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A Line Made By Walking
The Goldsmiths Prize
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2017 Goldsmiths Prize shortlist - A Line Made by Walking
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Works about Lower, Slower Views. I test myself: Richard Long “A Line Made by Walking”, 1967. A short, straight track worn by footsteps back and forth through an expense of glass. Long doesn’t like to interfere with the landscapes through which he walks, but sometimes builds sculptures from materials supplied by chance. Then he leaves them behind to fall apart. Pieces which takes up as little space in the world as possible. And which do little damage.
In this loosely autobiographical second novel, Frankie is a 25-26 year old Irish graduate from Art College, struggling to establish her own artistic career and her wider sense of her life. Working in a Dublin art gallery while living alone in a bedsit, she suffers a sudden crisis of confidence and having initially moved back to her childhood home, asks her mother if she can instead live in her (three years deceased) grandmother’s rural bungalow, hoping that the solitude and the exposure to nature will allow her to lose her confusion and despair.
The book largely consists of her thoughts and meditations over her period in the house, often alone but occasionally interacting with her neighbour (and elderly born again Christian) and her family, particularly her mother with whom she has a remarkably functional relationship.
As thoughts and themes emerge to her, she tests herself by recalling conceptual art pieces of which her interpretation matches the theme, such as the example above which also provides the title of the novel, and which in interviews Baume explains as particularly important to Frankie as she interprets it as being about “searching, repetition, what we leave behind”. Around 70 of these interpretations, all with the phrase "I test myself" punctuate the novel.
At the book’s opening, Frankie comes across a dead robin, and meditates that she seems to frequently come across dead animals:
Somehow, they always find me. Crouching in the cavernous ditches and hurling themselves under the wheels of my Fiesta. Toppling from the sky to land at my feet. And because my small world is coming apart in increments, it seems fitting that the creatures should be dying too. They are being killed with me; they are being killed for me. I decide I will take a photograph of this robin. The first in a series, perhaps. A series about how everything is being slowly killed.”
And Frankie’s own conceptual art project becomes an integral part of the book. Each of the 10 chapters is named after a dead creature that she finds and photographs, and the grainy black and white photographs, which clearly acknowledge Sebald, are included in the text.
Frankie knows that her own traumas and problems are minor compared to those of others and struggles with her own sense of self-absorption
These aren’t things which constitute a troubled childhood, not even close ………….
And yet, here I am. Perceiving everything that is wonderful to be proportionately difficult; everything that is possible an elaborate battle to achieve. My happy life was never enough for me. I always considered my time to be more precious than that of other people and almost every routine pursuit – equitable employment, domestic chores, friendship – unworthy of it. Now I see how this rebellion against ordinary happiness is the greatest vanity of them all
But at the same time reacts badly to any attempt to suggest she is depressed and particularly the attempts of medical professionals to treat her situation as a diagnosable and chemically treatable condition.
After a disastrous attempt at small talk with a hairdresser, Frankie reflects
The ability to talk to people, that’s the key to the world. It doesn’t matter whether you are able to articulate your own thoughts and feelings and meanings or not. What matters is being able to make the noises that encourage others to feel comfortable, and the inquiries which present them with the opportunity to articulate their thoughts and feelings and meanings, the particulars of their existences, their passions, preoccupations, beliefs. If you can talk to other people this way, you can go – you can get – anywhere in this world in life
Frankie clearly lacks this ability, and even the desire to develop it, and this widens further into her difficulty in accepting the way the world works, and her problems into interacting with other people (her only really stable relationship is with her mother, as she knows there that she can be awkward and rude and that her mother will still love and accept her unconditionally).
This in turn drives her towards the word of conceptual art, and indeed to interpret the world around her as conceptual art, in her own words “I think: art is everywhere. I think: art is every inexplicable thing” and “Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behaviour is an act of performance”. Viewing a field of daffodils across from her grandmother’s bungalow she is unable to enjoy the view, instead reflecting “Daffodils only remind me of cancer, forget-me-nots of kidney disease, red poppies of the trenches”
She also conceives of ways to use art to represent her frustration at what she sees as the malfunctioning of the world.
Every time I take the train, I buy a coffee .. and the trolley attendant asks me the same question “sugar or milk”. And I reply “no, neither, thanks”. And he or she then presents me with, alongside my coffee, a stirring stick. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it had happened only once, or if it was the same attendant, but this is not so. Whoever it is, every single time, they make the same mistake. I’ve been gathering these sticks for seven years now … They are a project. I have not yet decided how to display them, but they are a conceptual art project about the way in which people don’t listen, don’t think
The novel at times teters on the verge of boredom, given Frankie’s drifting, but this is staved off by Baume’s imaginative use of metaphors and descriptive language, particularly relating to nature, only occasionally resorting to cliché (a rather odd rant about dental floss for example which would not be out of place in a hackneyed stand-up set).
