‘If I could make an effective plan I would write exquisite prose, multiply embedded, like W G Sebald, Modiano, Per Petterson. I’d tell it like it is, like Ernaux. I’d knock people over like Beckett; soothe like Tove Jansson; counsel, insightful, brave, and strong, like Maya Angelou; go dark-deep melancholy desperate beautiful like Plath. I’d meditate poetically like Toni Morrison, tantalise and annoy like Gertrude Stein. Like Clara, I’m never certain how well I get on with Stein; perhaps I see her more as a pivot, a queen bee, choreographing minions. I’d lead myself astray like Malte Laurids Brigge, or Anne in Astragale. I’d be capable of cruel shocking things, like those twins in Ágota Kristof.’
My plan was to lose myself in a fast-paced thriller or a crime fiction novel as the Norwegian tradition encourages everyone during the long Easter break. However, a completely different story pulled me into its core and påskekrim might have to wait, although Shelley Day, author of The Confession of Stella Moon is no stranger to the genre. (What Are You Like shows her another writing style). Paris Pages, published by Postbox Press / Red Squirrel Press, is both a universal and a deeply personal book that deals with the importance of art in everyday life and Art with a capital ‘A’, and what it truly means to be an artist. The quote above is just a tiny indication of the richness in the book. Through one hundred pieces of sublime lyrical prose which often becomes poetry, Paris Pages explore essence of the creative process. This in itself is a complicated meandering journey through opinions, thoughts and emotions. As the book is focusing on three main characters, the understanding of what Art is, or should be, and how it could relate to our existence and living, it contemplates various artistic forms and styles, reaching into the real historical events while absorbing atmosphere of the city which has always been an inspiration to many. Shelley Day knows Paris well, having lived there, visiting various galleries and museums, walking the streets, looking at the buildings and breathing the air. She made notes and made inquiries, asked questions and asked herself, and kept writing. The result is a stunning story, quite urgent in its message, and painfully contemporary.
Very private experiences are also relevant to the intertwined lives of Clara Delaney, Sadie Sarrazin and László Száműzetés, three people who found themselves in the French capital for different reasons. The psychotherapist Clara feels she’s nearly done with her job and profession, and is determined to become a biographer of the barely known, nearly completely forgotten and possibly disgraced Max Zuniga, a psychoanalyst and one of Freud’s colleagues. It seems as if he had never existed. She is still processing breakup with her partner Johannes from Oslo.
The young photographer Sadie as a volunteer worked with traumatised migrants at Sangatte, a commune on the northern coast of France, a place which we might heard about as the Jungle near Calais. She struggles with powerlessness, unable to be creative, to find this special spark and continue her work as a witness to the events that had happened during this particular refugee crisis. Her own trauma paralyses her; and therapy sessions with Clara seem to increase anxiety and sense of failure. And László, a mysterious man linking both women and somehow guiding them through complex emotions, represents the spirit and soul of Art. He is the personification of the Exile, a state of mind, a situation that is both physical and intellectual, and conveyed beautifully in Paris Pages. ‘Where is Home?’ will resonate with many readers.
The author makes so many references to writers, painters, sculptors, thinkers – Beckett, Edith Piaf, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Wei Wei, Rothko, Picasso, Cocteau, Patti Smith, Keats – all those creative giants who made their mark in Paris and who had also shaped her own relationship with art. I loved this element of the book as it forced me to pause, go back to a paragraph or sentence, read again, reflect on what I had learnt about them before and what I now wanted to check, find out again, put in context. The abundance of delicately distributed knowledge is like that extra sprinkling of dark chocolate in otherwise ordinary coffee. Not that there is anything ordinary about Day’s writing, a firm believer in the true concept that ‘The story is everything and everything is the story and it’s all inter-connected.’
Let me leave you with this thought as you hopefully reach for Paris Pages: ‘There is and never can be anything worthwhile in any manifestation of Art as long as human beings are suffering and humanity itself is imperilled on the verge of planetary self-destruction. Some things are of crucial importance. Art is an irrelevance in a world as troubled as this.’
Nordic Lighthouse 