A line made by walking

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Sara Baume: A line made by walking (2017)

308 pages

English language

Published July 15, 2017

ISBN:
978-0-544-71695-7
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OCLC Number:
953709514

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(3 reviews)

Retreating to her family's rural house in Ireland to escape the challenges of urban life, artist Frankie explores the chain of events that have challenged her mental stability and art education. As she picks up photography once more, she searches for meaning and healing while examining the natural world around her.

4 editions

Review of 'Line Made by Walking' on 'GoodReads'

Baume's second novel is as poignant as her first. An artist in her 20s, Frances, is struggling with the precarity of contemporary life in Ireland, and of her own emotional state.

Through the book, Baume presents a philosophical study on being young today, of the difficulties of balance and what it means to be an outsider (or whether everyone really is). She cleverly and brilliantly uses contemporary artists' works, described in staggered sections throughout the book, to explore this philosophy. The result is brilliantly engaging and simultaneously rewarding; a beautiful exploration by an excellent author.

Review of 'A line made by walking' on 'Goodreads'

When I first started reading A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume, I smiled grimly. Like the novel’s protagonist, Frankie, and indeed like the author herself, I too take pictures of dead little creatures. We are never as unique or exceptional as we think we are, a fact that Frankie–an aspiring and, in her mind, failed artist–is keenly, excruciatingly grappling with in this compelling and complex second novel by Baume.

Most readings have, understandably, focused on the various forms of human suffering explored in the novel. Following a nervous breakdown, 26-year old Frankie packs her things and leaves Dublin, moving initially into her childhood home with her parents, and then into her deceased grandmother’s cottage where she grapples with that bereavement as well as the loss of her own artistic life and sense of self. In this longer review, I look at the novel from another angle: the nonhuman …

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Subjects

  • Mental illness
  • Fiction
  • Nature stories
  • Women photographers
  • Artists

Places

  • Ireland