Back Reviews Reel: March 2017

My reads of three years ago were diverse as ever and comprised three contemporary and two classical works of literature from the pens of female and male writers from Europe and the Americas. The first two were The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey and The Pope’s Daughter by en-Nobel-ed writer Dario Fo, namely biographical novels bringing to life Austrian fin-de-siècle painter Gustav Klimt and the much defamed beauty Lucrezia Borgia from Renaissance Italy respectively. The short-story collection The Country Road by forgotten writer Regina Ullmann took me on a trip across rural Switzerland of the 1920s, while The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary, an award-winning French classic from the 1950s set in Africa, advocated the protection of wild life and more generally of the environment. Finally, I got absorbed in a fictitious Brazilian painter’s arbitrary train of thoughts running through the pages of non-narrative Água Viva by Clarice Lispector.

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The story of The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey starts with the first meeting of Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt in the 1880s. She is a sheltered twelve-year-old from a well-to-do Viennese family and he is a budding artist engaged to do her and her two elder sisters’ portraits. As her drawing teacher, he initiates her into the arts and later into the artistic circles of the time. Grown-up she becomes his muse, his loyal companion and his lover knowing and accepting that he will never make her his wife. But she isn’t just Gustav Klimt’s beautiful appendage. She has dreams of her own and realises them starting a posh Jugendstil fashion salon together with her sisters and with the support of Klimt as well as of his friends from the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätten.
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The Pope’s Daughter by Dario Fo, the only novel of the late Italian recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature, shows Lucrezia Borgia who is a scandal in fifteenth-century Rome because she – a worldly woman of unusual beauty, intelligence and refinement – lives at the Court of her father Pope Alexander VI. Malicious gossip spreads about her and about her relations to her father as well as to her brother Cesare. At the age of thirteen her father marries her to a son of Ludovico the Moor who rules in Milan and later dissolves the marriage to marry her to Alfonso of Aragon, a son of the King of Naples, whom he has assassinates when he is no longer of use. Only her third arranged marriage to Alfonso d’Este lasts and she becomes the much-admired duchess of Ferrara.
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The eleven, rather melancholy stories of The Country Road by Regina Ullmann remind of the bittersweet memories or tales that an ancient person might tell about village life in Switzerland of another time. Poor vagrant showmen entertaining people with little curiosities like a snake or a hot air balloon travel the dusty country road in their horse carriages, but most travellers walk because they can’t even afford a bicycle. The protagonists know death and solitude, misery and humiliation, falsehood and deceit. And yet, they don’t complain. Life is just the way it is. Such little joys like picking strawberries in the forbidden neighbour’s garden or a rest from a long walk on a hill overlooking the road on a hot day in May make life beautiful after all… and worthwhile.
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As one of the first environmentalist novels The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary, the Prix Goncourt 1956, tells the story of a man who got it into his head to end the outrageous slaughtering of elephants in Africa. From petitions to political bodies that nobody cares about, he turns to punitive action against the proud hunters. Activists for African independence support him in his fight taking it as a chance to spread their own message. But this is only the written plot of this book that has to offer much more between the lines. In fact, the elephant turns out to be a metaphor for something much bigger and just as endangered in the world of the Cold War as well as today, for something that it’s always worthwhile fighting for: humanity.
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Some call Água Viva by Clarice Lispector “non-narrative fiction” because the novella has no real plot of any kind and just flows with the poetical as well as philosophical mediations of a (fictional) abstract painter on various and seemingly disconnected subjects. Nonetheless, it forms a literary body that feels whole. The key to understanding is the painter’s desire to capture the present, the now, the moment in words instead of in colours although she knows that her attempt will be futile in the end. She floats with the stream of momentary thoughts that reflect her emotions a well as her observations and that guide her to new themes and a few illuminations. And all this in an enchanting language that feels like poetry.
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