Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory

"Absolutely. The late, great Janet Malcolm’s final book, Still Pictures , was released posthumously at the start of this year. It’s a memoir in essays, inspired by a collection of black and white photographs of her Czech refugee family found in a box (labeled ‘old not good photos’) in her attic. They left Prague in 1939, she writes: “We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray.” Malcolm was instinctively leery of autobiography. Memoir was a “novelistic enterprise,” she felt. But these candid images offered her an alternate way in, one befitting the former photography columnist for the New York Times: “Occasionally… like memory itself, one of these inert pictures will suddenly stir and come to life,” she writes, warming to her theme. Still Pictures will not, perhaps, be the work that Malcolm will be best known for, but it will greatly appeal to those who already admire her writing. I was also very excited to learn about a new book from the French Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux . The Young Man — ably translated from the original French by Alison Strayer—is an exacting account of an affair with a student thirty years her junior. “Perhaps it was the desire to spark the writing of a book—a task I had hesitated to undertake because of its immensity—that prompted me to take A home for a drink after dinner at a restaurant,” she writes, analysing herself after the fact. The affair does not end well, but one does not read Annie Ernaux for happy endings. She has made her name by conducting live dissections of her emotional life, and The Young Man is no different. But it is, even for Ernaux, a very slim book, coming in at only 35 pages. It would be remiss of me not to mention Prince Harry’s Spare . I think I must have absorbed every revelation in that book by osmosis thanks to the exhaustive media coverage of its launch. So let’s lay that aside; there’s little point in me recapping what’s already well known, except to note that The New Yorker published an interesting behind-the-scenes account of the book’s creation by the ghost writer, J. R. Moehringer—a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer in his own right."