Overall an excellent, different and memorable novel.
My parents did not want me to come here to stay. They are, like everybody, fearful of being completely alone and suspicious of people who choose to be. They hesitate, like everybody, to understand how it could heal me, as I believe it can. I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone. Tramp Press is a small independent press from Ireland, whose “aim is to find, nurture and publish exceptional literary talent. Tramp Press is committed to finding only the best and most deserving books, by new and established writers." They are best known for the Goldsmiths Prize winning and Republic of Consciousness Prize Solar Bones although, as with this book, they had to pass the rights to a UK publisher to make it Booker eligible.
See: http://www.independent.ie/entertainme...
A Line Made by Walking is Sara Baume’s 2nd novel, loosely autobiographically based although ultimately fictional.
Works about Lower, Slower Views. I test myself: Richard Long “A Line Made by Walking”, 1967. A short, straight track worn by footsteps back and forth through an expense of glass. Long doesn’t like to interfere with the landscapes through which he walks, but sometimes builds sculptures from materials supplied by chance. Then he leaves them behind to fall apart. Pieces which takes up as little space in the world as possible. And which do little damage.
Our first person narrator, Frankie starts aged 25, and when she turns 26 she remarks that she is now unambiguously nearer 30 than 20 (which perhaps gives away that she is no mathematician but rather an arts student).
She has been a keen artist all her life but: how I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.
Having graduated from college, and while working in an art gallery in Dublin, as a way into an artistic vocation, she undergoes a mental breakdown. One trigger being a Werner Herzog film, Encounters at The End of the World, and a scene involving the impenetrable resolve of a deranged penguin who simply walks away from his colony towards the mountains 70 km away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7kdD...
Her identification with the penguin including her own inability to be part of everyday life, which she realises that she and her family have historically excused as a part of her artistic temperament, an excuse that increasingly rings hollow, not least as she feels like a fraud:
Because I am the complicated, creative, cantankerous younger child, my family have always afforded me dispensation from the petty responsibilities of life, from the conventional social graces.
...
But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.
She returns first to the family home – which she always refers to as “the famine hospital” (after the purpose for which it was originally built) but then retreats to live alone in her recently deceased grandmother’s home in the remote countryside (‘turbine hill’, she calls it, after the large wind turbine behind the house).
There she largely walks in the local countryside, and ponders what has led her here.
And yet, here I am. Perceiving everything that is wonderful to be proportionately difficult; everything that is possible an elaborate battle to achieve. My happy life was never enough for me. I always considered my time to be more precious than that of other people and almost every routine pursuit—equitable employment, domestic chores, friendship—unworthy of it. Now I see how this rebellion against ordinary happiness is the greatest vanity of them all.
Early on in her stay on turbine hill, she finds a dead robin, or rather it feels as if the dead robin somehow found her:
Because my small world is coming apart in increments, it seems fitting that the creatures should be dying too. They are being killed with me, they are being killed for me.
I decide I will take a photograph of this robin. The first in a series, perhaps.
A photograph about how everything is being slowly killed.
This series of animals that she discovers forms an artistic project around which the book is based – each chapter illustrated by one such photo but only of wild animals she discovers, already dead or dying:
Here is another rule for my project: no pets, only wild things. So it can be about the immense poignancy of how, in the course of ordinary life, we only get to look at the sublime once it has dropped to the ditch, once the maggots have already arrived at work.
This is the actual image of the robin (from a similar artistic project Baume herself undertook some years earlier than the novel):
But in the book the photographs are reproduced in grainy black and white, as a quite deliberate nod to the great WG Sebald.
Another key theme relating to her no longer being a young person or student is how innate flexibility fades, skills that we all have as children disappear through lack of use.
And perhaps this leads to her desire to test herself, by recalling works of modern conceptual art (often performance art) that relate to the feelings she is analysing.
Why must I test myself? Because no one else will, not any more. Now that I am no longer a student of any kind, I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head. I must slide new drawers into chests and attach new rollers to armchairs. I must maintain the old highboys and sideboards and whatnots. Polish, patch, dust, buff.
Around seventy such works feature in the novel – each introduced and described verbally (but not reproduced) in a similar way, for example:
I watch the neighbours passing. I think: there are only two directions, really. Away from home, and back again, and you cannot, on all sincerity, say that you are going somewhere when you return so soon, and play it over again the next day, without ever making any progress.
Works about Progress, I test myself: Vito Acconci, Step Piece, 1970. At 8am every day in Apartment 6B, 102 Christopher Street, New York City, Acconci stepped up and down off an eighteen-inch stool at a rate of thirty steps a minute for as long as was physically possible, and I know there particulars, because at the end of every month Acconci drew up a report delineating the negligible variation between days. Charting, exhaustively, his total lack of headway.
