Still Life

"Yes, World War Two and all the way through to the 1970s. This is one of those books that you don’t read for plot, because not that much happens. It has its flaws, but I put all that aside because it so badly made me want to go back to Florence! I haven’t been to Florence since 1988, mainly because it just sounds like it’s so overrun with people that it’s hard to actually enjoy it. I should go, because Venice is like that and yet it is perfectly possible to have a good experience there. Florence is so fantastically painted in this novel. It’s about a soldier named Ulysses. Towards the end of World War Two, there’s bombing going on, and he’s hiding in a cellar in Tuscany and meets an older woman named Evelyn, who’s an art historian. She’s there to check some paintings and they spend an evening together. She tells him all about the art that’s in Florence. He’s never really thought much about art, but what she says sticks with him. He goes back to London. His own family has been a bit of a disappointment and fractured, and his marriage doesn’t work out, and he gets the opportunity to move to Florence. He takes it, and a couple of his friends go with him. It’s basically about how this man learns to love art and creates what they now call a ‘chosen family.’ He brings together people from his past and people he meets in Florence. I think what attracted me to the book is that if My Brilliant Friend is about growing up in a neighborhood and being a part of a community your whole life—from when you’re born to when you die— Still Life is about a stranger, a foreigner, coming to live in what seems like quite a closed community, and slowly making his own way and being accepted into that community. I’m an American who moved to the UK and, for the longest time, it was quite hard to make friends and understand how to be American without irritating everybody. But you learn how to accommodate. This is a book, in a way, about accommodating your own foreign-ness and finding your place. Yes, that’s probably another reason why I like this book so much. It’s very beautifully written, and very visual. You really feel like you’re in Florence. Even if you haven’t been there, you feel like you could describe it or paint it. I guess I’ve always loved art. My father was a photographer, and I don’t know if that did it. I don’t take photographs particularly well, but I understand what storytelling is through visuals. When I write, I have a tendency to picture what’s going on in a scene. It’s almost like a little film or slideshow in my head, and then I write down what I see. There’s a big visual element to it."