Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I am really surprised by the simplicity and transparency of the writing. I expected something much thicker than this, especially since it was written largely as early as 1818, though I consumed the 1831 edition. Yes, disbelief has not only to be suspended, but hung by the neck from the highest branch, and left there. Not only do we have the assembly of human bits, but we also have the being’s own story, which is couched in the same manner as Victor Frankenstein’s memoir, despite the fact that the “thing” claims he has yet to learn language. He does this, and then proceeds to read Paradise Lost, which is just hanging around the rural areas of Switzerland. But overall it is a very rewarding read, with lots of surprises, such as, for instance, that Frankenstein never refers to his creation as a “monster”. And it’s only as a result of the being’s mistreatment and the breaking of his word by Frankenstein that he embarks on his retributions against the family.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - ADDA Simfonica in Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Mozart

The symphony orchestra may rank among the most important of all human inventions. The fact that the very idea is absurd makes it a gem of human achievement. Around a hundred human beings, who have devoted their lives to mastering techniques in the use a technology invented specially for this product-less purpose. They join together in the presence of an audience, who is only in attendance to share the both intangible and abstract experience of hearing sounds, sounds that have been concatenated by the imagination of others who generally are not even present. The absurdity of the exercise can only be imagined. The permanence of its effect cannot be overstated.

The fact that we have concerts at all in these virus-dictated times is, in itself, a miracle. Duly temperature-checked at the door, socially-distanced and only in attendance by virtue of the musicians’ willingness to perform the same program twice each time, at six o’clock and then again at nine, we are privileged to assemble in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall. And this has happened three times in the last two weeks for this particular participant.

And, after some months away from real live orchestral sound, the opening phrases of Edward Tubin’s Estonian Dance Suite provided an immediate and major thrill. Tubin’s reputation for musical conservatism does not prepare the listener for the harmonic and rhythmic surprises in his work. We followed that with the performance by Adolfo Guitiérrez of Shostakovich’s second cello concerto, whose almost neurotic, obsessive concentration seemed to tap the general anxiety we are all feeling these days. Adolfo Guitiérrez had the time and energy to play and a little encore by Benjamin Britten, despite having to do the whole thing again just two hours later. We then heard the Symphony No. 1 of the fourteen-year-old Felix Mendelsohn. The music seems to fit the mental image of the early teenager in a frock coat and a cravat parading as a precocious adult. In some ways, the almost deliberate recourse to complexity, the calculated varied modulations of key speak of this lad frantically staking his claim to adulthood. The fact that the work convinces and generates communicative experience is testimony to the young man’s invention and genius, indeed success in his personal project. Anu Tali’s conducting debut in Alicante was thus a brilliant success.

The second trip was for a concert devoted to the memory of José Enrique Garrigós, who was a significant figure in the business and cultural life of the province. He died last year and was clearly an acquaintance of Joesp Vicent, ADDA Simfonica principal conductor and artistic director. Josep Vicent also clearly has special regard for the major work on the program, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique.

But the concert began with a finale, the final jota from the Three Cornered Hat of Manuel de Falla. The piece was perhaps a long-term favorite of José Enrique Garrigós and perhaps gave an insight as to how he himself wanted to be remembered. There followed a performance of Raise The Roof, a timpani concerto by American composer Michael Daugherty. To describe Javier Eguillor’s performance as soloist as virtuosic would almost belittle the achievement. Rarely silent throughout the work, the work began with an aurally blinding flash of a cymbal roll. The timpani then offered their notes to the orchestra, which then proceeded to play with and amongst them throughout a first movement that was almost entirely pentatonic. Overall, the piece layered gloss on gloss, sparkle on glitter to provide almost an evaporation of emotion and brilliance.

And then we had Tchaikovsky six. Certain pieces of music, quite rarely, it has to be said, only grow by greater exposure. Each time such pieces say something bigger, reveal layers of nuanced meaning previously missed or merely impact on the listener in a more vivid, immediate way. This Tchaikovsky symphony is one such piece. This particular performance I would place a few centimeters short of life-changing. A closer brush with raw experience might even have been dangerous. After the turbulence, the paroxysms and the joy, we were left with the pianissimo of two notes on the basses, sawn rather than bowed, the cuts of the last ties with hope. Strangely enough, such overt despair makes everyone, eventually, feel better, because the only remaining way is up. I am reminded that in the same hall in less than two months I expect to hear a performance of Shostakovich Symphony No. 4, which finishes with precisely the same two note fate in the basses, but repeated like a torture.

