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. 

Nancy Marie Brown's IVORY VIKINGS: THE MYSTERY OF THE MOST FAMOUS CHESSMEN IN THE WORLD AND THE WOMAN WHO CARVED THEM

More people, I imagine, recognize the Lewis Chessmen than realize that they do. They're the models for the set Harry Potter and pals use in their films. Some illustrations for Lewis Carroll's works draw on them. Etc. Or, like me, they heard of the set on the amazing History of the World in 100 Objects podcast and looked them up and spent untold hours just admiring them. The beserker rooks as they bite their shields, the elaborately enthroned kings with their swords on their knees, the knights astride their stocky little ponies, the queens with their faces resting pensively (or worriedly?) in their hands...

For such people, I wouldn't call Ivory Vikings essential reading, as such, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless. The book explores the set -- or rather, sets, for bits of four sets of chessmen were dug up on that Scottish beach in 1831 -- piece by piece, beginning with the knights, modeled after late Viking warriors, and in the process makes a particular argument as to their nature and origin, a nature and origin intimately tied to some of the later and lesser read Bishop's Sagas of Iceland, as well as to some of the more famous Family Sagas, on which author Nancy Marie Brown draws for ideas of legendary/historical characters that might have inspired these personality-filled bits of walrus ivory and whalebone.

By the way, if you're not familiar with these sagas, you can pick them up pretty cheaply in "Saga Six Packs" over at Amazon, or, and I highly recommend this even if you're not going to read them (though you should read them!), go have a listen to the Saga Thing podcast, in which a pair of scholars summarize, dissect, and rate the sagas in terms of "best bloodshed" and "nicknames" and "notable witticisms" and such. Trust me. It's even more fun than it sounds!

But back to Ivory Vikings, which I wanted to like a lot more than I actually did. The problem is structural; while the idea of building the arguments as though one were slowly setting up pieces on a chess board is an intriguing one, the execution of same is very sloppily done, here. For instance, the final chapter, ostensibly considering the pawns, outlines the known history and provenance of the pieces since their discovery in 1831, and thus feels like it belongs at the book's beginning (especially since offhand references to stages in their journey from the island of Lewis' Uig Bay to various museum exhibits are made throughout the rest of the book, and phrased as though the reader is merely being reminded of something already discussed, to baffling and annoying effect). Too, and perhaps more irritatingly, anecdotes from the history of the North Sea in the ninth through 13th centuries are often repeated almost verbatim in several places, while others are fragmented and scattered throughout the book's chapters. The resulting narrative is rather more like a fever dream than a thoughtful work of non-fiction.

Still, these anecdotes and ideas -- that the famous/infamous Gunnhild the Grim may be the model for the queens (and now I can't but picture her holding her hand to her face as she considers what curse would be best for her lover Hrut, for instance), that Pall Jonsson not only might have commissioned the pieces but is also a living avatar of the modern chess bishop that was no bishop in the original Arabian game that became our modern chess, that a woman referred to briefly in a saga of his life might have been the carver of the set -- are fascinating and fun to consider, even as one realizes, through one of the more coherent threads in the book, that the mystery of these remarkable chess pieces might not ever be solved. Locations that might hold the answers to our questions are also locations of existing archaeological digs that would be damaged, if not destroyed, if we wanted to go deeper, as we'd have to, say, in Iceland's Skaholt, where an important 16th century site may sit right on top of the 11th or 12th century site we'd want to examine.

The reader who can be patient with the book's weird structure, and has an interest in chess, history, art history, commerce, archaeology, craftsmanship -- anything, really -- will enjoy this excuse to think about all of these things while admiring these whimsical, enigmatic, arresting little works of art. The reader who can't, will probably want to skip this one.









As for me, I'm off to read or re-read some sagas. Even as I shake my fist that a lot of the ones I'm now most curious about have not yet been translated into English. Ah, me.

100 Books #107 - Walter Moers' A WILD RIDE THROUGH THE NIGHT

"I've got no idea what's gone wrong with your dreams of late, but they've definitely been getting wilder."

When your own dear personal psychopomp aka "dream princess" who is also your late great-great-great grandmother tells you this, you know you're in for a weird adventure. Of course, by the time twelve-year-old Gustave Dore meets his ancestress and hears this observation, he's already been on one for a good bit: captaining his own ship and all but losing it to the "Siamese Twin Tornados", meeting Death and his sister Dementia, saving a Damsel in Distress from her Dragon but learning that he kind of misread that situation a bit...

Wait? Meeting Death? Yes. Death wants the kid's soul, like now, and the only way young Gustave can avoid complying is by performing a series of tasks. Welcome to the wild, weird, wonderful world of Walter Moers, here exhibited as part Where the Wild Things Are, part Maakies (Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby would have felt right at home on Gustave's ship), with a dash of the Twelve Labors of Hercules thrown in.

Every Walter Moers book I pick up becomes my new favorite Walter Moers, and A Wild Ride Through the Night is no exception, despite the absence of Moers' cartoons. That's not to say the book is unadorned by illustration, though; far from it. The story took its inspiration from twelve engravings by 19th century French engraver and illustrator Gustave Dore*, and these appear sequentially in the book (and, being engravings, look pretty okay in e-Ink, to my surprise), making it at least partly a sort of wry commentary on sequential art and how any sequence's story can be altered by any amount of interstitial storytelling; it can even be made into an imaginary portrait of the artist as a young man.

I've been a fan of Moers since I first stumbled across The City of Dreaming Books in the new books section of my public library a few years ago. With a title like that, how could I pass it by? That book was nothing like I'd expected, but altogether wonderful -- and the lovely thing about his Zamonia books* (I mean, besides their inherent charm and their amazing, adorable illustrations) is that any one of them is a wonderful introduction to this world, populated by sentient, literate, civilized dinosaurs, adventuring educated dogs, blue bears who captain ships, and yes, dreaming books. But also, any one of them is a total gateway drug; once you've sampled from it, if it's at all to your taste, you will feel utterly compelled to go and get them all. So, you know, here.

A Wild Ride Through the Night is an earlier work than the Zamonia books, but already quite a mature one: Moers has already worked out his signature style (and so has his translator, John Brownjohn), blending whimsy, satire and pathos with fairly strong character creation (Lil' Gustave is no Rumo, but who is?) and a whole lot of just plain WTFery. If you don't laugh at loud at some of these bits, see your psychiatrist. And while a lot of the weirdest stuff (like a monstrous flying pig with lizard/goat legs) originated from the fevered imagination of Dore, I really don't think Dore could have come up with the kind of dialogue Moers gives to such grotesqueries. Truly, he is like no other writer, living or dead.

But you know, if you can't have Moers illustrations in a Moers book, Dore will do. Yes, yes he will.

*Illustrations used are taken from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Orlando Furioso, "The Raven", Don Quixote, Legend of Croquemitane, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Paradise Lost, and the Bible.