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A Line Made By Walking
The author of the award-winning Spill Simmer Falter Wither returns with a stunning new novel about a young artist's search for meaning and healing in rural Ireland.
Struggling to cope with urban life-and life in general-Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family's rural house on "turbine hill," vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here-her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school-and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life. As Frankie picks up photography once more, closely examining the natural world around her, she reconsiders seminal works of art and their relevance.
With "prose that makes sure we look and listen," Sara Baume has written an elegant novel that is as much an exploration of wildness, the art world, mental illness, and community as it is a profoundly beautiful and powerful meditation on life.
Struggling to cope with urban life-and life in general-Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family's rural house on "turbine hill," vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here-her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school-and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life. As Frankie picks up photography once more, closely examining the natural world around her, she reconsiders seminal works of art and their relevance.
With "prose that makes sure we look and listen," Sara Baume has written an elegant novel that is as much an exploration of wildness, the art world, mental illness, and community as it is a profoundly beautiful and powerful meditation on life.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published February 23, 2017
292 people are currently reading
5,338 people want to read
About the author
Sara Baume
16books441followersSara Baume is an Irish novelist.
Her father is of English descent while her mother is of Irish descent. As her parents travelled around in a caravan, Sara Baume was born "on the road to Wigan Pier". When she was 4, they moved to County Cork, Ireland. She studied fine art at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design and creative writing at Trinity College, Dublin from where she was awarded her MPhil. She has received a Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Her books are published by Tramp Press in Ireland and Heinemann in Britain.
In 2015, she participated in the International Writing Program's Fall Residency at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, IA.
Her father is of English descent while her mother is of Irish descent. As her parents travelled around in a caravan, Sara Baume was born "on the road to Wigan Pier". When she was 4, they moved to County Cork, Ireland. She studied fine art at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design and creative writing at Trinity College, Dublin from where she was awarded her MPhil. She has received a Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Her books are published by Tramp Press in Ireland and Heinemann in Britain.
In 2015, she participated in the International Writing Program's Fall Residency at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, IA.
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October 5, 2017
Update ... great deal: This is a Kindle special today for $2.99
Charles Bukowski once said.....
"Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right."
In "A Line Made by Walking", 25 year old Frankie, an artist, spends a lot of time being alone. Seeking relief from inner pain she associates with city life in Dublin.....her art, job, friends, and a general sense of her failed self, she retreats to her deceased grandmother's Bungalow. Frankie has lost her sense of 'self', and 'purpose'. She isn't sure she wants to live.
The solitary life that Frankie is living.....[often with lovely 'stream-of-consciousness' prose], speaks intimately to the reader.
We observe this lonesome character carefully - get inside her head with her....feel her grief. Frankie is morning her grandmother-while struggling to survive the thoughts inside her head.
She thinks about her childhood- her grandmother- mother - father - school friends - books - death- various artists, art projects and rules she designs for herself.
While lying on the amber carpet in the Bungalow, Frankie takes to crying, or eating a chocolate bar, or looking through magazines, and reading a book every night ....or thinking about favorite musicians. She examines the trinkets left behind that belonged to her grandmother. ....she sips drinks... thinks about herself vs. other people....comparing differences. She begins decoding samplings of art. It almost begins to feel like an addiction- but maybe it was a focus she needed to experience feeling worthy in an ordinary world. It's a little complex - yet had a meditative inquiry feeling.
Frankie has her camera -- and a project ( rules to her project: she will photograph dead animals). The ten animals Frankie photographs are of a ROBIN, RABBIT, RAT, MOUSE, ROOK, FOX, HARE, HEDGEHOG, and BADGER.
I found it easy to relate to Frankie. She felt loss - alone in the world - but she didn't consider herself sick. Yet - over time it's clear depression and anxiety has been with her as long as she can remember.
Frankie said:,
"I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone".
This next excerpt from Frankie resonated with me:
"I am not sick, just lost. And lostness is an entirely fixable state. Whereas sickness � � mind � � sickness in particular � � is entirely contrary, intangible, unfixable. And I am calmed by this idea, encouraged. And so I go on."
"There really isn't much wrong with me, I say it's just that, well, I'm not like other people; I don't want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other peoples eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalize me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know?"
Rich, and intimate! Sara Baume makes an indelible impression and avoids lapses into sentimentality -- yet is a powerful and compelling story. - BEAUTIFUL BOOK!!!
Thank You Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Netgalley, and Sara Baume
Charles Bukowski once said.....
"Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right."
In "A Line Made by Walking", 25 year old Frankie, an artist, spends a lot of time being alone. Seeking relief from inner pain she associates with city life in Dublin.....her art, job, friends, and a general sense of her failed self, she retreats to her deceased grandmother's Bungalow. Frankie has lost her sense of 'self', and 'purpose'. She isn't sure she wants to live.
The solitary life that Frankie is living.....[often with lovely 'stream-of-consciousness' prose], speaks intimately to the reader.
We observe this lonesome character carefully - get inside her head with her....feel her grief. Frankie is morning her grandmother-while struggling to survive the thoughts inside her head.
She thinks about her childhood- her grandmother- mother - father - school friends - books - death- various artists, art projects and rules she designs for herself.
While lying on the amber carpet in the Bungalow, Frankie takes to crying, or eating a chocolate bar, or looking through magazines, and reading a book every night ....or thinking about favorite musicians. She examines the trinkets left behind that belonged to her grandmother. ....she sips drinks... thinks about herself vs. other people....comparing differences. She begins decoding samplings of art. It almost begins to feel like an addiction- but maybe it was a focus she needed to experience feeling worthy in an ordinary world. It's a little complex - yet had a meditative inquiry feeling.