And so to the third of the recent orchestral events. Programmatically this one was unusual in that it presented a Saint-Saens-Mozart sandwich. Three shorter pieces by Saint-Saens, the Andromache overture, Spartacus and the Dance Macabre, surrounded the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20. The Saint-Saens showed off the orchestra to great effect, the brilliant orchestration producing color and effect in an almost Proust-like stream of consciousness, albeit considerably shorter. The brilliance of the composer’s orchestration contrasts with his musical conservatism, but the whole assembles like an Impressionist painting, albeit of a generation earlier than the composer’s own life.

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 is a different experience from those previously described. This is a quiet, understated, deeply personal work the bursts with emotional states that are not advertised like self-promotion or worn like jewelry. The writing is subtle, reticent, suggestive of some deeper emotional experience than that being related to the listeners. It is a piece that needs a pianist with perfect touch married to an ability to communicate, a transparent virtuosity that allows the music to quietly come before technique, but a technique perfect enough to admit moments of sympathetic variations of emotion. The soloist achieving this perfection with apparent ease was none less than Maria João Pires.

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble

 

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble was published over fifty years ago. Reading it now, for this particular reviewer, is the equivalent of reading Arnold Bennett in the same year that Margaret Drabble’s novel was written. Bennett’s quintessential late Victorian and Edwardian identity was then and remains almost foreign territory to the contemporary reader, but – even given the fifty year time shift – one might expect that the reader who actually experienced the 1960s as a teenager might suffer no culture shock whatsoever in reading Margaret Drabble’s essentially 1960s novel. That assumption, however, would be quite wrong.

The mechanics of Jerusalem The Golden’s plot can be described without spoiling the experience of reading the book. Clara is a lower middle-class girl growing up in Northam, which is clearly not far from Margaret Drabble’s own Sheffield, despite being described as being fifty miles or so further from London than its real-life manifestation. Clara clearly rather despises Northam. In her third person narrative that always feels like it wants to inhabit the first, Margaret Drabble has her principal character regularly refer to the dirt, the lack of sophistication and general ugliness of the place, factors that convince Clara – and no doubt the author herself – that life should transfer to London at the first opportunity.

Clara’s family is far from dysfunctional, but then the jury might be out on this because it hardly displays any function at all. Mrs Maugham, Clara’s mother, seems to live her life at arm’s length behind a wall of collected prejudice and panic if experience gets too close. Clara seems determined not to be like her mother.

Clara is successful at school but ignores received opinion as to what she might study, preferring her own judgment to the conventional pragmatism of offered advice. Before she leaves school, Clara has already shown significant signs of maturity. Not only does she develop an obvious but inwardly not perceived independence and individuality, but she also matures physically, developing an early and fine bosom, which she soon realises can be used as a source of power.

In London, where she attends university, Clara meets the unlikely-named Clelia, whose family turns out to be precisely the kind of befuddled, messy, propertied, sophisticated, if rather unclean lineage that would forever be diametrically opposed to her own Maugham household. One feels that if Clara’s mother were invited to the Highgate pad of the Denham family, her nose would turn up in silence as she reached for a mop to disinfect the floors. Strangely, Clelia is rather similar to Clara, both physically and personally, though we do not appreciate this until late in the book, when consciously or otherwise Clara seems to morph into the very identity of her friend.

Clara is a thoroughly credible 1960s character. This misunderstood decade, for most people, was not about free love, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll or protest. Ideologically, it may have become so, but day to day life was school uniforms, dance halls largely segregated by sex, social conservatism and conformity, allied to a newly won, for most people, glimmer of opportunity for self-betterment. Clara exhibits the values of her age, but also gnaws gently at the edges of the constraints, as the era appeared to expect one ought. She surprises herself on a school trip to Paris, but she does retain total control, a facility she learns to cultivate.

And it is this aspect of Clara’s character – its desire and ability to control, to extract exactly what she wants from life in general and circumstances in particular that comes to the fore. Clara desires, Clara gets. She is always self-deprecating, but she even learns to use this flawed confidence to focus attention and facilitation from others when she needs it. Gradually Clara is revealed as someone who ruthlessly uses her physical, personal and intellectual advantages to achieve precisely what she wants, despite the fact that she often tries to deny any conscious plan.

