It is just a picture. And you are right, said Evelyn. Art historians have made gods of men. …what it’s always about, for me, is response. It’s a painting that demands of us a response. All the best ones do
You were taken with the cloud back there. It drew you in. It interested you.
They go together. It’s what we’ve always done. Left a mark on a cave, or on a page. Showing who we are, sharing our view of the world, the life we’re made to bear. Our turmoil is revealed in those painted faces – sometimes tenderly, sometimes grotesquely, but art becomes a mirror. All the symbolism and the paradox, ours to interpret. That’s how it becomes part of us. And as counterpoint to our suffering, we have beauty. We like beauty, don’t we? Something good on the eye cheers us. Does something to us on a cellular level, makes us feel alive and enriched. Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world, Ulysses. It repositions our sight and judgement. Captures forever that which is fleeting. A meagre stain in the corridors of history, that’s all we are. A little mark of scuff. One hundred and fifty years ago Napoleon breathed the same air as we do now. The battalion of time marches on/
Art versus humanity is not the question, Ulysses. One doesn’t exist without the other. Art is the antidote. Is that enough to make it important? Well yes, I think it is.

I read this book and I nearly fell asleep in three separate occassions. The people’s lives, their destinies, as followed through generations, was an absolute hogwash. The occassional deep thought like:

Is it wrong to admire beauty when it is the subject of such horror?
The Sabine woman?

And

So cry, my dear. This room needs the outpouring of emotion. The stiff upper lip is woven into the haberdashery.

made me feel like I was in an arts class where you were supposed to talk about feelings but all you could think of was emulating a response as everything was so dreary.

To the book.

Winner of the InWords Literary Award

Still Life is a big-hearted story of the families we forge and the friendships that make us.

1944, Italy. As bombs fall around them, two strangers meet in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa and share an extraordinary evening.

Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner a 64-year-old art historian living life on her own terms. She has come to salvage paintings from the wreckage of war and relive memories of her youth when her heart was stolen by an Italian maid in a particular room with a view. Ulysses’s chance encounter with Evelyn will transform his life – and all those who love him back home in London – forever.

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There’s some sex scenes, some lesbian friendly fingering, some hetero-sex against a wall and a lot of talk about people’s wants and desires. I wish I could go back in time and erase this book from my watchlist as it was so freaking bad. The writing does not feature any dialogue – just sentences beginning in a new paragraph sometimes indented. I found it hard to follow as to who was speaking with whom.

The metaphors and comparisons weigh down rather than lift the prose and I found myself rolling my eyes whenever I saw some pretentious looking thing like this:

Tired, kind face with the keenest blue eyes that looked at him as if he was a meadow of wildflowers.

Ooof.

That’s me not picking up a book from this author again. The only reason I gave it two stars was the descriptions of some of the paintings and statues I have seen in person in Rome & surrounding areas. Well done for those but the rest of the book is crap.