October 9, 2009
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall is a beautiful novel. I can't believe that I had never heard of this novel before (it was a chance find) and that the whole world of readers and book groupers aren't eating it up, singing its praises to the sky, and sending it soaring to the top of lists. How to Paint a Dead Man is on my top-ten list of the year: I loved it for the poetic clarity of its writing, the searing vision of its writer, and the absolute truth of its characters -- but most of all for the underlying electric current of life that runs through the entire novel, the relentless forward movement of time and of creation, in all of its forms. The novel is completely life-affirming with its exploration of why is it we humans go on living, even when it causes us such pain to do so. It is our creativity -- our ability to create joy and beauty and hope -- that allows us to go on.
Hall writes without fear or containment about four very different and yet connected lives, each one unique, believable, compelling. The four stories take place at different points in time, through the last half of the twentieth century up to the present. All four of the characters have suffered a defining loss; all four cope in different ways, and against different currents of misunderstanding, loathing, fear, and wavering self-examination. The most sure voice is also the oldest, an aging artist based on the Italian still-life master Giorgio Morandi: through his journal entries we pick up the pieces of his life, and become immersed in the philosophy of his work and existence. He has become a solitary man ("solitude is the most joyful of commitments") but is neither a loner nor a misanthrope. Although old and infirm, there is much he stills wants to experience, the light on the blue bottles he has arranged in his studio; the tutoring of students in the nearby village; his cigarettes; and the young artist who writes to him with such curiosity and energy, a reminder of "the other souls in this world whom I might have liked to meet."
The first character we meet is a young woman, completely unmoored and bereft over a terrible loss, and disconnected from her own identity: "All you want is to be yourself again, because the identity that was once yours has vanished. Though a familiar face is reflected in the mirror, its anima is missing. You are absent." She is also an artist, a photographer, but she has stopped creating images, too scared to go back to her camera and find what she has recorded there from a past she can no longer bear to think about.
A middle-aged artist, successful, famous, and with a huge personality, is the third of the four characters. He has lived life according to his own dictates and interests, ensconced in an ethic of hard work and abundant play. One night he finds himself suddenly and inexorably tethered by circumstances, and alone. He thinks over the years of his past, sifting through the exaggerated stories to find the truth of what he had to leave behind -- abandon -- to succeed to where he is now, and to realize what is important now to him.
The fourth character is a young Italian woman, also tethered by circumstance. Her situation is further circumscribed by family history and by gender, and yet her ability to see beyond herself and define the essence of the world around her allows her some escape. The voice of this character is the most poetic of the four, relying as she does on her strongest sense -- her sense of smell -- to convey her surroundings: "All people smell differently, like the cardamoms, and nutmegs, and Spanish chillies in the spice jars at the market. Tommaso smells of burnt-milk and hyacinths. Maurizio like candle wax, chicken skin, and sometimes cologne from the pharmacy where he has flirted with the girl behind the counter. Her mother's voice always has an undercurrent of dark blue, like the night sky of the Nativity."
It is from the old artist that we learn of fifteenth-century Cennino Cennini's instructions to art students on how to paint a dead man, and how to paint wounds. He wonders if "the condition of death is perhaps less grave to the human anatomy than physical injuries. For in death there is release from suffering." For all four of the characters, that is the contradiction of life that they face: to live is to suffer pain and loss and sorrow -- but can they choose death over life?
We are not all artists, painters like Morandi who painted potent, vibrant still-lifes (there is an irony there, the painter of still life as the harbinger of always-moving life) or writers like Hall who has written this novel crackling and sparkling with life, and yet we all have both the literal and figurative capacity to create. It is our creativity keeps us alive, our ability to imagine a future with moments of joy and beauty, our literal ability to create life and our figurative ability to find and hold on to moments of connection. Our ability to remember and our ability to hope: the combination of the creative forces of memory and of imagining is powerful, and powerfully and undeniably illustrated in the marvelous How to Paint a Dead Man.
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