Review by New York Times Review
WHAT IS THE LINE between creating and copying? How does the subject of a portrait, like a particle in a physics experiment, change and transform under the portraitist's watchful gaze? How do writers hide and reveal themselves in their work, leaving sly traces that only their intimates might recognize? These questions lie at the heart of "Mr. Gwyn" and "Three Times at Dawn," two clever interlocking novellas by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco. Best known for his novel "Silk," about a 19th-century French silk merchant, Baricco has now changed century, venue and tone. We begin in contemporary London, where the novelist Jasper Gwyn, "quite fashionable in England and fairly well known abroad," has decided, out of the blue, at the age of 43, to stop writing. He announces this via an article in The Guardian listing 52 things he will never do again. "And the last was: write books. His brilliant career was already over." From this ending-as-beginning, Jasper embarks on a strange postmodern postcareer. At first, he is disoriented by his newfound irrelevance. He spends time in a laundromat, writing "mentally." Feeling slightly off, he goes to a clinic for tests. In the waiting room, an old woman, a retired teacher who will play a strange, significant role in his life, asks an incisive question: "Are you Jasper Gwyn or just someone who looks like him?" Jasper decides to become, as he puts it, "a copyist." He will sit with a subject for four hours a day, for 30 days, and "write portraits" that he will give to the subject but not publish-a kind of literary Lucian Freud. He rents a studio and commissions a 72-hour soundtrack to play in the background. He painstakingly selects the right light bulbs, which will last long enough to illuminate the studio for a month: "He had to identify the speed at which embarrassments would dissolve and the slowness with which some truth would rise to the surface." He chooses a variety called Catherine de Médicis because "they would go out without gasping, in vain flashes, silently." And he gets to work, with the help of Rebecca, an assistant sent by his longsuffering literary agent and only friend, who has pleaded with him to start publishing again. "The list? Brilliant provocation. Avant-garde act," he tells Jasper, adding, "And then who's going to remember?" But the lapsed novelist will hear none of it. Rebecca, a heavyset young woman who lives with a no-good boyfriend and has little confidence in herself, is unaccustomed to being watched so closely, yet she becomes Jasper's first portrait subject. She poses nude. They don't speak. In silence, they grow close in unpredictable ways. This connection, a kind of oblique, platonic love, is the emotional center of the book. "How do you do it?" Rebecca asks Jasper after reading his portrait of her, whose words we are never shown. "Her eyes were bright with tears." Other subjects arrive-a dealer in antique watches, a woman who imports fabric (a sly reference to "Silk"?), a former stewardess. All agree to pay Jasper thousands of pounds and sign a waiver promising never to publish the profiles. Eventually, the strange idyll ends. One of Jasper's subjects reveals his secret to a tabloid and later to The Guardian. "There was in the air something that resembled the breaking of a spell." Jasper retreats. Rebecca waits. But he has disappeared, sending her a cursory note-"Please believe simply that it couldn't be done otherwise"-and a novel by a writer Rebecca once said she admired. Jasper has vanished. But not completely. We come to understand that the second novella, "Three Times at Dawn," which Rebecca discovers in an act of complex literary sleuthing, contains a rare selfportrait of the artist, camouflaged in prose like a subtle pattern woven into a textile, visible only in a certain light. With its multiple protagonists and multiple intertwined narratives, "Three Times at Dawn" reads like the love child of Virginia Woolf and Haruki Murakami. It involves a man on the run in a hotel lobby, a woman who comes in drunk in the pre-dawn light, a hotel clerk, a woman escaping an abusive boyfriend, a policewoman who helps rescue a boy after he flees from a burning house. But which one is Jasper? Baricco leaves this ambiguous. Like Jasper, Baricco isn't easy to pin down. Is he a serious novelist or does he just look like one? In "Silk," Baricco told the story of Hervé Joncour, a merchant who traverses much of the known world-from France to Japan by land and sea-to smuggle silkworms and to see his lover. Although the book has a wicked surprise ending, it reads like highbrow fluff. Occasionally, there's something that feels too neat, too well constructed, about "Mr. Gwyn" and "Three Times at Dawn." They're beautiful inlaid boxes that may turn out to be empty-the literary equivalent of a restaurant designed to evoke the authenticity of a foreign place, yet itself lacking any true soul. A knockoff, not a veritable antique. No writer should be expected to draw on his native land as material-the republic of letters is nothing if not a free country-but I suspect that Baricco's limitations are tied to his chameleonic nature. Here he writes with a tone of slightly amused detachment, an Italian disguising himself as British. But the novellas, seamlessly translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, also show Baricco operating on a deeper register, and genuine emotions, however mannered, course through them, yielding moments of arresting, quiet beauty. Years after Jasper has gone, Rebecca, now married and the mother of a child, opens for the first time the book he had given her and begins to understand the ways he has hidden himself there, and also revealed himself. "With a prick of dismay she realized that, in a single day, a certain distance that she had worked at for years had elegantly shifted-a curtain in a gust of wind. And from far away came a nostalgia that she thought she had defeated." Baricco has written a tender meditation on the almost imperceptible ways in which people, and books, can change us, resonate, call out over the years, sending us back in time and destabilizing us, like so many Trojan horses smuggled into our lives under cover of darkness. In these mysterious novellas, a gift is given from Jasper to Rebecca, from a writer to a reader, and from Baricco to us-elegantly wrapped, with much, it turns out, to ponder inside. RACHEL DONADIO is the European culture correspondent for The Times, based in Paris. From 2008 to 2013 she was the paper's Rome bureau chief.