Margaret Drabble’s style throughout is both complex and backward-looking. Clara could easily be a character from fifty years earlier – an Arnold Bennett society debutante, aware of social niceties, protocols and conventions, but needing to make her own way through life’s challenges. But Clara is always ready to assert her presence in a way a woman from fifty years earlier might not have done and thereby she achieves her ends, often irrespective of any potential damage done to others. Her potentially self-destructive success in achieving her wishes is increasingly quite disturbing. Hers is an individualism that also could easily become self-defeating, as evidenced in the author’s assessment that Clara “thought nothing of” being sick in a Paris toilet when she decided to leave her married lover behind. We are left thinking that there is something unsaid to follow. And, if that were to be the case, perhaps a more general parallel with the 1960s decade is possible, in that it might have felt like a liberation for the individual, but also that it might eventually have threatened something that was both longer lasting and longer term. One feels by the end that Clara is set for some pretty rude awakenings.

Twelve years of Alfas del Pi Classical Music Society - alfasmusica.com

 

«Nuestro público es el fiel reflejo de lo que es la sociedad alfasina»

Tras doce años de existencia la asociación ha organizado ya más de 250 recitales

por Nicolás Van Looy

 martes, 3-noviembre-2020

Entrevista > Philip Spires / Sociedad de Conciertos de Música Clásica de l’Alfàs del Pi (Wakefield -Reino Unido-, 1952)

Philip Spires representa, en cierta medida, el tópico del gentleman inglés. Su tono de voz suave, su verbo educado al extremo y, sobre todo, una cultura general que emana de cada una de sus palabras convierte una conversación con él en todo un desafío intelectual.

Spires preside la Sociedad de Conciertos de Música Clásica de l’Alfàs del Pi. Con todos estos datos, el lector seguramente se haya hecho una imagen muy definida en la mente sobre nuestro entrevistado y no diferirá mucho de un hombre estirado, pedante y, casi, con levita y monóculo.

Philip Spires es todo lo contrario. Es un tipo cercano con el que cualquier conversación, por larga que pueda ser, se hace corta. Su trabajo le llevó a vivir en distintos y exóticos lugares del mundo y ahora, ya jubilado, ha recalado en l’Alfàs del Pi donde puso en marcha la asociación que sigue presidiendo.

La Sociedad de Conciertos de Música Clásica nació hace doce años. ¿Cómo comenzó esta aventura?

Originalmente colaborábamos con Vicente Orts, en la Finca Senyoret, con unos conciertos de verano que reunían a una pequeña cantidad de personas y a unos pocos músicos. En aquellos días teníamos la ayuda de una entidad bancaria. No era mucho, pero organizábamos dos o tres conciertos en el mes de agosto.

Entonces, Joaquín Palorames, vicepresidente y director artístico de la asociación, también organizaba conciertos en colaboración con algunos ayuntamientos, especialmente en l’Alfàs del Pi. Fue él quien pensó en poner en marcha un programa de conciertos de pago a través de una membresía por parte de los asociados ya que pensaba que podía ser un modelo que funcionaría en un lugar como l’Alfàs.

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Sé que el día de su puesta de largo las cosas no salieron muy bien. ¿Qué sucedió?

(Ríe) Fue el día del incendio forestal de La Nucía. Íbamos a comenzar el concierto y no había suministro eléctrico, lo que nos obligó a arrancar tarde. Pero, desde entonces, hemos realizado unos 250 conciertos.

Ustedes han traído a l’Alfàs del Pi a artistas de todo el mundo sin olvidarse tampoco de los músicos de la zona. ¿Qué es lo más complicado a la hora de organizar un programa anual de conciertos?

¡Lo más complicado para mi es lidiar con Joaquín! Él es el director artístico y discutimos qué artistas queremos invitar. Lo bueno es que él tiene sus propios contactos y, a través de ellos, podemos llegar a la mayor parte de los músicos que queremos traer. Además, hay músicos que nos contactan directamente ofreciéndonos su repertorio y sus conciertos.

