Play Book Tag discussion

This is exactly what I like best in “experimental” writing. Playful vistas with depth, lives with layers and connections that bubble up delightfully into your awareness, the fruits of discovery there for taking and in enough plenty there is no want or penalty of missing some. We have one-half of the book devoted to the life of a female painter in Renaissance Italy posing as a man, Francesco, and a second half about a teenaged girl in contemporary England, Georgie, who is engaging with her dead mother’s obsession with Francesco’s work as part of her process of grieving. One could say the book is about the parallels between art and love, violation of the polarities of gender, hidden stories beneath surface forms, and the immanence of the past in the present through memory and imagination. There are a lot of balls juggling here, and it was fun to have another ringside seat after enjoying her “The Accidental” so much.

Francesco’s story unfolds from her shuttling back in forth in time through memory. Francesco is the daughter of a mason whose talent in art inspires her father to teach her the skills of using tools and construction and to help wangle her work in the guise of a boy as a painter’s assistant. When she was a teen, she befriended a rich boy whose excursions with her to a brothel afforded her an opportunity to use the women there as models, paying them with her renditions of them. When we catch up with her in her 20s she has become a success with a painting of a saint being shown in the same room with works of a famous artist. She witnesses a boy grooving on her painting, and the allure of his form and ways of moving compels her to follow him. But he is following and spying himself on an older woman under his own spontaneous ardor. We soon learn that Francesco’s temperament has long led her to delight in love of both men and women.

From her character’s first person narrative Smith does a masterful job of convincing me how talented artists must be wired to see the world differently. The book begins with a challenging section composed of poetical perceptions and metaphors for Francesco’s special vision and motifs she is driven to pursue. At a later point she reveals a bit of what she has learned from the works of masters in the following collage:
… from looking at whose works I learned
the open mouths of horses,
the rise of light in landscape,
the serious nature of lightness,
and how to tell a story, but tell it more than one
way at once, and tell another underneath it
up-rising through the skin of it

At another point I felt blessed to get an even more articulate version of her artist mind:
It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things: cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence: paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and underdry of its feathers, a brick about the wet kiss of its skin.

Eventually Francesco gets a major commission from a Duke to paint three large panels in his palazzo in Ferrara, representing three months of life the service of the Duke’s as a just noble for his people, with other artists tapped to do the other months. Together with an assistant she jokingly calls the “pickpocket” she unleashes all her creativity to depict activities of the Duke in the context of the range of life among the villagers in the bottom section, activities of Roman gods above, and between a band of blue sky through which float some special people. But the Duke is stingy with his pay, and Francesco has to end the project prematurely. In revenge, she wreaks some subtle satire in the images. Other elements, such as using the image of a prostitute friend for the three Graces, conform to an assertion of her own private value system.

Like all artists, Francheso struggles with trying to create something of lasting value when all else in life is so ephemeral. Sometimes she despairs:
Cause nobody’s the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves.

But occasionally, she meets someone who recognizes and accepts the duality behind the gender he presents, as in the case of a bedraggled peasant man she meets on the road who explains his friendly response about it:
It means, he says, you are more than one thing. You who exceed expectations.

For the most part, however, she accepts the vibrancy of mortality:
Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.

Yet in the second part of this book, Smith tries to prove the words of an early philosopher of aesthetics Francesco admired who found common ground between human romance and art:
love and painting both are works of skill and aim: the arrow meets the circle of its target, the straight line meets the curve or circle, 2 things meet and dimension and perspective happen: and in the making of pictures and love—both—time itself changes its shape: the hours pass without being hours, they become something else, they become their own opposite, they become timelessness, they become no time at all.

The plot is only of vignettes of mystery, lessons in discovery of self. An image of a plant with eyes for buds precedes the first section, a motif the artist uses in her painting of the blind Saint Lucia. A wall-mounted monitoring camera precedes the contemporary section. This is Georgie’s world. Our high tech age of TV, camera phones, and lives laid out on the internet. She is a pain in the ass to her parents, always correcting their grammar, a stickler pedant that counters their easy going hippie heritage. But like the old song says,”there’s another Georgie deep inside.” She likes to be called George. She thinks her new special girlfriend wants to kiss her. Standing in the garden (Eden?), she forces herself to watch on her iPad pornography with a young girl used as an object and can’t get over how her existence as being used will persist indefinitely on the internet instantly available to hoards. Our hearts go out to her as she pledges to watch it in regular ritual as a witness. And experience her father trying to protect her and mitigate her horror with helpless platitudes that only lead her to lash out: “I can’t believe I am even related to you. “

She hates history, with all its ancient wars and plagues. But her mother is now history. And she can’t get over how she can be gone but still live in her memory. She revives a lot of their lively exchanges, at first pausing to correct “she says” with “she said”, but then letting slide on such editing. Though she tells her therapist she must be getting by without feeling her feelings, she is seems to be beginning to feel the love she shared with her mother. She can see know how cool her mother was as the pioneer of radical satirical internet pop-ups that would put out artistic content over a political text or political messages over content related to the arts. She can feel the wisdom behind her gentle critique of her multitasking of TV and internet by saying, “You are a migrant of your own existence.”