Frankie has her camera -- and a project ( rules to her project: she will photograph dead animals). The ten animals Frankie photographs are of a ROBIN, RABBIT, RAT, MOUSE, ROOK, FOX, HARE, HEDGEHOG, and BADGER.
I found it easy to relate to Frankie. She felt loss - alone in the world - but she didn't consider herself sick. Yet - over time it's clear depression and anxiety has been with her as long as she can remember.
Frankie said:,
"I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone".
This next excerpt from Frankie resonated with me:
"I am not sick, just lost. And lostness is an entirely fixable state. Whereas sickness � � mind � � sickness in particular � � is entirely contrary, intangible, unfixable. And I am calmed by this idea, encouraged. And so I go on."
"There really isn't much wrong with me, I say it's just that, well, I'm not like other people; I don't want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other peoples eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalize me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know?"
Rich, and intimate! Sara Baume makes an indelible impression and avoids lapses into sentimentality -- yet is a powerful and compelling story. - BEAUTIFUL BOOK!!!
Thank You Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Netgalley, and Sara Baume
October 25, 2017
Intensely personal and hauntingly memorable, this is a strong contender for the Goldsmiths Prize and one of the best books I have read so far this year.
This is not a plot-driven novel - it is more of an extended meditation and an exploration of the fragile psyche of Frankie, a lonely former art student in her mid-twenties suffering an existential crisis that causes her to flee her Dublin bedsit, initially to return to the "famine hospital" (her parents' house). Frankie persuades her parents to allow her to move to her grandmother's house on "turbine hill", which has been empty since she died three years earlier. Here she does very little - occasionally reading but more often either lying on the carpet or exploring the natural world around her on foot or cycling.
This account is punctuated by frequent digressions in which she challenges herself to think of and describe conceptual artworks on a given subject - these are all real (some are famous) and they are all listed at the end of the book, with a note explaining that "they are interpreted according to Frankie. I urge readers to seek out, perceive and interpret these artworks for themselves."
Each chapter is entitled with the name of an animal, these refer to a photographic project in which Frankie photographs dead animals she has found - these photographs also appear in the text, in grainy black and white images reminiscent of Sebald.
At several points she refers to Werner Herzog's film "Encounters at the End of the World", and specifically a scene in which a deranged penguin is shown determinedly walking away from the group. This is clearly symbolic of Frankie's disillusionment with the career-oriented trajectories of her generation and her own lack of confidence in the art she has pursued.
There are also humorous interludes such as an encounter with the Jehovah's Witnesses, which help to lighten a mood which could otherwise be oppressive. Frankie's conversations are mostly confined to those with her mother.
I can't really do justice to this book in a review like this one - my best advice is to read it for yourself.
I will return to Baume soon, since I already have a copy of her debut novel .
This is not a plot-driven novel - it is more of an extended meditation and an exploration of the fragile psyche of Frankie, a lonely former art student in her mid-twenties suffering an existential crisis that causes her to flee her Dublin bedsit, initially to return to the "famine hospital" (her parents' house). Frankie persuades her parents to allow her to move to her grandmother's house on "turbine hill", which has been empty since she died three years earlier. Here she does very little - occasionally reading but more often either lying on the carpet or exploring the natural world around her on foot or cycling.
This account is punctuated by frequent digressions in which she challenges herself to think of and describe conceptual artworks on a given subject - these are all real (some are famous) and they are all listed at the end of the book, with a note explaining that "they are interpreted according to Frankie. I urge readers to seek out, perceive and interpret these artworks for themselves."
Each chapter is entitled with the name of an animal, these refer to a photographic project in which Frankie photographs dead animals she has found - these photographs also appear in the text, in grainy black and white images reminiscent of Sebald.
At several points she refers to Werner Herzog's film "Encounters at the End of the World", and specifically a scene in which a deranged penguin is shown determinedly walking away from the group. This is clearly symbolic of Frankie's disillusionment with the career-oriented trajectories of her generation and her own lack of confidence in the art she has pursued.
There are also humorous interludes such as an encounter with the Jehovah's Witnesses, which help to lighten a mood which could otherwise be oppressive. Frankie's conversations are mostly confined to those with her mother.
I can't really do justice to this book in a review like this one - my best advice is to read it for yourself.
I will return to Baume soon, since I already have a copy of her debut novel .
June 9, 2017
”The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realize and now I don’t think I can bear it any more.
Frankie recites the works of artists, a compulsion that seems to calm her, checking to make sure she remembers an artist, a work that correspond to her thoughts at that moment. Cleaning her bedsit, her thoughts take her to “Works about Bed, I thought of another one: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled,1991. In 1992, the same gigantic image appeared on twenty-four different billboards around the city of New York. A photograph of a double bed. Sheets disheveled, pillows indented by an absent pair of head. There was no accompanying text, no title, but I know from secondary sources that the absent heads were those of the artist and his partner, who, in 1991 and 1996 respectively, died of AIDS.�
“This is the best of conceptual art: by means of nominal material, vast feeling is evoked. A message enduring long after the posters have been replaced by car ads and clothes ads and Coke ads at Christmas.�
“It’s message: appreciate the people around you. Don’t re-plump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.�
Frankie is 25; she’s left her life in Dublin to find some internal peace and solace in the solitude of her grandmother’s Bungalow. She’s left her school and her part-time job for tranquility. Seclusion.
