Review
I couldn't possibly count the number of novels, poems, autobiographies, paintings and songs which were inspired by the fact that the author felt like they never really knew their own parents. It's a bug question, this one of identity. And how can we possibly know who we are if we never knew where we came from in the first place. It may be an over done idea but the premise behind "Life Portraits" that I picked up from reading the snippet, is a very valid one that leaves a lot of room to play around in. We never really realize it because we spend so much time looking for information that is sensational but people are fascinating. Really they are. Everyone has a story that is amazing and deserves to be told. And so these novels keep popping up, the stories of those we never really got to know and no they're dying maybe or dead and there's all this unfinished business....no, the premise for this isn't very original. But it's written well and the little I read gave me enough mental questions about the characters introduced that if I had the whole thing in front of me I'd probably read on.
Review
This excerpt from "Life Portraits" is especially interesting to me because of the historical references to Atlanta, where I grew up during the same time as Eva would have been there. Incidents Eva, Sally's mother, photographed such as Lester Maddox blocking blacks from his restaurant with an axe-handle in the door were events I lived through and my family talked about, so this makes the portraits literally jump off the page for me. It is the rare writer who can evoke a strong sense of smell from me when I'm reading, twice removed from the experience being described, but this writer did. I can smell those sharp, acrid darkroom chemicals, and that smell completely pulls me into the story in a way that simple visual imaginings cannot do. I can still smell it, half an hour after reading it. The choice of photographs as a means of telling the story--photographs that I imagine mostly in black and white, as a serious newspaper or war photographer might shoot them--is an intriguing hook; a means of opening up a world of secrets and buried history, like the hidden nudes in Eva's locked cabinet drawer. The writing itself is quite good. I enjoy the textures of complex sentences and layered imagery, so this is a writer whose skill commands my interest in the writer as well as the story--much as I am interested in following an excellent actor's career through and transcending the characters he or she plays. Of course, I am curious to know whether Sally's inheritance is scant or somehow deliberately hurtful because of her rift with her mother--it is not money or property, after all--or (as I suspect through the foreshadowing) the greatest treasure a complex woman has to leave a daughter she deeply loved and lost.
Product Description
Imagine Sally Swain's surprise when she inherits from her mother twenty years of nude photographs of a strange man, all taken before Sally was born. Life Portraits tells the story of Eva Swain, photographer, and Isaac Rutherford, painter, as they carry out a twenty-year art project, beginning in 1955, to meet once a year and record each other's portraits. Life Portraits also tells the story of Sally, who left home at seventeen and returned fourteen years later, a single mother, in time for her mother Eva's funeral, to discover that Eva had lied to her about her father. She sets out to solve the mystery surrounding the nude portraits and find the identity of her father, and along the way discovers that she is her mother's daughter. What she learns forces her to examine her relationship with her own daughter - and her daughter's father. Part mystery and part love story, Life Portraits should appeal to readers that love complex characters and family sagas. The story of the twenty-year-long art project is original and captivating, and is spun out in alternating scenes with Sally's search for the mysterious man in the portraits.
