Blogcritics Author: Melita Teale

Book Review: Evolution for Everyone - How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives by David Sloan Wilson

Melita Teale — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:32:26 EST

Evolution may be for everyone, but this book is only for some. At least it's not The God Delusion.
Call it the timing. I can’t resist comparing David Sloan Wilson’s book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives to 2006’s blockbuster The God Delusion, by another atheist evolutionist writing for the pop market, Richard Dawkins. Wilson argues for his ideas with far more...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Book Review: Wall and Piece by Banksy

Melita Teale — Mon, 6 Aug 2007 17:56:24 EDT

What is art? The best answers are useless, flat conversation killers as from Tolstoy and his type, who say art is something that infects the person beholding it with someone else's emotions. Such conversation-killers are best because pickier definitions of what art is get silly and tedious. Obviously the word, like 'love,' 'beauty,' or 'fun,' means different things for different people. Obviously - and yet silly art critics tediously struggle to quantify what art is. But they have a good economic reason to do so. If they don't produce more than popular truisms like 'art is a thing that makes you feel,' why would we listen to them, rather than to our own inclinations, when it comes to deciding what art is good and what art is bad? So for decades, art critics have danced around the question of quality in art by plugging the illusion that the artistic value of visual spectacles is related to a lack of popular appeal - plugging the illusions that few things are art and few people are artists, that most things and people are not art or artists, and that they, the critics, can educate us about the difference. Are you touched by Rothko's paintings? Congratulations, my friend; you're far more sensitive than those dimwitted thousands who cried at the end of Old Yeller and who don't care what abstract expressionism is. Now consider Marcel Duchamp's signed urinal and tell me if you're not still special. Art critics use such pseudo-elitist pandering within their industry to hawk art commodities as shamelessly as ad companies use images of sexual adequacy to sell beer. The results are mind-boggling, like Damien Hirst scoring a reported million pounds for a big copy of his son's Young Scientist Anatomy set, or Jeff Koons getting almost $2 million for copying the Pink Panther. In both cases, the buyers may have made a good investment. If the Bigger Fools Theory holds true and if the critical system works as intended, such works will only appreciate in value. So the world of modern art is one of jaw-droppingly retarded and high stakes, of 'new clothes' on an emperor who's hung like a grasshopper. This makes its reaction to the graffiti artist Banksy a little extra interesting. We see one side of this reaction in champagne-socialist comma-orgies like the Guardian, where Jonathan Jones panics that Banksy's popularity represents the Fall of Art. He grumbles that people who enjoy Banksy are also people who think art critics like him are either fools or grifters for admiring the likes of Damien Hirst. He even pricelessly uses the word 'philistine' - the professional art critic's equivalent of "Oh yeah? Well, SHUT UP!" In short, he sweats in print. But why the panic, why the sweat? It's not just about Banksy's popularity - we don't see art critics whining over the massive appeal of Anne Geddes, for example. It's also about the other side of the modern art world's reaction to Banksy - the buyer's side. It's about the money, attention, and acclaim for an artist working outside of professional criticism. Banksy's works sell at auction for ridiculous but believable, non-hedge-fundy sums. This is despite Banksy being a mass-producing artist who seems to be in the act of flooding his own market, so it looks like buyers actually like them. So this is where I actually start reviewing Wall and Piece, with apologies for the delay. Banksy is a shocking kind of artist, and this is a shocking book. It's not any countercultural strands in his work that are shocking, or even his images and the way they're placed; those images and strands are extremely digestible, in fact - irony laced with surrealism lacing an undeniable, appealing optimism, on some of the ugliest public surfaces North America, Europe or Palestine has to offer. That optimism is what's shocking, because it's so out of place in the modern art market where Banksy has become a huge, expensive presence. It's practically revolutionary.Cheerfulness or optimism is often a part of his art - a child with a toy shovel on Israel's security wall, flowers instead of molotov cocktails, bananas instead of guns. The images are stencilled up with some free painting too; always representational, sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching, and always at least a little unsettling in their content or their locations. But the revolutionary optimism is in the existence of these images in the first place - the fact that Banksy puts these images up at all, that he makes an effort at wide artistic communication that falls outside of what's allowed, outside of criticism, and outside of arguments over what art is or isn't. And the revolutionary optimism is also in the fact that he's self-conscious enough, through Wall and Piece, to call what he does art. His writing's not Shakespeare, but it's sufficient, since the images are the point. He pulls out a loose manifesto, and he writes about what he does and why he does it, and writes about how other people can do it too, even if that means his market getting even floodier. Can you imagine anything worse - not for the forces of social order, considering graffiti is the least of their worries - but for the modern art industry? What happens to modern art as an industry if everybody turns their attention to creation, or at least starts really thinking about art - self-consciously forming their ideas about what they like and what they don't like, about what they want to see and what they want to make themselves? What happens if people start sharing their visions with each other instead of quietly believing in their own incompetence and sinking into impotent elitism or complete pop culture sublimation? What if the white collar Occidental world took advantage of only having to work 40 hour weeks to become a society of (hopefully better-natured) Paul Gauguins?Obviously the worst case scenario for art critics and investors would be the bottom falling out of a ridiculously overpriced industry - speculators turning away from artificial monster artists like Jasper Johns - and most of all, people having faith in their own aesthetic feeling. Art turning into an institution of creation and enjoyment, a labour of individual and social love, instead of a ludicrously overheated investment market demanding specialist guidance. All of which is a long-winded way of me writing that Wall and Piece is a great book. Amusing, engaging, and most of all inspirational. I recommend it whole-heartedly. But of course I'd drop $30 on this book before $30,000 on one of his creations. Because as for Banksy's quality as an artist - meh, I'm more into abstract expressionism, myself. Wall and Piece is published by Century and is available in Canada through Random House.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