”At six o’clock on the last full day, through my suction-cupped hand, I heard church bells and knew what time it was against my will.�
Her mother worries about her; they didn’t want her to leave the city for this Bungalow, haunted with memories of her grandmother, alone. They can’t imagine wanting to be alone. But Frankie believes this is what can heal her� will heal her. Or not. Either way, she can’t face continuing this internal struggle, carrying around this pain she doesn’t have the means to put down, she knows this isn’t “normal,� and maybe, she thinks, she doesn’t want to continue on this way.
”I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.
The rituals, the inability to live the way others do, the way others expect her to. It’s terrifying to her, these expectations of others to live what they call a “normal� life.
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 in this way, you can go—you can get—anywhere in this world, in life.�
This is a very introspective and intimate view of a young woman who is overwhelmed, believing in her talents as an artist but frustratingly unable to bring them forth to share as she wishes she could. She feels lost, forlorn, and can’t seem to find her way through, can’t seem to connect to others even though she senses on some level she needs to do just that. She’s walking that line between an oppressive unhappiness and madness. It’s raw and heartbreakingly real.
Last year I read, and loved, Sara Baume’s ”Spill Simmer Falter Wither� a story also centered on the theme of loneliness, internal pain, an inability to connect with others. It was one of my favourite reads. ”A Line Made By Walking� feels more personal, as though it was written from a place of understanding what it is to feel as though your art isn’t measuring up to other people’s expectations � and if your art isn’t measuring up, then what would that say about the artist? Fortunately, with all she’s learned along the way, her readers have benefited.
“A Line Made By Walking� references Richard Long’s 1967 famous photograph, a point on one of his journeys between his home in Bristol and St. Martin’s. Midway, in Wiltshire, he walked in a relatively straight line between two points, the far end of a field and a cove of trees, until the now flattened turf was bathed in sunlight and the line made by walking was clearly visible. Click. A ‘performance art� piece, Long’s work was considered to be “quietly revolutionary� as, in essence, it claimed that the art is in the act of walking. The line made by walking, then, is perfectly impermanent, but the story it tells…that’s a different story altogether.
Recommended
Frankie recites the works of artists, a compulsion that seems to calm her, checking to make sure she remembers an artist, a work that correspond to her thoughts at that moment. Cleaning her bedsit, her thoughts take her to “Works about Bed, I thought of another one: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled,1991. In 1992, the same gigantic image appeared on twenty-four different billboards around the city of New York. A photograph of a double bed. Sheets disheveled, pillows indented by an absent pair of head. There was no accompanying text, no title, but I know from secondary sources that the absent heads were those of the artist and his partner, who, in 1991 and 1996 respectively, died of AIDS.�
“This is the best of conceptual art: by means of nominal material, vast feeling is evoked. A message enduring long after the posters have been replaced by car ads and clothes ads and Coke ads at Christmas.�
“It’s message: appreciate the people around you. Don’t re-plump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.�
Frankie is 25; she’s left her life in Dublin to find some internal peace and solace in the solitude of her grandmother’s Bungalow. She’s left her school and her part-time job for tranquility. Seclusion.
”At six o’clock on the last full day, through my suction-cupped hand, I heard church bells and knew what time it was against my will.�
Her mother worries about her; they didn’t want her to leave the city for this Bungalow, haunted with memories of her grandmother, alone. They can’t imagine wanting to be alone. But Frankie believes this is what can heal her� will heal her. Or not. Either way, she can’t face continuing this internal struggle, carrying around this pain she doesn’t have the means to put down, she knows this isn’t “normal,� and maybe, she thinks, she doesn’t want to continue on this way.
”I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.
The rituals, the inability to live the way others do, the way others expect her to. It’s terrifying to her, these expectations of others to live what they call a “normal� life.
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 in this way, you can go—you can get—anywhere in this world, in life.�
This is a very introspective and intimate view of a young woman who is overwhelmed, believing in her talents as an artist but frustratingly unable to bring them forth to share as she wishes she could. She feels lost, forlorn, and can’t seem to find her way through, can’t seem to connect to others even though she senses on some level she needs to do just that. She’s walking that line between an oppressive unhappiness and madness. It’s raw and heartbreakingly real.
Last year I read, and loved, Sara Baume’s ”Spill Simmer Falter Wither� a story also centered on the theme of loneliness, internal pain, an inability to connect with others. It was one of my favourite reads. ”A Line Made By Walking� feels more personal, as though it was written from a place of understanding what it is to feel as though your art isn’t measuring up to other people’s expectations � and if your art isn’t measuring up, then what would that say about the artist? Fortunately, with all she’s learned along the way, her readers have benefited.
“A Line Made By Walking� references Richard Long’s 1967 famous photograph, a point on one of his journeys between his home in Bristol and St. Martin’s. Midway, in Wiltshire, he walked in a relatively straight line between two points, the far end of a field and a cove of trees, until the now flattened turf was bathed in sunlight and the line made by walking was clearly visible. Click. A ‘performance art� piece, Long’s work was considered to be “quietly revolutionary� as, in essence, it claimed that the art is in the act of walking. The line made by walking, then, is perfectly impermanent, but the story it tells…that’s a different story altogether.
Recommended
March 6, 2017
This is a story for anyone who is lost. It's for anybody whose dreams of brilliance have been dashed, about coming to terms with being average. It's not a self-help manual and it offers no easy answers, but it might help someone in a similar situation feel less alone.
