was a superb portrait of momentary stasis and unexploded energy. There was something in the grainy quality of the print, in the space where the image had been shot, in the unflinching gaze and the dramatically held energy of the dancer that was uncannily familiar…’
Arriving in New York she finds work in a variety of places, one being in the library, and is tasked with sorting the collection of an almost obscure photographer, Robert Sander, whose dance and performance pictures of the 70s had given him some measure of fame. It is this collection which provides much of the trail towards her mother as his story adds the substance to Thalia’s own. Three lives across time linked by movement – of the dance, the camera capturing the moves and the journeys that one takes through life.
Falling can have many meanings but here it is the exploration of positioning and expectation and trust for a dancer but perhaps the greater meaning is how that relates to anyone’s life. Those non-verbal messages that are in a look, a space in a photograph, a turn of a head, the catch of the light on water.It is a dense story, an esoteric story, weaving as it does between two time frames, the reader must stay alert for the nuances of the times and places. But it offers much in the understanding of the relationship of politics and aesthetics in photography. It will also make you look deeper into those artistic compositions to extract the creator’s meaning. This is excellent literary fiction, not a book that you will whip through but one to be savoured and reflected upon.

[Tiah]

~When she got to Esther, there was the old pain, lying like a slender steel instrument accidentally left behind after surgery, somewhere between her throat and her belly.~

~Thalia knew right away that the Swedish girl would be like a deep breath in before a dive underwater, the last of which you expelled seconds before you surfaced.

~The house was silent, except for the faint buzz of electrical things. She felt like she was living with appliances now, instead of people.~

~She had realised then that if she stay in that room, if she looked any longer, she would not make photographs.~

~[S]he'd wondered whether it was normal to make excuses for one's parent.~

~He dropped loose coins from his pockets, as though he needed a trail to find his way back to his room.~

~Falling is a mix of knowing and not knowing.~

[Jakkie Brink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Multi-layered, complicated book. Amazing insights on creativity and the creative process.

[Nerine Dorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while, I encounter a literary work that is best described in terms of imagery, tones, and textures, and Notes on Falling by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is one such work. We start the story with photographer Thalia, who has grown up motherless and raised by her father, who has done his best for her, but who has also never shared anything about her absent mother until quite late in her life. We learn that Thalia's mother left the country, left the baby Thalia in the father's arms, and that's about all we know – and this nagging absence perhaps does manifest itself in Thalia's life by her hunger to capture and quantify the world around her. If she can describe her world, lend it some form of permanence as a still image, perhaps she can control it in some way. Or at least these are my thoughts on the matter.

Thalia herself is a photographer, her entire life framed by how she works with light, objectifies and tries to understand her surroundings – and in that degree, Law-Viljoen paints with words in the same way a good photographer will paint with light, shadow, and subject matter. The reality that we are given is often naked, unforgiving, made up of sharp planes and angles that slice. A great photo will foreground details, open them up for analysis and understanding.

In this layered tale, we deal not only with the discomfort of the present, but we sift through memories encapsulated in stark imagery, be it 1990s South Africa and New York, and then also take a step even further back, to a New York of the 1970s, to catch a glimpse of a creative zeitgeist as ephemeral as its participants and instigators. Somehow, all these snapshots are tied together in Thalia's search for a mother who was willing to abandon her for a dream.

Through Thalia, we encounter Robert, whose own search during New York of the 1970s, is intrinsically linked to Thalia's journey – though for fear of spoilers, I won't say how. What Law-Viljoen does well, is show how an individual can frame their lives in a search for meaning, not only of their innermost selves, but also in how they fit into the larger picture – even when the world is like an unstoppable train that continues hurtling through space and time with or without your presence. This is very much an existential novel, that does not have the neat, tidy hallmarks of a happy tale – much like real life, in that regards – that will leave readers with much to ponder on these seemingly isolated yet intrinsically linked themes expressed within the story.

And as someone who majored in photography at university, it was a real treat for me to read a novel that spoke a language that I understand well. This is a beautiful, if disquieting and uncomfortable book.