Book Review: After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Melita Teale — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:20:17 EDT

Haruki Murakami’s After Dark is absolutely delicious. It goes somewhere inside the reader and stays there without seeming to going anywhere at all. Short, seemingly slight, and yet each secondary character is so well delineated they don't seem like secondary characters; each coincidence so well written there doesn't seem to be a coincidence; each bit of cruelty intolerable and each breath of redemption practically lavender-scented. How did he do it? He framed it in a simple enough structure, seemingly more Hollywood or prime-time special than literary fiction. It’s the story of one girl’s downtown all-nighter and the people that populate and shape it, seen and unseen. Mari doesn’t feel like going home because her sister Eri has a problem. Mari can’t solve Eri’s problem, but Mari can perhaps fix what went wrong with her and Eri.Why she doesn’t feel like going home, what Eri’s problem is, and how Mari can recover her sisterly feelings are things that are revealed, or not, at a pace so perfect we don’t even realize we’re being paced. Similarly, the secondary characters, who are only secondary by virtue of their patterns of appearance, are shown to the reader as though on a slowly brightening stage.We understand more and more from a zero beginning, but without a bit of frustration as the process is so enjoyable. One never gets the feeling Murakami is toying with his reader or trying to show how clever he is. The narrative voice is cool but involved. This seems like a book the author put together because he wanted to – because he thought it was a good idea. And it was. What bumps it up from good to brilliant is that through all through the gradual elucidation of characters and emotions, Murakami takes the time to wrap us up in Eri’s spell as well. There has never been such a passive protagonist that will stay with you like she does; never a protagonist so seemingly calm who will discomfit you for so long. While we understand more and more, we understand less and less. That, too, is unfrustrating.I recommend it - definitely – for the beach, for the evening, for the commute to work, for anywhere. After Dark is published by Bond Street Books and it's available in Canada through Random House.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