Things are not going well for poor Frankie. A 25-year-old art student living in a poky Dublin bedsit, she finds herself lying on the musty carpet, crying her eyes out. Abandoning her course and part-time gallery job, she is whisked home to the countryside by her concerned mother. A doctor tells her she has a "happiness deficiency" and prescribes a regimen of anti-depressants. Instead she takes up residence in her dead grandmother's crumbling bungalow. Surrounded by dusty souvenirs of her childhood, she begins to commune with nature and tries to make sense of her miserable existence.
Frankie struggles to understand what it is that's making her so sad. She feels rudderless. Life hasn't turned out the way she had hoped. The more she fails to connect with society, the more she withdraws into her own cocoon of loneliness. It's a vicious circle of melancholy and regret. In an ultimately unhelpful conversation with another doctor she manages to articulate her problem:
To survive, Frankie clings to her one passion in life: art. She takes photos of all the dead animals she encounters on her country rambles and assembles them as a project. She enjoys testing her own art knowledge and the story is interspersed with 60 of these asides. They are prompted by whatever sees or feels as she goes about her day: works about deprivation, motherhood, lostness. Her interpretations of these projects say more about her state of mind than any mental health assessment she goes through. Art is all she knows - it's her way of making sense of the world.
Sara Baume has admitted in interviews that this story is semi-autobiographical. Like Frankie, she also moved home to live in her grandmother's house after years as a struggling artist in Dublin. She felt a strong sense of despair at not making a success of her chosen career. But by becoming immersed in her scenic surroundings and finding joy in the little things like wild flowers and rescue dogs, she managed to take the pressure off herself and move on.
Truth be told, there's not a whole lot of plot in A Line Made By Walking. But that's not the point of it. It's a journey into the mind of a confused and frustrated young woman, someone who has so much to offer but has no idea how to harness her talents. It shares similar themes to Baume's first novel: that unshakable feeling of loneliness, an inability to connect. Baume's remarkable powers of observation shine through - she has unerring ability to capture beauty in the ordinary. Through Frankie, a version of her younger self, she conjures a vision of depression that is so raw and so real. It's a perceptive and beautiful story about accepting disappointment, and the challenge of finding one's place in the world.
Things are not going well for poor Frankie. A 25-year-old art student living in a poky Dublin bedsit, she finds herself lying on the musty carpet, crying her eyes out. Abandoning her course and part-time gallery job, she is whisked home to the countryside by her concerned mother. A doctor tells her she has a "happiness deficiency" and prescribes a regimen of anti-depressants. Instead she takes up residence in her dead grandmother's crumbling bungalow. Surrounded by dusty souvenirs of her childhood, she begins to commune with nature and tries to make sense of her miserable existence.
Frankie struggles to understand what it is that's making her so sad. She feels rudderless. Life hasn't turned out the way she had hoped. The more she fails to connect with society, the more she withdraws into her own cocoon of loneliness. It's a vicious circle of melancholy and regret. In an ultimately unhelpful conversation with another doctor she manages to articulate her problem:
"I'm okay in my own bones, but I know that my bones aren't living up to other people's version of what a life should be, and I feel a little bit crushed by that, to be honest, a little confused as to how to align the two things: to be an acceptable member of society but to be able to be my own bones both at once."
To survive, Frankie clings to her one passion in life: art. She takes photos of all the dead animals she encounters on her country rambles and assembles them as a project. She enjoys testing her own art knowledge and the story is interspersed with 60 of these asides. They are prompted by whatever sees or feels as she goes about her day: works about deprivation, motherhood, lostness. Her interpretations of these projects say more about her state of mind than any mental health assessment she goes through. Art is all she knows - it's her way of making sense of the world.
Sara Baume has admitted in interviews that this story is semi-autobiographical. Like Frankie, she also moved home to live in her grandmother's house after years as a struggling artist in Dublin. She felt a strong sense of despair at not making a success of her chosen career. But by becoming immersed in her scenic surroundings and finding joy in the little things like wild flowers and rescue dogs, she managed to take the pressure off herself and move on.
Truth be told, there's not a whole lot of plot in A Line Made By Walking. But that's not the point of it. It's a journey into the mind of a confused and frustrated young woman, someone who has so much to offer but has no idea how to harness her talents. It shares similar themes to Baume's first novel: that unshakable feeling of loneliness, an inability to connect. Baume's remarkable powers of observation shine through - she has unerring ability to capture beauty in the ordinary. Through Frankie, a version of her younger self, she conjures a vision of depression that is so raw and so real. It's a perceptive and beautiful story about accepting disappointment, and the challenge of finding one's place in the world.
December 19, 2021
A Line Made by Walking is a poignant portrayal of a young artist who lives on the fringe and struggles with depression. Baume writes poetically about Frankie’s interior landscape and I was torn between wanting to savor her beautiful writing and fleeing the sadness that was recounted. That there are biographical elements in this work made it even more potent.
Frankie, the 25-year-old artist, a recent art graduate seeks refuge in the bungalow of her deceased grandmother. In her own words, ”My small world is coming apart in increments� and ”I am being killed very slowly.� Frankie reminded me of Ray, the 57-year-old protagonist in her debut work, Spill, Simmer. Falter, Wither. They are both social misfits whose lives are disintegrating and heading toward destruction. Frankie spends most days lying on the floor except when she is out cycling.
There is a darkness that pervades this book. Frankie’s art project consists of her taking photographs of animals that have been injured and die as a consequence; hence the novel is structured around the creatures (robin, hare, badger, etc.) that wind up dead in her grandmother’s house. What struck me too was Frankie’s analysis of Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 painting, ‘Wheatfields with Crows�: ‘An angry, churning sky, tall yellow stalks, tapering into the distance; a line made by walking. And a murder of crows between the stalks and sky as though they are departing or arriving or have just been disturbed.� There was something indisputably ominous about the line of walking van Gogh chose to make.
