First Lines of Julia Voss' "Hilma af Klint"

 "What kind of world was Hilma af Klint born into in 1862? Which paths were set, which doors were closed, and which were open to a young girl? When the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft visited Sweden at the end of the eighteenth century, she was appalled by what she saw." 

- Julia Voss, Hilma af Klint, a Biography

I only recently discovered Hilma af Klint's amazing paintings. She creates colorful organic mandala-like patterns that pulse and vibrate with life. This book is one of the first biographies that I know of her life. It's interesting and readable and filled with reproductions and full-color prints. So far my only quibble is that while i'm gaining insights into af Klint's life, it doesn't have the immediacy of seeing her life though her personality (like, say, John Richardson's Picasso bios) perhaps due to the lack of primary materials. Still, there's a lot to learn about af Klint's situation and motivations; one of the most interesting so far is that her work drawing illustrations for veterinarian reference books inspired some of her best paintings:

"The photographs' black backgrounds set off the bright circle of the petri dish where the tiny life forms swarm and grow. Hilma would later use the composition in the 1907 series The Large Figure Paintings, which looked at the world as if through a microscope." p. 108  

I have a print of The Ten Largest No 2 - Childhood and this book helps me to explore it's depths though the eyes of it's creator - no small feat.

First Lines of Jeff VanderMeer's "Acceptance"

 "Just out of reach, just beyond you: the rush and froth of the surf, the sharp smell of the sea, the crisscrossing shape of the gulls, their sudden, jarring cries. An ordinary day in Area X, an extraordinary day-the day of your death--and there you are, propped up against a mound of sand, half sheltered by a crumbling wall. The warm sun against your face, and the dizzying view above of the lighthouse looming down through its own shadow. The sky has an intensity that admits to nothing beyond its blue prison. There's sticky sand glittering across a gash in your forehead; there's a tangy glottal something in your mouth, dripping out."

- Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance.

The conclusion of VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy opens up as many questions as it closes, as one would expect from such a sprawling examination of an unknowable mystery. As such, it's as enjoyable as the first two volumes, although the book's structure prevented me from being absorbed into the journey as much as I did in the first two books. Here, VandeerMeer splits up the story between different narrators, each one with their own perspective and time, so that you're forced to jump from the time before Area X arrived to before the 12th expedition to after the inexplicable expansion of Area X's borders.  So it's not that this book isn't as good as the previous two - there are at least two scenes here that sent chills up my spine - but it's tone and flow are discordant, and thus I only enjoyed this book on a more intellectual level than the previous two.

Regardless, all three books are very much worth it. I appreciate VanderMeer's questioning style, making you think and ponder what everything means. Even if this leads to the character's ultimate paranoia: 

“What’s wrong with asking questions?” 

“Nothing.” 

Everything. Once the questions snuck in, whatever had been certain became uncertain. Questions opened the way for doubt. His father had told him that. “Don’t let them ask questions. You’re already giving them the answers, even if they don’t know it.” p. 23

I really enjoyed the limnal space this trilogy created.

Related Posts:

• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Authority"
• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Annihilation"
• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Hummingbird Salamander"
  

Are we there yet?

 "One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."
- Henry Miller

or

"...
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now. ..."
- part of Ithaka, by C.P. Cavafy

And to play us out...

First Lines of Catherynne M. Valente's "Deathless"

"In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her."

- Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

I've read a number of Valente's books before - Palimpsest, and part of In the Night Garden - and while I've appreciated her artful and moving prose and imagery, I've been left cold by an issue I have with a lot of fantasy writing: the stakes don't feel real. The fantasy gets in the way of true pathos. I did not have that issue with Deathless.

I picked this up, honestly, because of Koschei the Deathless's amazing role in Mike Mignola's brilliant  Hellboy comics. But Valente transforms what in the original myth feels like a muscly thug, a simple cypher for imminent death, and turns him into a sympathetic figure, as someone who revels in his role but has not yet become it. And yet he's a strangely distant figure in the novel - most of the book focuses on Marya Morevna's entry into and exit from mythology. This is Valente's genius: she writes not only an updated retelling of the Russian myths in their amazing strangeness and complexity (for example, there's a Tzar of Birds here) but also comments on a meta level on myth-telling in general. It's an odd dance and I can't say that I understood it all - but the book was a hell of a journey and I enjoyed every minute of it.