Book Review: Suite Fran�aise by Ir�ne Némirovsky

Melita Teale — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:24:50 EDT

Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française is the best prose epic I’ve ever read, and it’s not even half-finished. She found a way to write sweeping vistas of a country at boiling and simmering points, exploding and settling with a cast of thousands, without sacrificing the personality of her characters. The two parts of the book that exist are written well enough to stand alone, but it’s frustrating to the point of tears that the other three she planned were never written. Némirovsky’s composition of Suite Française was interrupted by her imprisonment and murder at Auschwitz. The manuscript survived her, and it was published some 50 years later, in 2004. It has received huge amounts of press since then because the instances of genius and poignancy combining in such a way are exceedingly rare. Before Némirovsky’s career was cut off by France’s oppression of resident Jews, she had published several works of some success. But Suite Française, even in its unfinished form, was hailed on publication as evidence of a new talent and maturity. Certainly, it vastly surpasses her second most famous book, David Golder, a portrait of a merchant banker’s final days.The excellence of the book is especially remarkable as the elements of her own situation as a stateless Jew in a country that had yielded to Nazism is never referred to in the narrative. In her notes for the book, she wrote of France: ‘My god! What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.’ We do watch, but we would never know that the narrator of the vision was one of the victims of France's deterioration, or indeed that there were any victims like her. And while her portraits of the French and German characters are far from universally negative, she does show us a shocking yet wholly believable decline, after France's military defeat, of what is held to be 'honour'. She employs the trick of defining the unbearable and the horrid by juxtaposing it with the luxurious or the noble. The result, while sometimes deeply sarcastic and bitter, is crystal clear sketches of situations and people.Each character, even the most secondary, is full enough to call an emotional response from the reader. This ranges across an epic spectrum, from sympathy to violent dislike. In one brief chapter, she can create more of an audience empathy for a prowling tomcat than writers like Paul Auster can manage for a lead character in 150 pages. And the pictures she conjures of French refugee landscapes, uneasy moods and uncertainty during the first years of the Second World War are eerily and amazingly real.So much for the genius; from there, the poignancy. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt pointed out the monstrosity of loudly decrying how Nazism exiled Einstein while not acknowledging ‘it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.’ After one reads Suite Française, such moral holes don’t arise. While the pages are open, the writing precludes thinking of anything outside the book. When it’s closed, however, the deep frustration that Némirovsky was murdered before finishing it helps us understand some of the scope of what the world loses with every victim of war and ethnic violence. The book forces the reader to think of all the hopes, creativity and love that a population's casual evil and mindless genocidal bureaucracies can and do destroy, as though they were nothing at all - but we, the readers, know better; we have our hands on the proof.Suite Française is published by Vintage Canada, and is available there through Random House Canada.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

Book Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Melita Teale — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:05:29 EDT

The genius of a novelist can be revealed by first-person narration, when an author displays the balls inherent in giving up his own omniscient third person and adopting the voice of his hero. The results range from uncannily believable, as in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, to provokingly manipulative, as in Martin Amis’s last novel. The narrating voice of Mohsin Hamid’s recent book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is at the uncanny end of the spectrum. It’s the most engaging new novel I’ve read since Never Let Me Go, and the most unsettling. The structure of the book calls to mind another Ishiguro novel, The Remains of the Day, in that an expedient is found to have a character tell a climactic story of his own life, which leads to another climax in the real time of the narration. Sound complicated? But it’s beautifully simple: a Pakistani man called Changez sits down in a café in Lahore. He starts talking to a nervous, ominous American about his post-Princeton career at a valuation firm immediately before and after September 11, 2001. We read nothing except what Changez has to say about this time and the relatively unremarkable events in it that drove him to his present career in Pakistan. And the voice of Changez is a calm one; again recalling The Remains of the Day, it seeks to avoid hyperbole. And yet the novel tapers to a sharp conclusion as unsettling as anything in more overblown genres, and the conflicted emotions of Changez are presented with picture perfect clarity. The reader believes in his love for the character of Erica while being aware of its opportunistic and almost predatory nature. We can believe Changez is fond of his sympathetic boss, while we remain aware Changez understands that boss – outsider though he also is – as a part of an unacceptable system. I can’t imagine how anyone who enjoys literature could fail to enjoy this book. Don’t be scared off by a title suggesting it could be an apologia for terrorism or shrill anti-Americanism; it’s neither. Rather, it’s the specific and ‘first-hand’ account of one man who progresses through the American dream and reacts to it the only way he can. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is published by Bond Street Books and is available in Canada through Random House.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

