Anu Recommends #21
Still Life, art, and the ways of seeing
Hi and welcome to the Storyteller!
I’ve got a special review + interview newsletter issue coming your way next Sunday (fans of Greek Mythology, neo noir, and detective stories, take particular note), and I wasn’t too sure about what to write about today. The reading is still slow, and though I’m enjoying it (who wouldn’t enjoy a reread of Howl’s Moving Castle?), there isn’t a lot to report on current reads yet.
Then, my dad finished Still Life by Sarah Winman last week, calling it “one of the best books he’s ever read”—I thought, why not write about yet another book the two of us can now call a shared all-time favourite?
So that’s what you’re getting, along with some musings on framing, exclusion, inclusion, and the ways in which we view the world, and especially art.
Still Life, the touchstone of painting—Èdouard Manet
A still life painting is, by definition, about inanimate objects, alluding to a lack of life and movement. If you've studied art, you will know that the themes can be personal, cultural, societal, mythological, religious or philosophical and existential. That it can be placed into one of four categories: flowers, banquet or breakfast, animals, and symbolic.
Sarah Winman's book by the same name uses this concept but turns it on its head in that there is much movement here, a brimming vitality and verve—“twitches can't be painted.”
This is a slow, character-centric narrative burn of the best kind. Found family, love, and beauty in all forms; all triggered into motion because of a chance encounter in 1944 Tuscany between Ulysses Temper, a young English soldier, and Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian.
“The power of still life lies precisely in this triviality. Because it is a world of reliability. Of mutuality between objects that are there, and people who are not. Paused time in ghostly absence [...] Yet within these forms something powerful is retained. Continuity. Memory. Family.”
The narrative concerns itself, particularly, with the symbolic, offering up new ways of looking at the ordinary, the mundaneness and beauty in daily life's small, still moments, while also celebrating the momentous and the sweeping, recording their existence for us to see and for them to remember. All in a whimsical package with unabashed sentimentality which, I agree, isn't everyone's cup of tea.
There is sadness here, heartbreak and tragedy and loss and grief and wanting and loneliness. But there is also so much joy, tenderness, laughter, and hope, and the satisfaction and comfort of found family, for us and the vast cast of characters that populate its pages, which includes a well-spoken, uncannily human African blue parrot named Claude.
“Wherever there is framing, there is exclusion.”
One of the myriad thought streams in my head at any time is about art. I've particularly considered choice a lot over the past year as I find myself at a transitional phase in my own writing and what it looks, sounds, and feels like; what I write and want to write about. Choice is an integral part of anything, when you think of it, down to the smallest, most mundane of daily tasks. When you pick between something or the other, when you decide on one over the rest, you're choosing, and those choices, individually and when they pile up over the moments, days, weeks, months, and years, define you and your life. And for those of us lucky enough to create, our art.
In 2021 I read Ways of Seeing by John Berger, A.S. Byatt's Matisse Stories, as well as Michaela Carter's Leonora in the Morning Light, and, in early 2022, Sarah Winman's Still Life. All dealt, in subtle or overt ways, with the nature of art and the artist, with perception, and context and, of course, choice and what the choices we make (and what we inevitably don't choose) say about us.
Berger, specifically, points out seeing as a sense—we never look at just the one thing in isolation, we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Every image embodies a way of seeing—they aren't objective mechanical records—and moreover what we make of it, our perception, depends also on our own way of seeing.
Art is the artist's “experience of the visible”. A rich testimony about the world surrounding other people at any point, and about the person who captured it. What Cezanne called “the painted moment”.
The “world as it is” is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness. It has taken me all these books and all these months to even begin encapsulating my baby thoughts about any of it. And even now I'm not sure how much sense I'm making, or what even is the point I'm trying to pin down here. Except that I love the idea that we get to craft, invent, and reinvent our literal and fictional selves and stories, moment by moment, choice by choice. Book by book.
Even then, one may argue, why bother, why make representations of anything at all?
Still Life doesn't claim to have all the answers, it doesn't even have much of what you’d call a traditional plot, and there were many moments at the start and towards the end of the novel where the pace lagged, where I questioned if those parts could have been better edited, but there's a heart beating and thrumming throughout this almost fable-like love letter to post-WWII Florence, to art, and to humanity.
What's not to adore about that?
As always, please feel free send in recommendations—books, movie, TV shows, authors to interview, ideas of what you’d like me to write on, rants/ramblings/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) and more. Just drop me a line and turn this into a conversation, even if just to say hi and let me know what you thought of the latest issue :) Or share this with someone you think might enjoy it.
Take care and see you next week!
Anu
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You can find me on Twitter at @AnuNande (follow for all the football chatter) and on Instagram at @booksinboston.
Dear Anu, really loved your write-up about "Still Life". The book has left a lasting impression on my mind. I strongly urge book lovers to read it. It is guaranteed to grip from the first page.
Lovely post, Anu! Thanks to your newsletter, my TBR list keeps increasing!
I've only recently started thinking about how we engage with art and the bit about looking at things as a relation between the thing and ourselves, really resonates.