También contamos con distintos lugares para organizar los conciertos. Por ello, si contamos con un músico al que no conocemos muy bien, podemos, por ejemplo, probar su recital en el Forum Mare Nostrum antes de programarlo en la Casa de Cultura al año siguiente.

Su trabajo a la hora de contar con músicos de fama internacional es impresionante. ¿Desde dónde han sido capaces de traer concertistas?

Hemos tenido artistas que han venido, obviamente, de España; pero también de Italia, Alemania, Francia, Croacia, Serbia, Polonia, Rusia, Reino Unido, Irlanda, Bélgica, Estados Unidos, Albania, Bulgaria… ¡de muchísimos sitios!

Nuestros conciertos son, en cierta medida, fiel reflejo de la sociedad internacional y multicultural de l’Alfàs del Pi. Es una sensación que me encanta, porque yo me considero, por encima de todo, un ciudadano del mundo y, en segundo lugar, un habitante de un lugar concreto. Soy un absoluto convencido de que cuanta más interacción tengamos, mejor.

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L’Alfàs del Pi no deja de ser un pequeño municipio fuera del circuito de los grandes escenarios de la música clásica. ¿Es complicado convencer a los músicos para que vengan a tocar aquí?

No, en absoluto. No estamos en las grandes ligas, es verdad. Debemos ser realistas y sabemos que no vamos a poder contar con Lang Lang, así que nos centramos en lo que nos podemos permitir y ahí sí que somos capaces de atraer a muy buenos músicos. Artistas con la calidad suficiente como para haber tocado en algunos de los escenarios más importantes de ciudades como Ginebra, París, Nueva York, Viena, etc.

En nuestro caso, muchos de los músicos con los que contamos vienen de Italia por una cuestión de relaciones históricas. Algunos son muy conocidos y otros menos, pero eso es la música. Debes estar abierto a escuchar lo que te ofrecen y lo que te llevas es esa experiencia.

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Una vez han cerrado el acuerdo con el músico, ¿quién propone o decide el repertorio que tocará en su visita a l’Alfàs?

Una vez me crucé con un pianista, cuando dirigía una asociación en otro lugar del mundo, al que le pregunté cuántas piezas podía tocar sin necesidad de ensayar demasiado y me dio que unas mil. Eso es algo extraordinario. Normalmente, los músicos llegan con un repertorio y lo que hacen es repetirlo en cada una de sus actuaciones.

Lo más habitual, por lo tanto, es que cuando hablamos con ellos nos digan “voy a ir con este programa”. Algunas veces les hemos pedido que cambien alguna pieza, pero sólo ha servido para que, llegado el momento del concierto, no cambiaran absolutamente nada.

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¿Cree que es acertado el término de música culta para referirse a la música clásica? ¿No supone etiquetarla de una forma elitista que podría espantar a buena parte del público?

Entiendo lo que dices. En inglés, por ejemplo, no tenemos ese sinónimo, pero la música clásica también es percibida como algo elitista dirigida a la clase media-alta en adelante. Rechazo esas etiquetas de forma enérgica y categórica. Pero voy más allá: odio el término ‘música clásica’. Sé lo suficiente de música como para saber que el periodo clásico comenzó alrededor de 1720 y acabó en 1800.

Supongo que su propia colección de música será enorme.

Arranca en el siglo X y termina en una grabación de una pieza que se compuso la pasada semana. Tengo 32.000 piezas musicales en mi colección en más de 2.000 discos. No quiero repetirme, pero muy pocas de todas esas grabaciones podrían ser consideradas música clásica. Son, principalmente, música moderna y es imposible de clasificar.

Pero esas etiquetas, de una u otra forma, se han impuesto en casi todas las expresiones artísticas.

Así es. Si lo comparamos, por ejemplo, con las artes visuales, tenemos el periodo clásico, pero también el romanticismo, el barroco, el rococó, el renacimiento o el gótico. Y luego, tienes la era moderna, que arrancó entre 1880 y 1900. Mi opinión sobre todos los movimientos en el mundo del arte se resume con un dicho muy conocido en inglés: “el que paga al gaitero compone la pieza”.

Es la gente que paga el arte la que decide su estilo. Desde 1880 o 1890 el arte ha sido más la expresión de un gusto individual, de algo que va a ser patrocinado por un benefactor. Ese es el motivo por el que tenemos esa explosión de diferentes estilos.

