Review of the Day: Nat Tate

 

The New York art world feted William Boyd on the 1998 publication Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928 – 1960. David Bowie hosted the launch party; critics and artists flocked to celebrate the life of the tragic genius.

The hitch was that Nat Tate never existed. Named after two London museums – the National Gallery and the Tate – Boyd had invented the artist and his life. The whole thing was a gag. And the art world fell for it.

The risk with reissuing the book now is that, since everyone knows the punch line (it's described on the back cover), the joke will fall flat. No fear. Being in on the ruse takes away the gotcha moment, but allows the reader to appreciate Boyd's satiric talents.

Boyd is an excellent writer and the short format of this pseudo-biography – like a museum book published for an artist retrospective – shows him at his pithy best. He blends enough salacious gossip into the biographical detail, along with references to real artists like William de Kooning and Georges Braque, to give an authentic ring to the whole thing.

Mixed with plenty of photographs and color art plates, Nat Tate is a literary one-off that deserves its reprinting.

OTHER REVIEWS

The New Confessions (reviewed here)

Brazzaville Beach (reviewed here; winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize)

Restless (reviewed here)

If you would like your review of this or any other William Boyd Book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

I got my copy from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program. 

Thursday Tea & Opening Sentence of the Day: Barchester Towers

In the latter days of July in the year 185__, a most important question was for ten days hourly asked in the cathedral city of Barchester, and answered every hour in various ways -- Who was to be the new Bishop?

-- Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

This is the second of six books in Anthony Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire.  Written in 1857, it is a witty satire of English country life and the machinations of the Church hierarchy in the cathedral city of Barchester. 

For years, I've had good intentions to read all six books, but never added any more to my TBR shelf than a pretty folio edition of The Last Chronicle of Barset, the final volume.  So I finally got the audiobooks from my library and have been reading them with my ears, starting with The Warden.  (I am a big fan of audiobooks, especially when it comes to older "classics," as I explain here.)

The Warden was very good, but Barchester Towers  is even better.  It has a complex but not difficult story, the characters are over-the-top, and Trollope brilliantly clever.

This is my first time participating in Thursday Tea, a weekly event hosted by Anastasia at her Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog.

I get to participate this week because, for once, I'm at home on a Thursday.  I'm taking a Bon Bon Day, as my sister and I call them.  (Don't tell my law partners I'm playing hooky.)  So I am listening to Trollope while I putter in the garden, organizing my craft room, and play with the Jazz Cats.

And I'm drinking cup after cup of Earl Grey.  Hubby prefers this particular blend of Irish Breakfast, which is my daily drinker as well. But when he's not around, I hit the Earl Grey.

Opening Sentence of the Day: Carry Yourself Back to Me

Annie lifts her father's old binoculars off the porch.

-- Carry Yourself Back to Me by Deborah Reed.  I've been waiting for this one!

From Publishers Weekly:

In her first literary novel, Reed (who writes suspense fiction under the penname Audrey Braun) triumphs with this thoughtful, graceful story of singer/songwriter Annie Walsh. Annie has recently been abandoned by Owen, her cherished lover, and taken refuge at her home in Florida. In addition to heartbreak, Annie must also contend with the troubles of her brother, Calder, who has been accused of a crime of passion. There is a lovely passage on snow, new to Annie, as well as moving account of her first attempt to sing since her world crashed. In a small bar on the eve of Christmas Eve, "she sings about the evening sky going dark, and the sound of her voice is warm and thick and bigger than the room. She sings about a tingle in her bones." The novel's tragedies are deftly drawn, and never maudlin. Readers will enjoy the novel's engaging characters, intricate plot, and beautifully rendered sense of place.

Teaser Tuesday: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

[Deborah] was terrified that she might have cancer, and consumed with the idea that researchers had done -- and were perhaps still doing -- horrible things to her mother. . . .  Deborah started wondering if instead of testing the Lacks children for cancer, McKusick and Hsu were actually injecting them with the same bad blood that had killed their mother.

-- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

This is my Book Club's current book. It is a non-fiction account of the woman who's cancer cells -- which have been growing ever since 1951 when a sample of the tumor was put in a petri dish -- became known as HeLa and have been used in medical research for the last 60 years. 

 

I really enjoy the science part of the book about how the HeLa cells have been used, and the medical ethics and personal privacy issues are fascinating.  I am a little put off by the book's treatment of the family, which strikes me as being more exploitative (even if the goal is to engender sympathy) than how the scientific community treated them all these years.   

 

 

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

 

Mailbox Monday

Thanks for joining me for Mailbox Monday! MM was created by Marcia at A girl and her books (fka The Printed Page), who graciously hosted it for a long, long time, before turning it into a touring meme (details here).

The wonderful Amused by Books is hosting in September. Please visit!

I was in Montana last week for work (see news story here and an interesting follow up piece on Slate here), so had the chance to "discover" a terrific used book store in Kalispell called The Bookshelf.  

I found two books I've been looking for for a while now:

Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson. This is one of her non-mystery novels, from before she started her Jackson Brodie series.



First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan. This collection of short stories was McEwan's first published book.