This was actually exactly what I expected it to be. The kind of fragmentary, essayistic effort to understand — in both an intellectual but also a very affective way — a person from the past, that melds with meditations on the self, excavations of illicit memories and ancestral trauma. But the French version, so, a little extra. Lots of passages about trying to feel your way into an experience that seems opaque or inaccessible, and the weird juxtaposition of a passionate sense of longing in a very bureaucratic archival space. A mother who is cruel but also wounded; an effort to be closer to her by imagining her feelings; the implicit awareness that recognizing that she has suffered doesn’t really excuse the ways she has made you suffer.
I’m probably sounding dismissive, which I really don’t intend to be — I enjoyed this book very much! It’s a wonderful meditation on the nature of photography, and the body as art, but also, objectification as pain, and the struggles of women artists. I love this kind of stuff. And though I understand the critiques of this type of writing (as I wrote about recently), this one is done well, more so than many others. I admittedly am not in a rush to buy the other two books in the triptych, but I definitely want to read them eventually.
Kasia Reads 