The reader is invited by Baume in her author’s afterword to experience the art for themselves and form their own interpretation, and I certainly found it added to the book to do so (via google) or perhaps that her interpretations added to the art, although in many respects, particularly as the works are so conceptual, the description in the novel can easily stand alone:
I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not.
Frankie also finds herself wondering whether she see art where other don’t, and whether this is a function of her artistic nature or a sign of her mental fragility:
I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.
[...]
The ability to talk to people: that’s the key to the world. It doesn’t matter whether you are able to articulate your own thoughts and feelings and meanings or not. What matters is being able to make the noises that encourage others to feel comfortable, and the inquiries which present them with the opportunity to articulate their thoughts and feelings and meanings, the particulars of their existences, their passions, preoccupations, beliefs.
This is a deliberately slow, meditative book - Frankie herself realising that there is no easy resolution in sight - I lie down and think about how this whole long, dark summer ought to end in a substantial event. But probably won't. For the first time, I acknowledge the possibility that nothing will die, or change, or even happen. - but it is all the more powerful for being so.
An original and powerful work - recommended.
Paul-Your first comment references your interest in Thomas Bernhard. Seagull just published a translation of his complete poems. An extremely interesting volume, and a typically beautiful hardback from Seagull.
Thanks will check that out
A lovely novel about solitude and depression? Yes, that’s how A Line Made by Walking strikes me: an utterly convincing novel about Frankie, an especially intelligent, well-educated, and artistically innovative twenty-six year old woman who retreats further and further into reclusiveness. Depression can be boring, but Baume saves A Line Made by Walking from boredom by Frankie’s “I test myself” references to visual art and by Frankie’s unexpected and idiosyncratic observations. Baume’s description of Frankie’s 26th birthday cycles from laugh-out-loud funny (when Frankie’s mother calls) to uncomfortably sad (Frankie’s sighting of the fox) to heart-warming and poignant (Frankie’s mother’s visit). Baume’s rapid calibration of her reader’s emotions was remarkable. Also remarkable was the warmth of Baume’s portrayal of Frankie’s familial relationships, and especially her relationships with her mother and her memories of her grandmother. All in all, an excellent novel and a novel to reread with patience, allowing time to Google Frankie’s “I test myself” references in context.In his comments above, Gumble’s Yard mentions that ”the grainy black and white photographs, which clearly acknowledge Sebald, are included in the text.” Unfortunately, the Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt U.S. edition omits these photographs.
Omitting the photos - that is downright bizarre, each chapter revolves around them! Albeit I guess the author referring to them and the reader imagining could work as well.
Even the Kindle version has photographs (I just checked as it is next on my to-read list and I thought I might have to buy a paper copy!).
Paul wrote: "Omitting the photos - that is downright bizarre, each chapter revolves around them! Albeit I guess the author referring to them and the reader imagining could work as well."Reading your and Gumble's Yard's comments, I think that the photos would probably substantially enhance reading A Line Made by Walking. I don't own it but I'm planning to reread it more leisurely than my initial reading. Which edition did you read with the photos? I'll plan to order it from the UK.
Dan - I originally read the William Heinemann version (which was a UK version targeted at the Booker prize) ........ however can I urge you to support the original Irish publisher and order direct from Tramp Press (who also originally published Solar Bones)
Thanks, GY. I did just order directly from Tramp Press. The Republic of Consciousness shortlist will be a pricey indulgence for me, but one that I'm eagerly awaiting.
Thanks for this information. I didn’t even know there was an edition with pictures. I’m loving the book so far and have been looking up the art she mentions. I’ve also ordered the book from Tramp Press today.
NB to avoid disappointment, the pictures are the dead animal photos which lead to the titles of each chapter (e.g. the robin above, from chapter 1, albeit picture above is the colour original, not in the book). The art of course one needs to look up / watch one self, although the references at the end are very helpful.
I'm reading this at the moment and like it a lot. The troubled stillness at the centre of the book is very well evoked. I met Sara Baume today at a literary event that took place on a boat! She's a terrifically interesting person and, as is obvious from the book, passionate about art, nature and literature.
I would second Dan's review except tht I didn't find the book wonderful. While I appreciate all of the characteristics Dan mentions, particularly the portrayal of the mother, I was boring silly reading this book. It also reminds me how narrow and limited a movement conceptual art was.
I'm about halfway through and enjoying it (if that's the right word). But I'm bothered by the chapter called Rook and the activity at the start of the subsequent chapter. The birdwatcher in me is getting fidgety because the narrator is using the words Rook and Crow interchangeably and they are not the same thing! Plus, the picture looks suspiciously like a Crow rather than a Rook but it's a bit hard to be sure off a small picture of a dead bird!The German edition (I think it was that one) of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers did something similar by having a Rook on its front cover when the main character is Crow.
