Toby Ferris' SHORT LIFE IN A STRANGE WORLD: BIRTH TO DEATH IN 42 PANELS (narr by Jot Davies)

Jot Davies is one of those audio book narrators whose name on a project automatically makes that project a likely listen for me, but put him on something like Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels, which turns out to be the answer to "what if John Berger and W.G. Sebald were merged into a literary/art historical Brundlefly (and also freakishly made the same allusions to the same cultural touchstones I'm thinking of right as I think of them!) and wrote a book about Breugel the Elder" and that becomes a dead certainty. 

Author Toby Ferris set about the project that gave rise to Short Life in a Strange World after being seized by a "mania for [Pieter] Breugel" as he mourned his recently dead father. Short narratives from that father's life are intertwined with biographical sketches of the author's trip to all of the museums and private collections that possess  definitively proven works of Breugel, and accounts of what is known of Breugel's own life as Ferris minutely observes Breugel's works and the settings in which they exist circa the early 21st century.

Along the way, Ferris winds up writing both lyrically and informatively (the lyricism greatly enhanced by Jot Davies' precise diction and rich and sonorous intonation) about diverse subjects such as the process by which paintings are restored nowadays versus in the 19th and 20th centuries, the aims and ambitions of medieval alchemists, the economic and cultural realities of life in what was, in Bruegel's time, the Spanish Netherlands, the arrangements of modern museums, the English phonetics pose to native speakers of Asian languages (that must have been particularly fun for Davies to narrate), and the occasional wilderness adventure undertaken in the company of Ferris' brother on the author's extended visit to the United States.*

Entertainingly, each chapter begins with a note about how much of the total "Bruegel Object", as calculated by a spreadsheet the author created as he first began contemplating this odd and lovely project, is discussed in that chapter.** From that starting point, Ferris can go in any direction as the imagery in each painting or group of paintings inspires speculation about the change of the seasons, the medieval understanding of death and new life, the difference between painting on wood versus canvas... anything goes, which is where the book most evokes W.G. "Rings of Saturn" Sebald for me and makes me wish Jot Davies could narrate that book someday.

What really stands out for me, though, is an odd little interval late in the book, the short but arresting 11th chapter, "Singularity." Here Ferris pauses to consider a sliver of the "Breugel Object" that has disappeared from public knowledge after being sold at Christie's early this century. This little roundel was a rather recent attribution after careful study with 21st century technology, this as much for its material faithfulness to Breugel's era as for its image, and so Ferris wrestles a bit with how much it should actually bother him that he has no way of seeing the original (the John Berger bit of the Bergbald Brundlefly). It's not part of the canon of classically-understood-to-be-Breugel, after all, and copies, made by one of Breugel's sons and by an engraver that somewhat altered the depicted image to make it more suitable as an engraving, are publicly held where he can see them. Ultimately, concluding that completism is an unrealistic and undue standard for him and his decidedly not academic approach to Breugel, Ferris decides to just let it be, man. After all, he's not trying to hunt down Breugel's drawings or misattributed works, etc, either. Framing matters. 

I, who have several uncompleted "survey all the things" type projects all over this here blog, respect this decision a whole lot, and take a kind of comfort in it, too. I may not get around to reading all of the Doctor Who novels or ever finish my cheeky and irreverent close study of Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle, but that doesn't mean that what I've competed of these are worthless for not being 100% COMPLETE COMPLETE COMPLETE. I mean, people wouldn't bug me to resume them if they didn't like what I've done of them so far, right?

And so with this book. While Ferris may have drawn the target around where his arrow hit rather than hitting an objectively established mark, what came of his effort is a lovely meditation on life and death and art, on landscape and memory (hey, Simon Schama!), how material objects such as paintings get scattered around the world,  and on how it feels to be in the same room with a famous masterpiece in our age of image reproduction and reduction. 

What a delightful listen! I think, though, that if I were to read it again, I'd want to sit down with a hardcover edition. The audiobook had an accompanying PDF to allow the listener to examine images of the paintings under discussion, and of course there are any number of ways to look at art on the internet,  but looking at them on the tiny screen of my phone was not very satisfying. As with most art books, of which this is certainly one, the luxury of glossy full color reproductions of the art is highly to be preferred.

But hardcovers don't sound like Jot Davies. Decisions, decisions...

*This is how I wound up having an amusing Twitter conversation about bear spray and, er, used bear chow, with narrator Davies (quite forgetting that the author was still included in the reply chain after Davies had clued him in to my early praise of this book as I was getting started with enjoying it). Sometimes the internet is still a boon to mankind, even in this dumb decade.

**The insights he derives from this supremely nerdy creation of his are weird and amusing. For instance, by Ferris' calculations, 74% of the "Breugel Object" contains a depiction of people in crowds. As someone who spent four years taking all my meals with the famous "Timer" of Phish fame, Zyzzyx, keeper of the Phishstatistics page, I can't help loving attempts like this to quantify art's impact on us.