As in her first book, the darkness never seems to lift. Frankie bothered me owing to the oblique nature of her sadness. There was a hint at possibly an eating disorder in her adolescent years, growing up in a ‘famine house.� Yet, Frankie has one of the sweetest and most understanding mothers one can ask for and an ostensibly happy childhood. I sensed rather resentfully that she held the reader at arm’s length, and was hard to know.
Given Baume’s training as a visual artist, this book offers her insight into a great variety of art forms. I checked out with great interest several of the art work she described. One example is Tracey Emin’s ‘Bed� (1998). Frankie’s interpretation was right on the dollar, “It was about feeling shit first thing in the morning. About tossing beneath the covers, not wanting to get up and yet making everything worse by not getting up. It was about workaday despair.� Then I looked up another work on ‘Bed� by Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled, 1991. It evoked absent bodies on an unmade bed with two pillow indentations, conveying a profound sense of intimacy. According to Frankie, “Its message: appreciate the people around you. Don’t re-plump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.� This made me want to cry.
A Line Made by Walking ended in as disturbing a way as it began. Again, I would conclude as I did in my review of Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither, read it when your heart is light and strong.
Frankie, the 25-year-old artist, a recent art graduate seeks refuge in the bungalow of her deceased grandmother. In her own words, ”My small world is coming apart in increments� and ”I am being killed very slowly.� Frankie reminded me of Ray, the 57-year-old protagonist in her debut work, Spill, Simmer. Falter, Wither. They are both social misfits whose lives are disintegrating and heading toward destruction. Frankie spends most days lying on the floor except when she is out cycling.
There is a darkness that pervades this book. Frankie’s art project consists of her taking photographs of animals that have been injured and die as a consequence; hence the novel is structured around the creatures (robin, hare, badger, etc.) that wind up dead in her grandmother’s house. What struck me too was Frankie’s analysis of Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 painting, ‘Wheatfields with Crows�: ‘An angry, churning sky, tall yellow stalks, tapering into the distance; a line made by walking. And a murder of crows between the stalks and sky as though they are departing or arriving or have just been disturbed.� There was something indisputably ominous about the line of walking van Gogh chose to make.
As in her first book, the darkness never seems to lift. Frankie bothered me owing to the oblique nature of her sadness. There was a hint at possibly an eating disorder in her adolescent years, growing up in a ‘famine house.� Yet, Frankie has one of the sweetest and most understanding mothers one can ask for and an ostensibly happy childhood. I sensed rather resentfully that she held the reader at arm’s length, and was hard to know.
Given Baume’s training as a visual artist, this book offers her insight into a great variety of art forms. I checked out with great interest several of the art work she described. One example is Tracey Emin’s ‘Bed� (1998). Frankie’s interpretation was right on the dollar, “It was about feeling shit first thing in the morning. About tossing beneath the covers, not wanting to get up and yet making everything worse by not getting up. It was about workaday despair.� Then I looked up another work on ‘Bed� by Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled, 1991. It evoked absent bodies on an unmade bed with two pillow indentations, conveying a profound sense of intimacy. According to Frankie, “Its message: appreciate the people around you. Don’t re-plump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.� This made me want to cry.
A Line Made by Walking ended in as disturbing a way as it began. Again, I would conclude as I did in my review of Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither, read it when your heart is light and strong.
September 28, 2017
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.
UPDATE: Now deservedly this novel has been shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize.
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:
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.
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.
Useful author interviews or articles:
UPDATE: Now deservedly this novel has been shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize.
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:
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.
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.
Useful author interviews or articles:
April 4, 2017
It can’t be easy to write a 300+ page book that almost totally eschews plot in favor of a contemplative and despairing narrator who lives a near solitary life, obsessed with just about every part of it. In fact, it would seem like a recipe for disaster.
And yet. And yet. Sara Baume pulls it off, creating a masterwork that focuses on the very essence of life and weaves the reader into the world of her 25 year old artist narrator, Frankie. At the same time, she enlightens the reader on some of recent history’s most intriguing and seminal works of art (which are conveniently listed in the epilogue) and presents a convincing and knowledgeable study of the depressed mind. Quite a feat!
The very structure of the book is sui generis. Each chapter begins with the name of an animal or bird (robin, rabbit, rat, fox, etc.); each dead animal has been stumbled across by Frankie, who photographs them. The photographs (which were not included in the advanced reader’s copy I read) is hinted to reveal the disintegration of Frankie’s mind and the senseless violence of an unfathomable world.
Frankie herself, like the animals she photographs for her art, is a creature of nature, living alone in the rural and vacant home of her deceased grandmother in Ireland. Refreshingly, she maintains strong ties with her family, particularly her mother, but she is untethered. She is barely there, determined to take up as little space as possible.
Themes from Sara Baume’s magnificent debut book, Spill Simmer Falter Wither resonate here too. Frankie is more connected and self-aware than Ray, the outcast from that book, but her skills of observation, love of the landscape, and ability to channel life through her resourceful mind, are all here. As in her first novel, Ms. Baume writes with poetic intensity and focuses on filling in the chasm between the sublime and the sad. I continue to be amazed at the raw intensity and the power of this author’s words. This one is meant to be saved and cherished.