Her mother is a journalist of culture and politics and is scholarly about art and feminism. She becomes captivated by the few works by a Renaissance artist little is known about and is sensitive as a feminist to a lot of its gender-bending content. A trip to the Duke’s palazzo in Ferrara is a special memory George unfolds for us. At one point she is whining, “What is the point of art”, and her mother answers, “Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.” When George experience with her the wonders of Franceso’s panels, she begins to get her mother’s obsession: “What there is …is so full of life happening that it’s actually like life …

We feel the excitement of her shared experience with her mother:
It’s like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. I’ve never seen anything like it, my mother says. It’s so warm it’s almost friendly. …It’s never sentimental. It’s generous, but it’s sardonic too. And whenever it’s sardonic, a moment later it’s generous too.
She turns to George.
It’s a bit like you, she says.

Only at this point do we get the real name of this artist and have a chance to look up the images. Luckily, in her wonderful review , Kalliope brings images of many of the paintings and their details together with a great commentary. Thanks to Theresa for first recommending this cornucopia of a book.

Great review! I have this on my shelf, along with her new one, Autumn, and am looking forward to both of them. She is an intriguing author!

Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
2 Stars/Quirky

The premise for Lemon Cake is quirky, as are the characters, and the very special magical gift bestowed upon Rose on the eve of her ninth birthday. Rose can taste the underlying emotions of the person who prepares whatever she eats. Unfortunately, her first encounter with her new gift happens with a lemon and chocolate cake her mother has baked. Rose always saw her mother as cheerful with a can-do attitude towards life. What Rose tastes shocks and horrifies-her mother's true feelings of despair and desperation gush forth from her taste of the cake.
As the plot progresses, Rose discovers her father's detachment and her brother's rage against the world. She also learns to control her gift and discovers that some secrets lie beyond her taste buds.
However, about half-way through the book I had great difficulty keeping track of what was going on. I do not like to force myself to finish a book, but I pushed on hoping things would improve.
But, alas, it did not. All I was left with was an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #1)
3 Stars/Quirky

What is there to say about a book which takes place on a world supported on the back of a giant turtle? Hold on because this ride is going to get very bumpy. The Color of Magic is the first novel of the Discworld series which comprises forty or so books, plus a number of spinoff novels written for young adults.
The Color of Magic has a number of curious and eccentric characters: the wizard/tourguide Rincewind; Twoflower the tourist; Twoflower's luggage which move about independently on hundreds of tiny legs; and DEATH, which needs no explanation.
I gave the book 3 stars because of the colorful characters who embark on adventures from the back of giant turtle. I also gave it 3 stars because I do not like certain types of magic within a book.
This book is a great example of what I think of as Over-the-Top magic. This catagory includes works by Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams, for example. My brand of magic is within the books of Alice Hoffman, Joann Harris, Tolkien and other writers of High Fantasy.

Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #30/Aching #1)
5 stars/Quirky

Okay, I know I am contradicting my previous review of a Terry Pratchett book. But I love this book!
The central character is Tiffany Aching, young witch in training. Following her brother's kidnapping by the Queen of the Elves, Tiffany must enter Fairyland to rescue him. There she will battle grimhounds, evil fairies, and the tyrant queen herself.
Knowing she cannot do this alone, she befriends and enlists the help of the Nac Mac Feegle-The Wee Free Men. Standing six inches tall, these sheep stealing, sword welding, fierce but funny wee blue men come to Tiffany's aid. Together they battle the evil which lives within the ever changing nightmare landscape.
Even though Tiffany is the main character, the Wee Free Men steal the show. Their antics are laugh out loud funny. It makes a mighty fine read, no forcing here.

Diane wrote: "Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, 2 Stars/Quirky ..."

These deserve their own thread, which you can create by clicking "Add a new topic" when you start with the overall Quirky listings. :-)

Tracy wrote: "Great review! I have this on my shelf, along with her new one, Autumn, and am looking forward to both of them. She is an intriguing author!"

Thanks for the kind word. Glad to whet you onward. I will look for your review of Autumm.

I've got an interesting history with Smith. I've read There But For The, and The Accidental. Although they fell short and I gave both three stars, I do find her writing intriguing and would like to try more of it. I'll give this one a go. Thanks for your very thorough review.

Susie wrote: "I've got an interesting history with Smith. ..."

"Intriguing" is a perfect adjective. Surprises like Easter eggs in every paragraph.