Book Review: David Golder by Irene Nemirovsky

Melita Teale — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:44:46 EDT

What sort of savage beast is a banker at bay? Irene Nemirovsky, the author of the acclaimed Suite Francaise, seems to have been in a good situation to tell us. Her father had been a powerful financier who was expelled from Soviet Russia, and her husband banked in France before anti-Jewish policies made his activities (not to mention Nemirovsky’s novels) unacceptable. Nemirovsky could have been in a better situation to tell the story of David Golder only if she had been a financier herself, and it’s the complex truth that she brings to her titular character that redeems an otherwise unengaged story. The novel, which follows the twilight of Golder as his career as a financier and a family man follows a series of highs and bottom-scraping lows to its end, was the first of Nemirovsky’s to receive critical acclaim. One can see why the New York Times called her Dostoevsky’s heir in view of her later work and in view of the fact that Golder is very well drawn indeed. The reader comes away from the novel with an empathy for the beast at its centre, while mystery over his character lingers; we understand him, but we never understand if it was love or ambition that powered his drive to self-destruction.But while David Golder himself lives, breathes, and dies through the spare and direct narrative, the other characters and objects are just words on a page, only obstacles in his path. Perhaps that’s the point, but such single-minded character studies don’t make for scintillating reading even at the novella length. With the Suite Francaise in wide distribution, I can only recommend reading or re-reading that for all but the most devoted Nemirovsky fans. Reading this before or instead of the Suite would be like reading Shirley instead of Jane Eyre to get to know Charlotte Bronte. Nonetheless, if you have the time and inclination to get into it, you’ll be treated to a fine portrait of a vicious, animal, yet sympathetic antihero.David Golder and the Suite Francaise are both published by Vintage and are available in Canada through Random House Canada.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

Book Review: The House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Melita Teale — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:27:20 EST

Martin Amis’s latest novel, The House of Meetings, didn’t hurt my eyes. That’s not the strongest praise in the world, but it’s all I can say for a book that engaged my interest for five unbroken hours and left a nasty aftertaste. The good news is this book is the perfect consistency for an afternoon reading binge. The love triangle plot seems ambitious because of its partial setting in a Soviet prison camp. Descriptions of the camp are appropriately hellish and evocative. Amis also pulls out some nice metaphors on pleasanter subjects, as with a heroine nicknamed "the Americas" after the curves of her silhouette.Also, there’s a really ambitious exploration of love in the face of rejection and of a hostile world. This exploration gets a great physical metaphor in the House of Meetings, where camp inmates have conjugal visits with wives they haven't seen for years and where they face the emasculating prospect of their future. The bad news is that The House of Meetings reads like a mash-up of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a little gore thrown in to keep the morbid interested. Outside of the gore, there’s no good reason to read The House of Meetings instead of either of those books. However, there are several good reasons to read Never Let Me Go and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting instead of The House of Meetings. Kundera was once a master of using characters to explain himself as a thinker. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was particularly good for this. In its seven narratives, Kundera explores oppressive human emotion in the face of an oppressive state. Such a theme is so tied in to an author’s philosophical perceptions that it would be nearly impossible to have perfectly natural characters living it out.This means there needs to be a puppeteering aspect to such writing. Kundera was an artful puppeteer. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’s characters sometimes seemed stilted and artificial, but they always worked as parables or similes. They helped us understand the perspective of the man behind them, and to make that perspective seem worth understanding. The House of Meetings, also dealing with oppressive emotion in an oppressive context, is nowhere near as successful in its philosophizing. While Kundera manipulated characters in the framework of stories, Amis manipulates a first-person voice. This makes episodes of puppeteering far too obvious and disruptive. Bits where the voice veers into opinionating are cringe-inducing, as when the narrator comments on his own stepdaughter and her generation. And here we come to why it’s a much better idea to read Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro is a master of convincing and illuminating first-person narration. Nobody who’s read The Remains of the Day (with the emotionally retarded Stevens somehow managing to provide a coherent portrait of himself and of Miss Kenton) or Never Let Me Go (Kathy is a tragic miracle, with a baffling calm regarding her tragedy) could deny that. The nameless narrator of The House of Meetings is no Stevens or Kathy. Rather, he’s an old man with a great deal on his conscience. He is close to death, and accordingly in the process of writing a confessional memoir for his stepdaughter. Amis could not have made it easier to make his narrator competent at describing himself and his relationships, and yet little such competence is in evidence. This is really too bad. The competence teases the reader, when it comes up. In the first half of the book the portrait of the narrator’s brother is fascinating. In the second half – after the brother gets a conjugal visit at the House of Meetings – the thread of fascination is dropped. Not even a “letter from beyond the grave” device can pick it up again. It seems like a waste, or else like Amis ran out of deadlines.Generally through this book we see a sort of laziness on Amis’s part. There are elements of a philosophical novel which are made too obviously easy with a first person narration. There are elements of a descriptive emotional novel that are made too obviously easy by its confessional style. It’s displeasing that Amis makes these things so easy for himself but is surpassed by authors like Kundera and Ishiguro, who didn’t. But what is truly offensive is that Amis chose post-war Russia for his setting, emotionally blackmailing the reader into attentiveness. Losing interest in a book about the gulag? Shutting the pages on the suffering of millions? Ignoring the mess Russia has become? Impossible. And yet Amis’ narrator seems to devalue the work of Russian émigré former interns because of their political value, as though saying “NO! Oi! This is the voice you need!” The audacity is really quite nasty. Amis’s fans probably won’t notice it.The book’s weaknesses make its climax both anti-climactic and perfunctorily voyeuristic although the progression of the story leading to it makes sense. And so I’ll make a double promise. If you start reading The House of Meetings, time will speed by until you reach the end. And once you reach the end, you’ll be none the wiser about human nature and won’t feel the satisfaction of having immersed yourself in a fascinating or illuminating universe. You’d do as well reading some Nancy Drew. At least that won’t leave an aftertaste. The House of Meetings was published by Knopf Canada and is now available there through Random House Canada. So is Never Let Me Go (Vintage Canada). You know which one I recommend.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

