March 2008
Time Out
THIS MONTH’S SELECTION OF BOOKS
The Invention of Everything Else
by Samantha Hunt; Houghton Mifflin, 2008
It is the winter of 1943, when Louisa Dewell, a chambermaid at the New Yorker hotel, discovers that one of the world’s greatest inventors is living out his last years in a suite on the 33rd floor. Nikola Tesla is the godfather of electricity; his inventions will help usher in the wireless age. At age 86, however, with no money, dismissed by the scientific community and ridiculed by the press, Tesla it putting his heart and soul into the care of injured pigeons. No less an oddball than Tesla, Louisa’s father recruits a friend to help him build a time machine that will reunite him with his dead wife. The ensemble of eccentrics is completed by Arthur Vaughn, Louisa’s former classmate, of whom she has no recollection. Samantha Hunt’s second book is a father-daughter tale, a historical comedy of manners and a counterfactual biography of the great inventor Telsa. The novel is not driven by plot, but explores wonderfully peculiar protagonists and the limits this world puts on dreamers.
Blood Kin
by Ceridwen Dovey; Viking Adult, 2008
Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee summarizes the debut novel of his compatriot Ceridwen Dovey as “a fable of the arrogance of power, beneath whose dreamlike surface swirl currents of complex sensuality.”
Blood Kin offers a tale about the revolutionary overthrow of a dictatorship in an unnamed country. The deposed president has been sequestered up in the mountains in his summer residence. The impressionistic narrative is composed of the points of view of three men attending the president in his captivity: his portrait artist, his cook and his barber, who only took the job to get physical access to the despot in order to kill him, but couldn’t get up the nerve. Chapter by chapter, a political puzzle forms and finally offers a grim greater picture. Each narrator is entangled in more than one power struggle, leading to the manipulation of personal relationships to painfully self-serving ends.
The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography
Since 1900,
by Max Kozloff; Phaidon Berlin, 2007
The human face is the signpost, where our inner workings surface to the environment. Thus photographic portraiture is an incredibly rich and rewarding subject. Renowned historian and critic of modern art Max Kozloff now presents the first extensive survey on this important genre. Commencing at the point of history when the possession of cameras and taking pictures became a mass phenomenon, Kozloff explores the many facets of our need for self-preservation and self-representation. In over 400 pages,
The Theatre of the Face offers a wide range of approaches retracing the evolution of image-making throughout the century. Of course, the field is vast and any selection can only be partial. But Kozloff’s essays, together with his chosen images, are a nuanced and intelligently designed chronicle that could become a key title for specialists and photo enthusiasts for years to come. <<<
