Bruton

I was away for the Bank Holiday weekend, which is why I’m behind with reviewing books for A Book A Day In May – but I did manage to keep reading, hopefully without being too antisocial to the friends I’d gone away with. Here are the three books I finished over the weekend…

Day 3: Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton

I hadn’t heard of Douglas Bruton when I picked up Blue Postcards (2021) in a secondhand bookshop in Portsmouth, but I was drawn by the nice design of the pocket-size Fairlight Modern – and, when I opened it, by the fact that it is written in 500 numbered vignettes. This fragmented style has been very successful for me in the past few years, and I’m always keen to try more. I can now firmly add Blue Postcards to the list of successes: I absolutely loved it.

1. At the foot of the steps of Le Passage de la Sorciere in Montmartre sits a man in a blue suit, the sleeves of his jacket pushed up to his elbows, his shirt collar unfastened and his blue tie loose around his neck. He sits playing with three chased silver egg cups and a wooden ball the size of a pie. He asks passers-by if they would like to be on which egg cup the ball is under, after he does a dance of the cups, shifting the order and showing the wooden ball and then not showing it. It is a trick of course, but he does it so well it’s hard to see how. Once I saw him life all three cups and there was no ball at all; it has disappeared.

That is the first of the vignettes, and it sets the tone of the book, even if the man himself isn’t among the most significant figures (though it’s not the last we will see of him). I often find that novels that use this fragmentary style start with something more tonal than relevant – so we are immediately in a world of illusion, street artistry, customers, Paris and, of course, a stray mention of the word ‘blue’. They are all things that will become paramount in Bruton’s novella.

There are a trio of main characters, I would say: Yves Klein, Henri the tailor, and the narrator himself. I was aware of Yves Klein but would have struggled to tell you much about him – now I know that he was a French artist in the mid-20th century, famed for monochrome art – most usually in a vivid shade of blue that came to be known (and maybe patented, or maybe not) as International Klein Blue. As well as canvas paintings, he painted sculptures and other pieces in this same blue. His other famous art was a living piece – his claim that he could jump from a height and be temporarily suspended in the air.

Henri the tailor and the narrator are fictional people. Henri makes a suit for Klein, sewing blue thread into the pockets, as he does into every suit. He figures significantly in his role as tailor, but we don’t learn (or need to learn) much of him beyond this. And, about 50 years later, the narrator is interwoven with these two lives. He finds a blue postcard at a stall in Paris – an invitation that Klein sent out in 1952 to one of his exhibitions – and he returns often, hoping to discover more postcards, and also hoping to get to know the woman who sold him the postcard. All three of these men share an obsession with the colour blue.

It took me a moment or two to realise that we were working in two timelines. The paragraphs sometimes follow on from one another and sometimes jump between the main trio, or to some objective fact about the colour blue, or to a poetic image that is tangentially relevant. Like many of the books I’ve written in this form, it builds together a picture – using the contrasts and unexpected similarities between disparate paragraphs as a way of giving more depth to a story than is possible in something more linear.

As another example, here are a couple of paragraphs that segue between Henri and Klein – and also demonstrate the narrator/author’s intrusion, breaking the fourth wall and letting us into the secret of his techniques:

109. Henri writes in his ledger when the suit is finished and when it has been collecgted. He puts the day and the date and how much he charged the customer. I should say that ‘once’ he wrote these things down but when I am talking about Henri I hope it is understood that we are in his time and not really in our time. If this was a film we might see Henri through a blue filter to show that his time is different.

110. On 15 October 1955, Yves Klein staged an exhibition of twenty of his monochrome paintings at the Club des Solitaires at 121 avenue de Villiers in Paris. Those that took the time to see the show responded with derision. One can imagine that the air was blue and loud was the sense of frustration at the waste of time it had been. But it was this strength of public response that attracted the attention of a critic called Pierre Restany who would go on to become the champion for Yves Klein’s work.

These authorial intrusions, particularly towards the end, give Blue Postcards a slightly postmodern twist – but the author is also like the man with his cups and ball in Montmartre, seeming to reveal his tricks as a way of getting us more deeply under his control.

I think Blue Postcards is a brilliant book. Bruton has clearly researched Klein in depth, and has written about him in a form that allows freedom to make something much looser and more interesting than a traditional biography. I’m very keen to read more Bruton – and to discover what else has been published in the Fairlight Moderns series.

Day 4: Stay True by Hua Hsu

I’m going to rattle through the next two books, but only because I want to go to bed(!) I finished the audiobook of Stay True (2022) by Hua Hsu while I was away – read by the author – and I thought it was excellent. For the first half of the memoir, it is about Hsu’s experience as an Asian American who is second-generation American to immigrant parents – and particularly how this shapes his experiences at college. It is also a memoir about self-discovery through music, through zines, through exploring alternative identities and forming connections with other people.

At college, he forms a slightly unlikely friendship with Ken – also Asian American, but that’s where the similarites end. Ken is in a frat, popular and athletic, and unshrinkingly enthusiastic about music and films that Hua considers far too mainstream. And yet Ken’s keenness to learn about Hua’s tastes is a driving force in them becoming dear friends – with plenty of in-jokes, one of which leads to the title of the book. They have the sort of intense closeness that can only happen in your late teens, freshly away from home and into the adult world.

I almost don’t want to tell you what the second half is about, because I think the memoir is extremely strong on what has already gone – and doesn’t need the tragedy that happens next to make it an exceptionally good book. But I must tell you. Ken is 20 when he is murdered in a senseless car-jacking – killed by a trio who are easily caught, making no effort to cover their tracks when they use Ken’s credit card at the mall. And so Stay True becomes about dealing with that shock and grief – but also a revealing demonstration of how ill-equipped 20-year-olds are to process any of this. There is a sharp honesty to Hsu’s telling of the days and weeks following the murder, which are disorienting, futile, and sometimes curiously ordinary.

Stay True isn’t the sort of grief memoir to try and make sense of these experiences, or draw any significant conclusions from them. It’s not really even an attempt to create a tribute to Ken – because a murder like this removes so much that should be part of a tribute to a life. But is a beautiful, thoroughly human book about many different things that cohere somehow perfectly.

Day 5: The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley

I love L.P. Hartley, but The Brickfield (1954) is probably the weakest book I’ve read by him yet. Novelist Richard Mardick is relating his memoirs to a much younger man, Denys. The scenes between them are excellent, and there is an amusing badinage between them that is very hard to capture on the page – and Hartley is very good at the sarcastic exchanges that still contain a level of respect from secretary to Man of Letters. But I find framed narratives often kill the story dead, and this is no exception.

So much of what Richard relates about his childhood is scene-setting – telling us what he always did as a child, or the way that relatives always behaved, rather than making the story interesting with specificity. Once the scene is (finally!) set, it is more engaging – telling of his leaving school through possible ill-health and living with aunts in the countryside. But it often feels like a pale imitation of The Go-Between, and a waste of his excellent talents. And – shamefully – the blurb on my edition gives away a major plot point that happens in the final 50 pages.