Entonces, ¿a qué nos referimos con el término música clásica?

Hoy en día, en pleno 2020, se puede referir a un cuarteto de cuerda, pero también a una grabación, como la que me llegó el otro día, de alguien creando un ritmo tirando granos de arena sobre una mesa para explorar sus efectos sonoros. La clave, para mi, es que el mercado no sea el principal objetivo que marque lo que el artista está intentando hacer. Eso es todo.

En cualquier caso, los artistas también deben de pagar sus facturas y eso lo consiguen siguiendo las demandas del mercado.

Antes me has preguntado sobre el término música culta. Es algo que contrasta con la música que se crea para el mercado. Este te marca una serie de patrones a los que te tienes que amoldar y a la gente no le produce ningún tipo de sorpresa. Cualquier cosa que sorprenda a la gente, que no resulte familiar, crea automáticamente una reacción. A veces, al público no le gusta que se le presenten cosas que no le resultan familiares.

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Si uno hace el experimento de escuchar cierto tipo de música, como por ejemplo el rock, y dar marcha atrás en el tiempo, verá que cada nuevo estilo de música entronca con un movimiento anterior y que no es difícil llegar a la llamada música clásica desde cualquier propuesta. ¿Por qué cree que eso no es algo mucho más evidente y que cuesta tanto que el público se acerque a ella?

De nuevo, falta de familiaridad. En esta sociedad es imposible, y eso es algo que en l’Alfàs del Pi sí que se ha conseguido en cierta medida, escapar de la música pop y su influencia. Oirás música pop en cualquier tienda, en cualquier calle, en los medios de comunicación… Te la están metiendo a todas horas. Es una fijación de consumo.

Si la gente se familiarizara de la misma manera, por ejemplo, con Chopin, también lo reconocerían. Hace poco escribí que para que podamos apreciar algo el público debe cooperar en el proceso y debe quedar libre de prejuicios. Eso es lo que mucha gente hace con la música clásica: prejuzgarla.

Disculpe la osadía, pero Puccini fue, seguramente, uno de los grandes artistas pop de su era. Al fin y al cabo escribía pensando en el mercado y en conseguir un nuevo ‘hit’. ¿No cree que es injusto prejuzgar la música pop de esa forma?

Eso que dices es muy interesante. Si repasas la biografía de Puccini descubrirás que fue prohibido…

Sólo por ciertos sectores, los más conservadores de su época. Sus obras llenaban los auditorios y él era inmensamente popular y rico.

Así es. Schubert apenas tuvo éxito durante mucho tiempo porque lo que proponía era nuevo y la gente no lo aceptó. Puccini era muy accesible, pero también hubo otros compositores de ópera como Leoš Janáček, conocido como el Puccini checo, que tuvieron un mayor legado sobre la ópera que vino después. Puccini, en ese sentido, fue una vía muerta.

Pero, volviendo a tu pregunta original, también rechazo, aunque lo he usado antes, el término de música pop. No es popular. Más del 90% de los discos pop que se publican no producen ningún beneficio porque no son populares. Lo correcto, por lo tanto, sería decir música populista.

Volvamos al ámbito local. ¿La mayoría del público de sus conciertos está formado por residentes extranjeros?

No. Nuestro público, te lo aseguro, refleja fielmente la sociedad alfasina, es decir, está formada al 50% por españoles y extranjeros. Y todo, con dos excepciones llamativas: no conseguimos que vengan muchos ingleses y tampoco, y esto me duele más, mucha gente joven.

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¿A qué cree que se debe?

Mira, durante un tiempo viví en Brunéi. Allí todas las chicas jóvenes de origen chino tocaban el piano, pero nunca vimos a ninguna en nuestros conciertos. Creo que es algo lógico. Un concierto de música clásica implica estar dos horas en un sitio sentado y escuchando música y los jóvenes están en una edad en la que lo que quieren es socializar.

Pero sí van al cine.

Sí, pero eso lo haces con tus amigos e, incluso, puedes cuchichear con ellos sobre lo que estás viendo. Si eso lo haces en un concierto de música clásica la gente comenzará a quejarse y a decirte que te calles.