Diamonds Are a Git's Best Friend

Melita Teale — Tue, 9 Jan 2007 18:43:56 EST

Of all the ways to blow a couple of months’ salary, I’m hard pressed to think of one stupider and yet more socially encouraged than getting your sweetheart diamonds. The sales figures aren’t out yet, but I can’t wait to see how many people were suckers enough to do it over the holidays. Don’t get me wrong. The more visibly expensive the present the better, as far as I’m concerned. But diamonds are one of the most boring decorations you can dig out of the ground and process at huge environmental and human cost. And squandering $5,000 on them when you could buy me (for example) a motor scooter instead is inexcusable.There’s no instinct making us value diamonds. We do have an instinct to display our wealth: the historical rarity of diamonds made them a useful way to do so. However, as they got more affordable and imitations indistinguishable, they lost that use. Diamonds aren’t about aesthetics either. People who claim otherwise are claiming the standards of a magpie. I love magpies, but I find that hard to believe.No; diamonds are about insecurity. They’re about being whipped.People who buy people diamonds know it will thrill the pants (figuratively or not) off the giftee, and are insecure in their ability to thrill those pants off some other way. People who ask for diamonds are insecure enough to want a demonstration of affection that words or useful presents like motor scooters can’t provide. And as for people who buy themselves diamonds... well... are you good enough? Are you smart enough? And doggone it, do people like you? And do you realize Al Franken was only funny because incredibly insecure people like you are so damn easy to make fun of?Something else is about insecurity: advertising. The two are directly connected because the diamond industry has a phenomenal marketing machine, currently in overdrive as it struggles to keep these fucking boring rocks relevant. Take, for example, the marketing fall-out from Blood Diamond. That movie focuses harshly on the trade in African conflict diamonds sold by groups of militants seeking funds to overthrow legitimate governments. It premiered December 8 and started drawing critical accolades for some of the cast right away. The pre-Christmas release of the movie was timed to put it into aggressive contention for the Oscars, a strategy that distributors often employ during that high-traffic time at the cinema. Unfortunately for the diamond industry, that's also a high-traffic time for jewelry stores. And, according to Advertising Age, the fear was a film focusing on the rotten side of the industry could hurt holiday sales badly.In stepped the World Diamond Council (WDC). It launched a high-profile cross-media multi-million dollar “education” campaign with the help of respected spokespeople like Nelson Mandela, pushing the idea that a reformed diamond industry is in fact a boon, not a curse, for Africa. Besides the “education” campaign, the WDC has also requested that Warner Bros. add a disclaimer to the film stating that reforms like the Kimberley Process have stamped out most of the trade in conflict diamonds. The filmmaker, Ed Zwick, has refused. And industry watchdog groups, while agreeing industry controls have drastically cut the trade in conflict diamonds, nonetheless claim a higher percentage of them remain in circulation than the WDC admits. One might also ask, considering the nature of some diamond-exporting countries like Guinea and Zimbabwe (who also participate in the Kimberley Process, along with a few other choice specimens), if buying diamonds from corrupt, murderous legitimate governments is vastly morally sounder than buying them from violent, murderous militant groups. A marketing toughie, no? Well, that’s not all the education that went on this past Christmas. According to Brandweek, an "educational" body of the De Beers Group called A Diamond is Forever set out to teach men what a great way diamonds are to communicate their love to their partners during the two months leading up to the holiday.The campaign, whose tag was "This Christmas, say everything without saying a word," was rolled out on television, online, radio and print. The television ads ran during male-demographic heavy news and sports programming as well as primetime. For the first year, they ran on TiVo as well.Wow. Without saying a word. For a moment, let me assume that the marketers behind A Diamond Is Forever don’t have a skewed view of human organization. And let me write a few consequent motherly words.“Educated” gentlemen, I understand you sometimes find it difficult to communicate your emotions. But if she needs diamonds to feel validated by your relationship, she doesn’t deserve you. Same works cross-wise, ladies. If he can only express his emotion for you by buying you diamonds instead of telling you convincingly he loves you (or buying you a motor scooter that has “I love you” decaled across the chassis), he doesn’t deserve you. And finally, ladies who only feel validated by diamonds and gentlemen who can only express their emotion by buying diamonds: good news. You actually do deserve each other. But the world doesn’t fucking deserve you.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

