Bernard Comment

Although it's not crucial to this book, "The Shadow of Memory" is a good example of how visual art is abused in "literary" novels. The opening chapters are about Pontormo's late frescoes for San Lorenzo, which survive only as drawings. The narrator and an older man have both read about them, and the drawings are used in conversation as examples of astonishing acts of imagination. I am allergic to almost all appearances of fine art in novels, for three reasons: first, paintings in particular tend to be used to register a kind of reverence for high culture; second, the art is often inexactly conjured, so it exists more as an idea of something wonderful than an image in the reader's mind; and third, descriptions tend to be dependent on second-hand and popularized accounts in art history textbooks and museum guides.

If, as a reader, you do not already know about Pontormo's lost frescoes, then the descriptions in these pages can't be much more than abstract and dry. If, on the other hand, you do know, then these descriptions are loose, full of clichés, and inadequate to their subject matter. It follows that the pages in this book devoted to Pontormo (and later, to Brunelleschi and others) are for people who have a glancing acquaintance with the art, and a reverence that comes from visits to museums and time spent in college classrooms. This kind of foggy adulation and unwitting repetition of popular ideas is a commonplace in novels that include visual art. In this novel, Pontormo serves mainly to show that the narrator and his friend are in possession of supposedly arcane knowledge (they read "manuscripts" in the Bibliotheque Nationale), outside the world of middle-class values.

The only novel about fine art that I know that escapes this is Thomas Bernhard's "Old Masters": in that book the narrator doesn't really even like the one painting that he has gone to see nearly every day of his adult life: it's just the only thing in the world that is more or less tolerable to him. Removing the adulation removes the problem of the worship of erudition; removing the need to describe the artwork (which is a relatively unimportant Tintoretto portrait) takes away the problem of descriptions so vague that the works fail to be clearly present in the text; and removing the interest in the work's value lets Bernhard avoid repeating information in art history textbooks.

Most of Comment's book isn't about visual art, but the painting and architecture are parts of Comment's dream of perfect erudition. In that respect "The Shadow of Memory" is a muddled mixture of Canetti, Bernhard, and Sartre (especially the autodidact in "Nausea," and the tutor in "The Words"). There are several possibilities: the book might be a novel of ideas (in this case, about how people possess memory, what kinds of memory people can have, whether memory can be learned, whether its loss can be slowed), or perhaps a psychological thriller, or a character study (the narrator and the compulsive, unpleasant old man he befriends), or a genre novel (because the book's publicity materials make it sound as if the narrator enters into a magical Faustian bargain to possess a memory).

I found the book unconvincing as a drama, as a description of character, and as a representation of memory. The narrator says he has a memory disorder, and wants to acquire a memory: but even in the first few pages, it isn't at all clear what makes him different from anyone else. At some point the reader realizes that the narrator doesn't have a memory disorder of the sort he claims, but rather a kind of dementia. Comment himself seems never to have decided what place tension and narrative drive play in the narrator's interactions with the older man: it's as if Comment hoped to mingle a novel of ideas with a psychological thriller.

In the end, the book poses itself mainly as a novel of ideas: but the notions of memory, its loss, and the ways it might be kept are inconsistently imagined. I am not convinced Comment himself has a clear idea of what memory means in this novel, how people might possess different sorts of memory, or what it might feel like to have those allegedly different kinds of memory. I'm not convinced he has thought through the ways that his genre-novel premise, the pages that develop his characters, the passages used to create the sort of tension that is expected in psychological thrillers, the devotion to what is taken as high culture and vast learning, the Bernhard-style rants against the bourgeoisie, and the scattered pieces of theories of memory, might possibly come together into a novel.… (altro)

Panoramas were the IMAX of the 19th century, combining entertainment and learning. Invented already at the end of the 18th century, it allowed the audience to travel to places unseen at little cost. Exotic locations and the wonders of nature, especially the Alps, were one of the most common subjects. City panoramas of London, Florence or Paris were popular too - and worked both ways: John Ruskin confirmed that Florence looked exactly as he had seen it multiple times in a London panorama. Religious themes, such as the crucification. Finally, immersive historical battles from the battle of the Nile to Waterloo to Gettysburg and Stalingrad helped make history accessible in a Disney Pirates of the Caribbean way. Faux terrain, puppets. light and smell assisted in placing the audience into the center of the action.

The decline of the panoramas happened with the advent of cinema. Panoramas were expensive to produce, fragile and highly combustible. Given the limited re-viewability (nuts like Ruskin excepted) and the high fixed cost, one after another of the original panoramas disappeared. The lucky survivors are mostly associated with battlefield museums, churches or the government.

Growing up in panorama-rich Switzerland (currently three, soon four), I love to visit these 19th and 20th century relics. Computer animation still cannot offer the 360 degree view of standing in the midst of marshal Ney's desperate charge against the British squares at Waterloo (represented in Comment's book only by a tiny picture). The highlight of the book are its many extensible four page panorama spreads that allow the viewer to grasp some of the majesty of the paintings. The text offers a fine introduction to a now lost commercial art. Its commercial drive triggered and doomed the works, few of which survive, battered and neglected. The internet with its ability for virtual travel comes to the rescue, so that one can at least pre-view some of them from home. The acquisition of this book is highly recommended.… (altro)

Trouvé dans un bac à soldes sans rien connaître de l'auteur, attiré par la réputation de l'éditeur (les Fante père et fils ont été l'objet de nombreuses publications chez Christian Bourgois) et convaincu par le prix dérisoire, je me suis laissé tenter par le quatrième de couverture qui, derrière une histoire fantaisiste, annonçait un regard critique sur l'exhibitionnisme ambiant de notre société et la marchandisation omniprésente du tout et surtout du n'importe quoi.

Alors pas de fausse joie, la lecture de ce court roman (140 pages environ) n'a pas révélé à mes yeux un chef d'oeuvre, Bernard Comment ne m'a pas semblé briller par le maniement du sarcasme comme l'annonçait la présentation, on a en fait affaire à un petit roman pas désagréable à lire, mais trop sage pour coller au côté cinglant que l'éditeur mettait en avant. A la critique acerbe de la société se substitue un regard plutot intéressant et dénué de cette compassion habituellement de rigueur sur la place des handicapés dans notre société, et à travers cela se dessine vaguement la question de l'inutilité et sa place dans un monde où tout est tourné vers la performance et la rentabilité. Faut-il nécessairement trouver une fonction à tout et surtout à tout le monde ?

A travers l'histoire tragi-comique d'un homme amputé des bras et des jambes, élevé au rang d'oeuvre d'art que s'arrachent les collectionneurs dans une société pour le moins loufoque, l'écrivain Suisse ne donne pas vraiment de réponses à ses interrogations, mais ouvre des pistes de réflexion sur le ressenti et les préoccupations des infirmes, finalement pas tellement éloignés des valides, les hommes n'étant toujours que des hommes.… (altro)