Paperback, 384 pages
English language
Published Jan. 5, 2014 by Hamish Hamilton.
This is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
What I took away from this book is that The past, the present and the future are not linear, not the way we understand it, anyway.
The premise of this book got me interested. 2 stories: 1 a renaissance artist in the 1460s, 1 a girl in Cambridge in the 2010s, half of printed copies got the Eye (artist) story first, the other half got the Camera (girl) story first. This is not a gimmick. The book is excellent, it doesn't need a gimmick.
The copy I read has the Camera first and I think it really made a difference in how I perceived the story. Yes, in spite of there being 2 stories, it is interlinked and really just one story. There is such a difference in writing style that it took me a while to adjust when I switched to the Eye, so much so I needed a day or so complete break to let the Camera settle. And now having read the entire thing, I'm going to spend a bit of time dipping …
The premise of this book got me interested. 2 stories: 1 a renaissance artist in the 1460s, 1 a girl in Cambridge in the 2010s, half of printed copies got the Eye (artist) story first, the other half got the Camera (girl) story first. This is not a gimmick. The book is excellent, it doesn't need a gimmick.
The copy I read has the Camera first and I think it really made a difference in how I perceived the story. Yes, in spite of there being 2 stories, it is interlinked and really just one story. There is such a difference in writing style that it took me a while to adjust when I switched to the Eye, so much so I needed a day or so complete break to let the Camera settle. And now having read the entire thing, I'm going to spend a bit of time dipping back into sections to reread, and contemplate all the ideas it has brought up.
Experimental freestyle poetry at first; don't get discouraged. It's well worth it. Cleverer, smarter, and more poignant every time I turned a page.
