Six Degrees of Separation: From All Fours to Grow Where They Fall

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: : Books are my Favourite and Best

All Fours,by Miranda July and this month’s starter book, is narrated by a 46 year old woman, a wife, a mother, a bisexual, a mixed media artist. I haven’t read it yet, but I think it’s on my TBR list.

Well, I picked up on the word ‘artist’.  Not a woman, not a family man, but a 16th century Florentine painter, probably homosexual: Jacopo Pontormo.  He’s the sort-of-star of Laurent Binet’s Perspectives. This story relies on a clever conceit: that the author (who unlike the very much alive actual author) finds, towards the end of the 19th century an interesting packet of letters in a curio shop. His interest piqued, he buys, then translates them. And presents them to us here, in this book. We’re in 16th century Florence. The cast list can be found in any history book dealing with that period of political and art history. Cosimo de’ Medici; Catherine de’ Medici; Giorgio Vasari; Michelangelo; Bronzino; Cellini; Pontormo: the list goes on, but this story is entirely untrue. It revolves around the fact that Pontormo, painting a now-lost group of frescoes, is discovered dead at his work. Suicide? Or murder? And if the latter, who’s the murderer? A series of letters between groups of the characters involved, not all of whom know or have dealings with one another, picks over the evidence, relying on actual investigation – sometimes – but more often hunches, gossip and personal ‘intuition’. There are subplots: There’s for instance, Maria de’ Medici, Cosimo’s 17 year old daughter, who’s to be married against her will for reasons of political alliance. When guards search Pontormo’s quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid—with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria. What a scandal!  This is a cleverly accomplished story, and wonderfully translated. It’s a tight, fast paced whodunnit brimming with subplots, from an author who clearly knows his stuff about the history of the period.

Let’s pass to another artist, Vermeer, in Douglas Bruton’s Woman in Blue. Douglas Bruton must have been fascinated by Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, in the Rijksmuseum: he knows it so well. He gives this interest – or in this case near-obsession – to one of the two narrators of this book who take alternate chapters throughout. An unnamed man visits this picture every day, for several hours, knows it intimately, interrogates it for meaning. This does not go unnoticed by gallery staff, or by his wife, who does not know where it is her husband disappears to. The other narrator is the young woman in the picture, who describes how it is she comes to sit for this particular portrait, and her own feelings. She is sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of the man who is transfixed by her portrait, amused that he is as in thrall to her as Vermeer himself, though she’s unaware of this man’s musings on previous romantic entanglements and indeed his feelings about his wife.This book explores the boundaries between reality and illusion in art, inspecting the portrait and the two protagonists intimately. It’s a captivating novella, with a surprise ending, and beautifully expressed throughout.

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley is a book I have only just started.  Bringley was for a period of his life a museum attendant  Here’s what Google Books has to say about his work: ‘A moving, revelatory portrait of one of the world’s great museums and its treasures by a writer who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny….’

Museum Attendant?  It’s not such a big leap from there to librarian perhaps. The Librarianist by Patrick de Witt.  At first I was prepared to be charmed by this whimsical account of the life and times of Bob Comet. A misfit at school, he became a librarian – of course he did. Then he continued – quite contentedly – his largely friendless existence, living in the house where he’d been born, now his alone since his mother’s death. He meets a young woman – also a social misfit, completely under her father’s thumb – at the library. Reader, he marries her. At about this time, he also comes across the man who becomes his only male friend, and – no, spoiler alert. We are introduced to Bob at the point when he’s long been separated from his wife. And, so far so good. But we plunge back into his younger life and the book loses its way, especially when we spend far too long in the time when he ran away from home as an eleven year old. It’s not hugely relevant to the story or to the man he became. A bit of a curate’s egg of a book then. Good in parts. But I’m not encouraged to read more work by de Witt. 

Another book about a misfit.  Jenny Mustard’s What a Time to be Alive. Perhaps I’m too old. This book comes with glowing endorsements on the cover from a number of well-regarded authors. But I just can’t share their enthusiasm. Sickan, a 21 year old student at Stockholm University, comes from a small town where she was often lonely, and seemed a bit odd. She’s determined to reinvent herself but is socially awkward. She seems to make progress: finding a flatmate, beginning to join in normal student life, albeit always feeling something of an imposter. She even finds a boyfriend, who’s charming. It’s a story about loneliness, and the well-remembered awkwardness of becoming an adult and wondering which bits of your true self you wish to hang on to. But although it’s well written, I never really engaged with it. My loss, probably.

My last book is about a man who isn’t a misfit, because he tries so very hard not to be, in Michael Donkor’s Grow Where They Fall. Here is the story of Kwarme, son of Ghanaian immigrants and living in London. The book is told in alternating chapters: his 10 year old self who attends a multicultural primary school, and his 30 year old self, who teaches in a multicultural high school. Black and queer, Kwame is also a Durham graduate. His flat mate, an upper class white man writing about wine, is very different from his traditionally-minded working class Ghanaian family. Kwame fits in, though never without a conscious struggle. It’s what he always has to do. Conforming is something he’s used to, though his homosexuality is a real challenge to someone of his cultural background. He’s a popular teacher, well liked, but his uncertainties and feelings of being unmoored and a little out of his depth persist. Towards the end of the book, one event, small in itself, assumes huge proportions in his mind and forces him to finally make some big decisions. This is a novel about Kwame finding his place. Finding himself, in fact, and having the courage to live his life. It’s told in the context – often amusingly recounted – of a small boy’s day-to-day struggle to please, and an adult’s wish also to be liked and respected.

I seem to have done quite a bit of travelling this month’s choices (and in real life, as it happens). Next month, Kate starts with the 2025 Stella Prize winner, Michelle de Kretser’s work of autofiction, Theory & Practice. Where will that lead us all, I wonder?

Image Credits

Jacopo Pontormo:  Visitation of Carmagnano, Church of San Francesco e Michele (Wikimedia Commons)

Delft: Who's Denilo? (Unsplash)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Yilei (Jerry) Bao (Unsplash)

Library image (Actually Barter Books in Alnwick): my own image.

Snow scene: my own image.

Ghanaian man: Kojo Kwarteng (Unsplash)