And by painting fantasy and reality with the same fine brush, you make it impossible to differentiate the strokes. They blend together, helping to create a new image, one that is neither, and both. This is Susanna Clarke’s great feat. It’s not that she tells the story of a world possessing magic. It’s that she convinces us that magic lives in ours. Not as a whimsical addition to a world we already know, but as a fundamental part of it, stamped into the foundation, intrinsic and essential, something that can be studied, comprehended, mastered, as rule-bound as maths, or physics. She melds the magic and the mundane, the fantastic and the ordinary.
But if it’s the creator’s life-story that makes an artwork ‘that little bit special’ or enables it to ‘thrive’, then what happens when the medium is storytelling? Does it really make sense to say that a good story’s ultimate value lies within another story? With the exception of Celebrity Autobiography, surely the opposite is true? We tend not to be interested in authors’ works because of their lives but in their lives because of their works.
The Watermark navigates this paradox by proposing that we think of the author as a kind of character – not as the story’s creator per se but as one of its components.
Painter’s professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling author of eight books along with others she’s edited, too many other publications to count, and an entirely separate career as a visual artist. She calls her latest book “A Life in Essays,” which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled “Autobiography,” this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter’s own story in the best possible way.
For a novel of only eighty-nine pages, Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest is surprisingly deep, and will appeal to readers familiar with the Romantic movement as well as those who just want to be carried away by a good story. Chuck Rosenthal has produced a large corpus of work, many novels, a memoir and essays. He possesses an agile imagination, an eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue, and he gives readers a sense of the mad passions that drove Keats, Shelley, and Byron.
In the fall of 1989, when the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi was in her early fifties, she found a lump in her breast. Within weeks, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, an illness she’d previously thought of as distant, Western, nothing for her to worry about. Cancer was then a taboo subject in Chinese culture, which did not dissuade Xi Xi from writing about it. In 1992, she released Mourning a Breast, an idiosyncratic text that was hugely praised on its reception and is now considered one of the first instances of a writer discussing her experience with breast cancer in standard written Chinese. Whether the narrator is her, granted, can be hard to say. Mourning a Breast has been called a “therapeutic memoir” and a “semi-autobiographical novel”; it contains literary criticism, science writing, nutritional calculations, and poetry. It’s hybrid enough to be sui generis, and yet it feels less like a self-conscious experiment than a warm, captivating mix of genres.