Book Review: Goya by Robert Hughes

Melita Teale — Thu, 4 Jan 2007 11:28:05 EST

I used to think there were two artists called Goya. My teenage, art-class-free brain assumed that the painter who practically licked the Naked Maja off the canvas and the man who produced the nightmarish Saturn Eating His Children were obviously different people. In Goya, Robert Hughes explains why this assumption was so natural. And he does it beautifully. When it comes to popular art criticism, the only thing better than snarky Robert Hughes is enthusiastic Robert Hughes. He’s enthusiastic about Goya, and the results are wonderful. Hughes has two traits that make him the best popular art critic in circulation. First, he’s great at exploring technical aspects of artistic composition and aesthetic balance in a way that’s accessible to the inartistic reader. This lets him tell the reader how a Goya composition is beautiful, instead of simply telling us the self-evident truth that it is. It allows the reader to better understand what was demanded of Goya, for example, in terms of the production of his etchings. In clear language, Hughes sketches out the process in a few paragraphs. Not enough information for a novice to go out and attempt it herself, certainly, but enough to understand another dimension of Goya’s genius in creating the emotion and tension of the Los Caprichos or Los Desastres de la Guerra. Hughes’ second great talent is his smooth, assured provision of historical context for his subjects, be they paintings or painters. This is important in the case of Goya. The Spain of his era tends to show up one dimensionally (if at all) in North American history curricula: the ‘birthplace’ of guerilla war, and one of the candidates for the place where Napoleon started losing. Obviously this is an insufficient context in which to look at the life of a painter who was active over six decades. And having such a long-lived, active subject, Hughes doesn’t have much room to introduce us more intimately to Goya’s Spain. Yet he manages very well. Easy prose sketches out the country’s social and ethnic divisions, international relations and gender roles. And it’s done with an almost breathtaking elegance. Without once seeming to reach for a straw, Hughes makes his sketches of Spanish society and Goya’s place in it pertinent to the paintings and etchings he goes on to discuss. Goya is good enough to wash the taste of Hughes’ clumsy, pissy memoir, the recent Things I Didn’t Know, out of the reader’s mouth. The introductory chapter, ‘Driving Into Goya’, should be Hughes’ autobiography in itself. Touching on the major car accident that opened Things I Didn’t Know, it amounts to a better self-made monument to posterity in terms of Hughes as a man and as a lover of art. It’s even good enough to make up for the fact that the reader spends the book wishing the reproductions of Goya’s paintings were bigger and more numerous. It’s a tease to read Hughes’ accounts of paintings and etchings that aren’t there. In Book Heaven, Goya has a double-sized format and an exhaustive visual section. Here on Earth, consider getting a book of reproductions to look at concurrently. The investment is worth it. Because, as Robert Hughes makes clear, there were two Goyas. Goya explores the public and the private artist; the man who could make royal brats seem sweet in his portraits and the man who could draw tears with etchings of poor, newly-orphaned kids; the man who could paint a beautiful, inviting nude as convincingly as an almost anti-sexual nightmare. And Hughes makes this clear with a delightfully light, clear hand. This book, recently re-issued in paperback, is a must-have. It’s published by Knopf and available in Canada through Random House.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

