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A review by slippy_underfoot
The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel
3.0
Nicola is a few years out of a fine arts degree and drifting through jobs in London, triying to relocate her artistic drive. Her friends all seem to be achieving something, even if on a small scale, but she has stalled. She arrives at the Feminist Assembly, an archive dedicated to women’s art, looking for answers.
Marcella, the curator, presents Nicola with letters sent to a friend by an unnamed ceramicist during the 70s and 80s. The letters chronicle the artist’s struggle with her life and art. The letters were donated after the artist took her own life.
That artistic frustration could lead to such finality exerts a horrible fascination for Nicola.
As she picks her way through the one-sided conversation, the lives of the women – Donna the artist, Susan the recipient - are illuminated for the reader by glimpses of their lives at the times the letters are written and received.
Nicola is struck by the echoes of her own life in the letters, co-incidences of place, and feeling, and circumstance. As the three women climb through each other’s lives she becomes untethered from her own reality, blurring her lines and colours.
It’s no surprise to learn that Hannah Regel is a poet. Her prose is gorgeously evocative.
We come to realise that for these women a life in art is an infinite process, indeterminate and unrelenting, where the questions you ask say more about you than what you do with the answers, if any, you receive. These questions must also sustain you. There are lives which can deal with this, lives which can’t, and lives which step away from it. They orbit each other and exert a pull which causes their tides to ebb and flow together.
The book itself is a sculpted piece, ambiguous and obscure in places, with no neat label to pin it down. I enjoyed the reading of it and the later reflections on the questions with which it left me.
Where does one life end and another begin, if they walk the same roads and carry the same loads? And what is the experience of being lost inside the lives of others?
Something very close to dread, Susan.
Marcella, the curator, presents Nicola with letters sent to a friend by an unnamed ceramicist during the 70s and 80s. The letters chronicle the artist’s struggle with her life and art. The letters were donated after the artist took her own life.
That artistic frustration could lead to such finality exerts a horrible fascination for Nicola.
As she picks her way through the one-sided conversation, the lives of the women – Donna the artist, Susan the recipient - are illuminated for the reader by glimpses of their lives at the times the letters are written and received.
Nicola is struck by the echoes of her own life in the letters, co-incidences of place, and feeling, and circumstance. As the three women climb through each other’s lives she becomes untethered from her own reality, blurring her lines and colours.
It’s no surprise to learn that Hannah Regel is a poet. Her prose is gorgeously evocative.
We come to realise that for these women a life in art is an infinite process, indeterminate and unrelenting, where the questions you ask say more about you than what you do with the answers, if any, you receive. These questions must also sustain you. There are lives which can deal with this, lives which can’t, and lives which step away from it. They orbit each other and exert a pull which causes their tides to ebb and flow together.
The book itself is a sculpted piece, ambiguous and obscure in places, with no neat label to pin it down. I enjoyed the reading of it and the later reflections on the questions with which it left me.
Where does one life end and another begin, if they walk the same roads and carry the same loads? And what is the experience of being lost inside the lives of others?
Something very close to dread, Susan.