La música es una constante en la programación cultural alfasina

Entrevista por Nico van Looy

 

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

There is perhaps no other tale in European culture that synthesises history, myth, literature and perhaps religion as famously and as frequently as Homer’s Iliad. So often has this story of Bronze Age conflict been adapted, one might wonder why an accomplished writer, known for her apposite, pungent and penetrating comment on contemporary society and its issues should turn to it for inspiration. It is a question that recurs throughout a reading of The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.

Surely an intentional pun on the similar film title, the substitution of Girls for Lambs, plus the associated allusion to insane slaughter and violence ought to point a reader toward the eventual direction of the book. The fact that this contemporary reality emerges gently and subtly is further evidence of Pat Barker’s profound writing skill. In a less accomplished writer’s hand, this rather blunt concept might just bludgeon the reader’s experience with polemic in a similar way to Achilles’s sword occasionally dealing with heads. But in Pat Barker’s hands, the idea works supremely and subtly.

The Silence of the Girls begins with a victory for Achilles in which a Trojan adversary is defeated and killed before his city is sacked. Men and boys are slaughtered, as well as most of the women, except for those deemed worthy of abduction as slaves, an office that would demand regular calls to duty. Young women thus become the chattel of victory, the spoils to be despoiled at the hands of the brutes, all to be suffered in the submissive silence of slavery.

Briseis is a king’s daughter who loses most of her family in the city’s sacking and it is through her eyes that the story is seen. She herself becomes a prize. Achilles, the half god, half man superhero, is the obvious claimant, but Briseis ends up in the confused clutches of Agamemnon. Achilles mysteriously withdraws from battle, apparently to sulk, and the Greek cause in the war with Troy suffers severely as a result.

Now thus far this might sound like a conventional rewrite of a well-known and well covered story, but Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls sees events through the eyes of the newly enslaved Briseis and her viewpoint adds much to the familiar territory. It is through her prism that we see an ancient world that is foreign to us but familiar to her. Her observations become interpretations of its customs, beliefs and assumptions. Like Helen, the beauty whose abduction started the conflict, Briseis is young, eligible and marriageable. Unlike Helen, Briseis was already on a losing side and must endure her gender without privilege, though in the bedroom their differences in position might just have been minimal, mere details of posture. While the males enact their increasingly ritualised conflict, Briseis and the other women hold everything together via food, comfort, kindness and tolerance. Their reward is further use, always with the threat of death nearby, if ever the fancy were to wear off.

In the case of Briseis, the fancy of Agamemnon was always in question, like his geography, but Achilles, it seems, regards her as something more than a mere bed-mate, though he seems have difficulty expressing his feelings. A thoroughly modern man, we presume. When Agamemnon gives way and Achilles claims his prize, there develops a bond which might pass for marriage. But somehow, any acknowledgement of a woman’s rights seems to be beyond the imagination of these committed warriors.

And this lack of ability to see self-interest extended by greater tolerance is doubly underlined when, at the end of the conflict, a sacrifice to the gods is needed to ensure a fair wind for the voyage home and this automatically has to entail killing someone who is young, virginal and female. Old habits, no matter how hard-set, simply do not die.

By the end, the significance of the title and Briseis’s relationship with Achilles has thus become clear. Contemporary films and genre fiction still make their point by sensationalising male violence against women, and perhaps relations between the sexes still bear some of the hallmarks that characterised the behaviour of these Bronze Age brutes. The difference, perhaps, is merely one of degree.

The Silence of the Girls is a challenging read, but not because of difficult language or deviousness of plot. Indeed, like much great drama, we know what is going to happen in advance, since the story is so well known. The joy is learning how things happen and how they are interpreted, and thus the difficulty arises because the reader must operate on different levels of awareness throughout. To ignore this contemporary parallel would render The Silence of the Girls just another re-write of an old story, and it is much more than that.

Sweet Caress by William Boyd

Sweet Caress, the tile of William Boyd´s 2015 novel, refers to the gentle contact the individual makes with the very surface of existence, the contact we loosely call “life”. It presents “The many lives of Amory Clay” that are contained in its principal character’s existence. As has become the author´s forté, William Boyd again brings to life a character who lives through the history of the twentieth century, impinging upon it, influencing it, being influenced and changed by it and thus consumed by it. It´s called life, and it’s linear, constantly reviewed but never relived, always surprising, but at the time apparently predictable. Like history, it’s just one thing after another.