And yet. And yet. Sara Baume pulls it off, creating a masterwork that focuses on the very essence of life and weaves the reader into the world of her 25 year old artist narrator, Frankie. At the same time, she enlightens the reader on some of recent history’s most intriguing and seminal works of art (which are conveniently listed in the epilogue) and presents a convincing and knowledgeable study of the depressed mind. Quite a feat!
The very structure of the book is sui generis. Each chapter begins with the name of an animal or bird (robin, rabbit, rat, fox, etc.); each dead animal has been stumbled across by Frankie, who photographs them. The photographs (which were not included in the advanced reader’s copy I read) is hinted to reveal the disintegration of Frankie’s mind and the senseless violence of an unfathomable world.
Frankie herself, like the animals she photographs for her art, is a creature of nature, living alone in the rural and vacant home of her deceased grandmother in Ireland. Refreshingly, she maintains strong ties with her family, particularly her mother, but she is untethered. She is barely there, determined to take up as little space as possible.
Themes from Sara Baume’s magnificent debut book, Spill Simmer Falter Wither resonate here too. Frankie is more connected and self-aware than Ray, the outcast from that book, but her skills of observation, love of the landscape, and ability to channel life through her resourceful mind, are all here. As in her first novel, Ms. Baume writes with poetic intensity and focuses on filling in the chasm between the sublime and the sad. I continue to be amazed at the raw intensity and the power of this author’s words. This one is meant to be saved and cherished.
April 26, 2017
"The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realize and now I don't think I can bear it anymore. The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed."
In her second novel, Baume explores the plight of twenty-five-year-old Frankie, an art-school graduate, who retreats to her grandmother's house in the country to heal after she begins to crack up in the city. Before the dangerous psychological descent that spurs her to break her bedsit lease and summon her mother to collect her and her things, Frankie had temporary work at a Dublin art gallery, puttying and painting walls in preparation for new art installations and serving as a general dogsbody. That menial work was a long ways from youthful dreams of making art. "My small world is coming apart," she observes, "because it is swelling and there's no place for me any longer . . ." Frankie has been "grounded", literally spending her days lying low--her cheek pressed against the dingy bedsit's shag carpet. She seldom eats and rarely responds to the phone.
After a brief time at her family home, a renovated "famine hospital" (an historical place of suffering that dates from the 1840s), Frankie flees both from her parents and the dependent, passive role she assumes while living with them, to live in her deceased grandmother's damp, derelict, country bungalow, with its pervasive smell of dog. Perched on a hill, the structure vibrates and hums in time with the large wind turbine that stands behind it and disturbs the air around it. The house is supposed to be up for sale, but there is little buyer interest. It has been sitting empty for almost three years, and nearly everything needs fixing. Slugs slime surfaces, and dead flies lie exactly where they dropped. Frankie alters almost nothing, partly because she is so profoundly enervated, but also in a kind of homage to her grandmother. The sights Frankie sees from the windows of the house, the objects she touches within it, and the pathways she treads out from it are still infused with the spirit of her grandmother.
Frankie's parents are nervous about their daughter's isolation and solitude, but she is convinced it is just what she needs: "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." They and Frankie's well-put-together sister, Jane, do not figure prominently as characters, appearing only for brief episodes, but those episodes are telling. Frankie's mother is a steady presence in her daughter's psyche; she is worrisome, says Frankie, but, as the reader soon realizes, possessed of grace, acceptance and remarkable restraint given her daughter's precarious psychological state. She is also a fount of knowledge, particularly about the natural world, and she has an unusual and intuitive sense of the rituals that a situation may require. For example, not knowing what to do with some curios her mother (Frankie's grandmother) has left behind, she buries them near the hedge outside the house. They couldn't be given to charity, she tells Frankie, and it seemed wrong to throw them away. When Frankie arrives, one of the first things she does is dig up the objects and restore them to their place on the windowsill. At one point, Frankie's father drives out to the house to mow the lawn. With a few deft brush strokes about his and Frankie's awkward sharing of tea after the yard work, the author reveals the man's brusque masculinity and communicates the uncomfortable love between the two. The sensitive and particular details about the objects and memories the grandmother has left behind will resonate for readers who have had a special relationship with their own grandmothers. They certainly did for me.
Baume's novel brings an artist's attentive eye to the emotional and "interior" life of a single character. It will not suit everyone. Devoid of incident in the most literal sense, the novel focuses instead on the ebb and flow of feeling and memory in a young woman absorbed in her own psychic processes. Because everything that is related to the reader is filtered through Frankie’s consciousness and told in the present tense (with occasional flashbacks to childhood incidents and the events that precipitated the breakdown) I found the narrative to be powerfully claustrophobic at times. It was not a book I could read steadily in one sitting. Occasionally, I also felt overloaded by a surfeit of sensory detail and by the (over)abundant references (I counted more than 70) to artists and works of art.
As a fairly recent art-college graduate and one casting about for her way in life, Frankie tries to maintain her mental faculties by "testing" herself on the artists she has encountered in her education and by describing their works. I found reading the book on an electronic device to be very helpful as I encountered these; I could easily google the works of art alluded to--almost all of them entirely unknown to me. (I recommend viewing and, in some cases, hearing, the works to better understand the text. Most of them simply cannot be adequately visualized.) I wonder at the author's decision to refer to quite so many pieces of art. The allusions do not always serve to illuminate character or advance the themes of the book, and they seemed to me to become something of an obsessive exercise. Maybe that was by design. (I admit, too, that I found many of the art projects bizarre and the sanity of their creators questionable.)