Neil wrote: "The birdwatcher in me is getting fidgety "Or as I am sure one of Nicholas Royle's characters would say "the twitcher in me is getting twitchy"
George Martin at least knows the difference between ravens and crows (I am not sure Rooks are involved in AWoIaF)
http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/R...
Gumble's Yard wrote: "Neil wrote: "The birdwatcher in me is getting fidgety "Or as I am sure one of Nicholas Royle's characters would say "the twitcher in me is getting twitchy"
George Martin at least knows the diffe..."
I am twitchy about being called a twitcher! There's a world of difference between a birdwatcher and a twitcher. Basically, twitchers will get up at an unearthly hour and drive 200 miles to see a rare bird, whereas a birdwatcher just takes what they find with the occasional trip for something special. Or something like that.
Ravens are huge birds, so a bit easier to spot. Crows and Rooks are often difficult to tell apart, except for the general rule (not always true or you would never have a murder) that if there is more than one, they are Rooks.
Anyway, it's a minor point (unless you are a twitcher/birdwatcher in an otherwise excellent book).
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Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
(last edited Oct 09, 2017 09:22AM)
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rated it 4 stars
Yes I knew about the twitcher/birdwatcher difference and the implied insult in calling the latter by the former, but the wordplay was asking to be made and hence I deliberately attributed it to one of Royle's characters (I was thinking of Stephen Osmer).As they say in Westeros - dark wings, dark words
Fair enough. I am a heading in the twitching direction but have not yet fledged. I’m keen enough to read bird bits of books rather more carefully than perhaps I should.
I cannot say I had noticed that Neil
The distinction that used to amuse me at university (you can tell the social circles within which we moved) was between trainspotters and bashers. The latter spotted not unusual trains but rather lived for travelling on obscure train tracks, or on trains that wouldn't normally go along a certain track. Each group regarded the other as ultra-nerds and bashers were highly insulted if you called them trainspotters. Is there a bird equivalent?
Just twitchers and bird watchers, really. Twitchers are often insultingly referred to as people who are just interested in ticking a list with no real interest in birds. Bird watchers are more interested in the general life of the birds, rather than just being able to say they’ve seen one.
Neil wrote: "Fair enough. I am a heading in the twitching direction but have not yet fledged. I’m keen enough to read bird bits of books rather more carefully than perhaps I should."As an aside Have read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom?
(I'm still waiting for my copy of A Line made by Walking as I ordered it through my local bookstore)
Yes, I have read it, but on its release so about 7 years ago and it’s a bit blurry now! There’s warblers in it, right?
The cerulean warbler
On the photos, interesting that the Tramp Press original has them at the start of each chapter, whereas the UK re-print has them appearing at the point within each chapter that they are mentioned. Still seems bizarre to omit them altogether though - not sure it necessarily detracts much from the book, but the photos clearly are important to the author.
Mod
Mod
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Paul wrote: "On the photos, interesting that the Tramp Press original has them at the start of each chapter, whereas the UK re-print has them appearing at the point within each chapter that they are mentioned. ..."I asked Sara Baume tonight about the pictures.
The Irish original, her publisher persuaded her to put them at the start of each chapter.
But the UK edition has the approach she wanted - pictures appearing in the body of the text, as a nod to W.G. Sebald
And in the US her publishers told her Americans are too squeamish to cope with pictures of dead things so told her she had to omit them.
She feels that with 3/4 Irish winners of the prize, she has little chance this year. Her money is on Nicola Barker.
Just finished - I hope it wins, and I am glad Frankie didn't photograph the dead cat.
I think the US publishers were wrong to exclude the photos. I don't know any Americans who would have been squeamish at the sight of them.
Ang. I would recommend you try her debut novel also.
Thank you, I will choose that as one of the three Tramp Press titles I bought as a RofC perk.
That's - with Will Self - two big WG Sebald fans on the shortlist. He and Thomas Bernhard are the two authors where any fan gets extra points in my book.
Useful author interviews or articles:
http://www.foyles.co.uk/Blog-Sara-Baume
http://www.bigissuenorth.com/reading-...
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/bo...
https://bookpage.com/interviews/21221...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
From the judges:
Tracey Thorn on A Line Made by Walking
In Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking, a young artist struggling with depression leaves the city and moves into a rural bungalow, the empty home of her dead grandmother, where, immersed in nature, she takes photographs of the dead creatures she finds in the surrounding fields. These very photos then appear throughout the novel, punctuating the text, in a way that serves to blur the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Frankie, the narrator, experiences and records the natural world in unstinting detail, turning aside from it repeatedly to make equally detailed notes on the artworks which she has studied and which inspire her. Testing herself. Stuck in a rut but looking for a way out. There is an obsessive quality to all this, in a novel which picks apart strands of loneliness, art, misery and family, trying to work out where we fit in the world, and what sadness means, and what on earth might help.