William Boyd´s characters are always carefully but lightly drawn. They are never easily caricatured, and even less easily summarised, rather like people, in fact. Their identity is amassed from their experience of life, congeries of circumstance and chance. And, like a great artist, the author manages to create rounded, credible people from the very lightest strokes of his brush, leaving the reader to create whatever detail makes sense. But they also retain a complexity that makes them convincingly real. These different lives of the subtitle always evolve apparently authentically from Amory Clay´s circumstance and so the transition from one setting to the next, though often abrupt, appears possibly inevitable, but always credible.

Amory Clay, female, lives this sweet caress of life, despite having been described at birth as her parents' son. She is taught an intriguing habit by a relative of describing people in four adjectives. Complex, indulgent, direct, driven. It´s a game that Amory Clay plays throughout her life and one she passes on to others, so this activity emerges occasionally throughout the book and introduces the reader to people that otherwise might take pages to describe. It is the verbal equivalent of a snapshot, a partially accurate freezing in time of a view of another person, but inevitably always taking a selfie.

Amory Clay´s family is inoffensively middle class, dangerously so, especially after her father returns a changed man from the First World War. Parcelled off to boarding school because someone else is paying for the opportunity, Amory does well, resentfully well, until events change her life. There will be no going back. Life´s sweet caress becomes a push onto a different and diverging path.

Photography motivates Amory. From her first click of a box camera, she is captivated by its possibilities. She turns her back of what the average professional might pursue to make a living to explore the possibilities of social record, photojournalism, the bizarre or images of chance. And then she pursues a photographer’s life, making her living from whatever genre of her chosen profession presents opportunity. She is afraid it will not pay the rent, but it does, and often things go quite well, for a while. She has ideas that it might even make her famous, but infamy is always near, always an option, sometimes preferred. Circumstances are often dangerous, both for her and the objects of her gaze, but then danger often unlocks new doors and paves a way via a new chapter to security.

Professionally and personally, Amory Clay visits various countries and continents, places and events, wars and country estates. She has relationships with men she encounters, but rarely on a short-term basis. She both drinks and makes love copiously. She is injured and recovers, partially, she thinks. She endangers her own life and places others in peril, but she adds emotional and experiential value to the lives of all she encounters, including the readers of William Boyd’s invention of her history. She even once kisses a woman, albeit one dressed as a man, in a doorway as a ruse to divert the attentions of potential attackers on the rampage.

By the end of this beautiful novel, we feel we not only know Amory Clay, but we also empathise with her and identify with her. Saying goodbye leaves almost a sense of bereavement. We have lost someone close and dear, perhaps we have even lost a part of ourselves, as a certain Lady Farr comes to the end of her adopted aristocratic life. It is she who writes her contemporary journal as a commentary to the memories of Amory Clay, the photographer, and who is, we know from the start, that same Amory Clay who became Lady Farr. How she became a titled landowner is just another story, completely unlikely, but no more so than any of the rest and, in the hands of William Boyd, utterly credible. Our encounter with Amory Clay’s many lives takes us to places we have never been and will never go, allows us to share a life we will never live and enriches our own memory via its shared, imagined, experience.

As ever in William Boyd’s writing, there is always one real gem only partially hidden amongst the history. In Sweet Caress it appears via a photograph taken by chance in Vietnam by Amory Clay, a record that will have to be expunged from the record if history is to remain written in its usual partially inaccurate way. But why single out one particular gem in this veritable jewel box of a novel?

The Leopard by Giovanni de Lampedusa

We are in the mid-nineteenth century in what we now call southern Italy. But then it was specifically Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples under the Bourbons. Within the pages of The Leopard, there unfolds a tale of landed gentry doing their specific things alongside the nation's general struggle for unification. There are numerous touches of brilliance, but overall it's a book I probably would prefer not to have read, despite particular moments of brilliance. Talking about the Bourbon's palace - Capodimonte - he says that the architecture is sound, but the decor and detail leave a lot to be desired - rather like the Bourbons themselves.

There are betrothals, weddings and much celebratory eating. There are also politics and liberation for Italy, albeit elevating yet another King, Victor Emmanuel, who was nevertheless something of a foreigner for these people in the south.

There is much to commend this book, especially the elegance and wit of the writing. But the modern reader may find the atmosphere just a little too stuffy.