Baume's work encourages the reader to consider the purpose, place, and need for art in life. One function of art is to jolt the viewer into really looking at the world. By drawing unusual connections between things--objects and ideas--artists make us see with new eyes. Sometimes, however, the creator seems to create simply to provoke. Only minimally acquainted with modern and performance art, I confess that I was unimpressed with and derived little meaning from many of the creations Frankie describes: an artist spending hours collecting pollen from blossoms to make large yellow squares on the floor; an artist sanding white marble slabs on which milk is then poured and coaxed to the edges; an artist making films of himself tumbling into a canal or off a roof into shrubbery; or an artist walking back and forth across a field for hours just to make a straight line in the vegetation for a scene that can be photographed--the famous "Line Made by Walking" for which the novel is named. (Don't get me started on Marina Abramovic's bizarre "Rhythm 0" project in which the performance artist stood passively for six hours straight so that gallery goers could use objects she had supplied to write on her, razor away her clothing (leaving her naked), slash her skin in order to suck her blood, and commit (minor) sexual assault. The purpose of the piece, Abromovic said, was to find out how far the public would go. I would have thought that Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a police blotter, or the Holocaust would have provided answers enough to that question.)
Through her protagonist, the author explores conventional responses to mental illness: religion, meditation, psychoactive medication, regular exercise, and social interaction. Frankie considers and rejects all of these, opting instead for solitude, bike rides, and immersion in the natural world around her grandmother's home. To use a phrase from Thomas Moore, she "cares for the soul." Baume appears to question the current medicalized view of a breakdown as a purely physical process--a disruption in brain biochemistry that can be cured by pouring on the chemicals--suggesting that it might otherwise be viewed as existential, a turning point in one's development, a time to reassemble the pieces of oneself into a new configuration, keeping some, discarding others. As Frankie tells the foreign doctor who attempts to force her into a program of pharmaceuticals: "I'm not like other people; I don't want what they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people's eyes, and I feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want . . ."
During her time in the country, she begins to work on a project which involves taking photographs of animals that have died, but not at her hands: "a series about how everything is being slowly killed." I was uncertain what to make of this. Did it represent the morbid preoccupation of the depressed person, a kind of defiance of the societal denial of death, a form of bearing witness to the overlooked creatures with whom we share the world, or an almost Buddhist meditative act to acknowledge the fate that awaits all sentient beings? I admit that Frankie's project made me uncomfortable. Though I have been able to be present at the deaths of humans and animals I have loved, I find it almost unbearable to witness or contemplate the wordless suffering of animals. I understand that some of the author's own photographs are to appear in the final text. I have seen some of them in the press, and they are delicate, poignant, and heartbreaking. I think their inclusion will assist readers in interpreting the work.
At the end of the novel, Frankie performs a paradoxical act of destruction and mercy after which she seems to gather some energy “to fix things", to move on--in short to become unstuck, more free. While Frankie's narrative concludes in an open-ended way, there is hopefulness. I will leave future readers to discover how Frankie's condition resolves.
A Line Made by Walking is an unusual, uncomfortable, honest, and rich work that deserves a second reading. I understand that the author has no immediate plans to return to writing and is turning back to her first love: art. If she does make something out of words again, I will be sure to read it.
I am grateful to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC of the book. I am also grateful to the author for articulating something so difficult so beautifully.
In her second novel, Baume explores the plight of twenty-five-year-old Frankie, an art-school graduate, who retreats to her grandmother's house in the country to heal after she begins to crack up in the city. Before the dangerous psychological descent that spurs her to break her bedsit lease and summon her mother to collect her and her things, Frankie had temporary work at a Dublin art gallery, puttying and painting walls in preparation for new art installations and serving as a general dogsbody. That menial work was a long ways from youthful dreams of making art. "My small world is coming apart," she observes, "because it is swelling and there's no place for me any longer . . ." Frankie has been "grounded", literally spending her days lying low--her cheek pressed against the dingy bedsit's shag carpet. She seldom eats and rarely responds to the phone.
After a brief time at her family home, a renovated "famine hospital" (an historical place of suffering that dates from the 1840s), Frankie flees both from her parents and the dependent, passive role she assumes while living with them, to live in her deceased grandmother's damp, derelict, country bungalow, with its pervasive smell of dog. Perched on a hill, the structure vibrates and hums in time with the large wind turbine that stands behind it and disturbs the air around it. The house is supposed to be up for sale, but there is little buyer interest. It has been sitting empty for almost three years, and nearly everything needs fixing. Slugs slime surfaces, and dead flies lie exactly where they dropped. Frankie alters almost nothing, partly because she is so profoundly enervated, but also in a kind of homage to her grandmother. The sights Frankie sees from the windows of the house, the objects she touches within it, and the pathways she treads out from it are still infused with the spirit of her grandmother.
Frankie's parents are nervous about their daughter's isolation and solitude, but she is convinced it is just what she needs: "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." They and Frankie's well-put-together sister, Jane, do not figure prominently as characters, appearing only for brief episodes, but those episodes are telling. Frankie's mother is a steady presence in her daughter's psyche; she is worrisome, says Frankie, but, as the reader soon realizes, possessed of grace, acceptance and remarkable restraint given her daughter's precarious psychological state. She is also a fount of knowledge, particularly about the natural world, and she has an unusual and intuitive sense of the rituals that a situation may require. For example, not knowing what to do with some curios her mother (Frankie's grandmother) has left behind, she buries them near the hedge outside the house. They couldn't be given to charity, she tells Frankie, and it seemed wrong to throw them away. When Frankie arrives, one of the first things she does is dig up the objects and restore them to their place on the windowsill. At one point, Frankie's father drives out to the house to mow the lawn. With a few deft brush strokes about his and Frankie's awkward sharing of tea after the yard work, the author reveals the man's brusque masculinity and communicates the uncomfortable love between the two. The sensitive and particular details about the objects and memories the grandmother has left behind will resonate for readers who have had a special relationship with their own grandmothers. They certainly did for me.