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 31, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
When readers enter the airy and dreamlike prose of Mr. Gwyn, they feel as though they are wandering through corridors where they have never been before, yet not for a moment do they lose confidence in the hand directing them. With a slice of surrealism, Baricco's tenth novel takes us into the life of Jasper Gwyn, an English novelist who mysteriously gives up his art in pursuit of the noble career of copyist. However, instead of manuscripts and manuals, he copies people, making written portraits after a month of nearly silent observation in a room expansive as it is bare. The second part of the novel is an extension of these portraits: two strangers encounter each other three times in the same hotel. However, while in one scene the characters are about the same age, in the next, they are two generations apart, meeting again as strangers. Baricco's characters enter worlds of the off-kilter realities and existential loneliness similar to Kafka's, yet here, despite the novel's distance and space, we can almost reach out and feel them. The work is a blended balance of satisfying resolve and loose ends that wander off the borders of the page, and recommended to anyone interested in fresh similes, comforting strangeness, and the confusion that clouds the human heart.--McLaughlin, Tim Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A prolific European master often compared to Italo Calvino, Baricco is still best known in the States for the cult classic Silk-but that should change with this enigmatic novel, which offers genial weirdness unparalleled this side of Haruki Murakami. Posing as a pair of novellas, the book centers on Jasper Gwyn, an acclaimed author who, to his agent's despair, has cheerfully given up his career. But Gwyn soon finds a new vocation as a "copyist," writing, rather than painting, portraits of high-end clients. Gwyn pursues his quest for realism from a run-down studio, helped by a carefully arranged array of lightbulbs, a 72-hour sound loop, and his devoted assistant Rebecca, to whom the story shifts after her employer vanishes amid a scandal. Years later, Rebecca comes to suspect that Gwyn the copyist might have been up to something even stranger than written portraiture. The nature of Gwyn's secret lies in the book's novel-within-a-novel, "Three Times At Dawn," about the mysterious and seductive Malcolm Webster, whose life's central events all transpire in hotel lobbies. Taken as one novel, the two sections make for a charming call-and-response meditation on how art connects the few brave enough to forget themselves. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two novellas, thematically related by the theme of love...or the lack of love.The first, Mr. Gwyn, is a tour de force of literary fiction about a mysterious, somewhat reclusive and definitely quirky author. At 43, much to the distress of his agent, Jasper Gwyn has tired of writing books. After a brief and restless hiatus, he's inspired to create portraits in a way analogous to that of visual artists. He rents a studio and even commissions a composer to create mood music appropriate for the space. Then, to practice his craft, he hires his agent's assistant, Rebecca, to visit the studio four hours a day for 30 days. She simply lives her life there (though without clothing), and Gwyn observes her, though some days he doesnt even bother to show up. At the end of that time, he produces a portrait in words that Rebecca finds extraordinarily insightful and deeply moving. Gwyn develops his talents and winds up with a flourishing business for those who want their portraits painted in words; the most meaningful one is for his agent, who has a terminal illness. Throughout the story, Baricco suggests that Gwyn is able to do in words what he cant in lifeget close to people. Rebecca then makes a startling discovery, believing that Gwyn has plagiarized his portraits from another author, Klarisa Rode, but in fact, he's begun publishing under assumed names. One of his works, published under the name Akash Narayan, is titled "Three Times at Dawn," not so coincidentally the name of Baricco's second novella. Though slighter, in some ways, this story is even more complex, for it focuses on three separate episodes revolving around a seedy hotel. In the first, Malcolm Webster meets a mysterious and seductive woman in his hotel room, while in the second, a young woman flirts with the hotel clerk (perhaps an older Malcolm Webster) as she tries to get some perspective on her relationship with her boyfriend up in their room. In the final section, a teenager, the younger Malcolm Webster, escapes from the squalor of the hotel with a woman detective as he deals with his dysfunctional family.Although the events he recounts remain cryptic, Bariccos style is lucid, and the appearance-versus-reality mind games he plays with his readers are fascinating. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