Book Review: Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

Melita Teale — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 12:44:00 EST

Sometimes a pop franchise can crap out so badly in the name of ongoing profit that one feels more confusion than disappointment. The Star Wars prequels, for example. Die Another Day. Godfather Part III. Robert Hughes, who flaunts his elitism with pride, may not appreciate having his autobiography included in such a list. Yet the first two thirds of Things I Didn't Know are so bafflingly poor there’s no other place to put it. Readers who are new to the Hughes franchise might find it hard to slog through to the final (and good) third, while established fans may give up in disappointment long before. Those who aren’t familiar with Hughes from his excellent written and televised work in history and art criticism may yet know his name. Recently, he was in a horrific and much-publicized car accident. While recovering from near-fatal physical injuries, Hughes was subject to vicious media attacks in Australia (where Rupert Murdoch has a Berlusconi-esque omnipresence in the news) on his way to a conviction for dangerous driving. Hughes believes this roast had more to do with him being a successful expatriate then with his disparaging public comments about other people involved in the trial. One can understand his defensiveness considering the blackmail some of the other victims of the accident seem to have attempted and the persistence of the provincial prosecutors in re-opening the trial until he changed his plea to guilty. And there’s no doubt the Australian popular press was vicious to him in the extreme. With so much blood in the air, it’s no surprise this autobiography is a defensive snarl of a book that opens with an in-depth account of the accident and its fallout. It’s also unsurprising that a spirit of defensive bitterness that seems to have inspired the book endures throughout its first two thirds, which deal with Hughes’ life as a child and young man in Australia. Sadly – and, for me, very surprisingly – Hughes seems to have let his bitter defensiveness hurt his voice. Textually and stylistically the book suffers for Hughes’ heartfelt disgust and disappointment to the point that the Australian sections are hard to read. In terms of content, Hughes finds something nasty to say about everyone. That includes his apparently inoffensive and beloved aunt Mim and her corgi. It also includes his parents. And yet their values, against which he believes he rebels into an artist, are for the most part left to our imaginations. Apparently they’ve been left to his as well, as he claims to not remember any conversations with his father and doesn’t describe any with his mother. His critical nastiness isn’t a flaw in itself: what does one expect in a book by a professional critic? What I do carp at, however, is a sin that Hughes doesn’t commit with his critical works on art and history: leaving out context. In the first two thirds of this book (and parts of the final third) complaints, criticisms, anecdotes and tidbits come thick, fast and outside of any solid structure. There are so many sloppy, out-of-place departures from linear narrative that Katherine Hepburn's Me starts looking polished. However, from time to time these departures are welcome, particularly when they're not about Hughes, his family, or half-recalled acquaintances. His histories of the Jesuits or early Australian architecture, for example, are fascinating. And once the narrative moves to Europe, both personal stories and digressions become more interesting even as accounts of his life and the people in it become more informative and less defensive and speculative.Not only that: his prose gets much, much better. The section on the flooding of Florence is so beautifully written, with the right mixture of clear language and shocking images, that it brought tears to my eyes. And his loving descriptions of Spain and Italy in the sixties practically present us with an evaporated paradise.The weakest part of the last third is his already notorious portrait of his first marriage. He describes it as the union of two ferociously unsuitable people. Only his wife’s unsuitability is on display, however. We are left to guess why Hughes may have been a part of his own marital problems. We get clues from things like an (at best) naïve disgust for the unsurprising difficulties of marriage with a woman introduced to him as “the best fuck in London” and a passing reference to vague plans to run a brothel. That episode is a symptom of the over-arching problem with this book. The tone is far too personally defensive (we know very clearly, for example, how not gay and not masochistic boarding school made the author!) and this distracts the reader away from the prose by making her wonder what Hughes has to defend. And then when she tries to re-engage in his prose, it too often loops awkwardly backwards into further defensiveness. The memoir seems set up for a sequel focusing on Hughes’ life and career in the United States, and I'm already waiting for it. Seeing the upward progression of the quality of Things I Didn’t Know from a weak start to a coherent and interesting finish shows clearly the next installment should be a really good book. However, the progression from lousy to good is also infuriating. It reminds us that a great writer and critic like Hughes has no excuse for publishing work like the first two thirds of Things I Didn’t Know except haste or a sort of conflicted, guilty self-consciousness that he should have dealt with before daring to publish his memoirs. Going into the Christmas season, I can recommend almost any of his other books as gifts, especially the recent Goya, which has recently been re-issued in paperback. But elitist who prefers good to bad though Hughes claims to be, this first installment of his memoirs thumps him into the same camp as any other pop franchise that values output over quality. Wait for the second. If you can't, Things I Didn't Know is published by Knopf and is available in Canada through Random House, as are many of his superior books.

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.