Baume's novel brings an artist's attentive eye to the emotional and "interior" life of a single character. It will not suit everyone. Devoid of incident in the most literal sense, the novel focuses instead on the ebb and flow of feeling and memory in a young woman absorbed in her own psychic processes. Because everything that is related to the reader is filtered through Frankie’s consciousness and told in the present tense (with occasional flashbacks to childhood incidents and the events that precipitated the breakdown) I found the narrative to be powerfully claustrophobic at times. It was not a book I could read steadily in one sitting. Occasionally, I also felt overloaded by a surfeit of sensory detail and by the (over)abundant references (I counted more than 70) to artists and works of art.
As a fairly recent art-college graduate and one casting about for her way in life, Frankie tries to maintain her mental faculties by "testing" herself on the artists she has encountered in her education and by describing their works. I found reading the book on an electronic device to be very helpful as I encountered these; I could easily google the works of art alluded to--almost all of them entirely unknown to me. (I recommend viewing and, in some cases, hearing, the works to better understand the text. Most of them simply cannot be adequately visualized.) I wonder at the author's decision to refer to quite so many pieces of art. The allusions do not always serve to illuminate character or advance the themes of the book, and they seemed to me to become something of an obsessive exercise. Maybe that was by design. (I admit, too, that I found many of the art projects bizarre and the sanity of their creators questionable.)
Baume's work encourages the reader to consider the purpose, place, and need for art in life. One function of art is to jolt the viewer into really looking at the world. By drawing unusual connections between things--objects and ideas--artists make us see with new eyes. Sometimes, however, the creator seems to create simply to provoke. Only minimally acquainted with modern and performance art, I confess that I was unimpressed with and derived little meaning from many of the creations Frankie describes: an artist spending hours collecting pollen from blossoms to make large yellow squares on the floor; an artist sanding white marble slabs on which milk is then poured and coaxed to the edges; an artist making films of himself tumbling into a canal or off a roof into shrubbery; or an artist walking back and forth across a field for hours just to make a straight line in the vegetation for a scene that can be photographed--the famous "Line Made by Walking" for which the novel is named. (Don't get me started on Marina Abramovic's bizarre "Rhythm 0" project in which the performance artist stood passively for six hours straight so that gallery goers could use objects she had supplied to write on her, razor away her clothing (leaving her naked), slash her skin in order to suck her blood, and commit (minor) sexual assault. The purpose of the piece, Abromovic said, was to find out how far the public would go. I would have thought that Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a police blotter, or the Holocaust would have provided answers enough to that question.)
Through her protagonist, the author explores conventional responses to mental illness: religion, meditation, psychoactive medication, regular exercise, and social interaction. Frankie considers and rejects all of these, opting instead for solitude, bike rides, and immersion in the natural world around her grandmother's home. To use a phrase from Thomas Moore, she "cares for the soul." Baume appears to question the current medicalized view of a breakdown as a purely physical process--a disruption in brain biochemistry that can be cured by pouring on the chemicals--suggesting that it might otherwise be viewed as existential, a turning point in one's development, a time to reassemble the pieces of oneself into a new configuration, keeping some, discarding others. As Frankie tells the foreign doctor who attempts to force her into a program of pharmaceuticals: "I'm not like other people; I don't want what they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people's eyes, and I feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want . . ."
During her time in the country, she begins to work on a project which involves taking photographs of animals that have died, but not at her hands: "a series about how everything is being slowly killed." I was uncertain what to make of this. Did it represent the morbid preoccupation of the depressed person, a kind of defiance of the societal denial of death, a form of bearing witness to the overlooked creatures with whom we share the world, or an almost Buddhist meditative act to acknowledge the fate that awaits all sentient beings? I admit that Frankie's project made me uncomfortable. Though I have been able to be present at the deaths of humans and animals I have loved, I find it almost unbearable to witness or contemplate the wordless suffering of animals. I understand that some of the author's own photographs are to appear in the final text. I have seen some of them in the press, and they are delicate, poignant, and heartbreaking. I think their inclusion will assist readers in interpreting the work.
At the end of the novel, Frankie performs a paradoxical act of destruction and mercy after which she seems to gather some energy “to fix things", to move on--in short to become unstuck, more free. While Frankie's narrative concludes in an open-ended way, there is hopefulness. I will leave future readers to discover how Frankie's condition resolves.
A Line Made by Walking is an unusual, uncomfortable, honest, and rich work that deserves a second reading. I understand that the author has no immediate plans to return to writing and is turning back to her first love: art. If she does make something out of words again, I will be sure to read it.
I am grateful to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC of the book. I am also grateful to the author for articulating something so difficult so beautifully.
July 25, 2017
Art Therapy
This will not surprise readers of Baume's miraculous first novel, , which follows a beaten-down old loner in his travels through Ireland with a half-blind dog. Baume is as unsparing in her sentiment as she is precise in her observations and brilliant in her use of language. Take a passage like this, from the present book:
+ + + + + +
One feature that especially appealed to me is the "playlist" of artworks that Frankie references throughout the book. The Van Gogh example above is just one of them; there are 74 others. Baume, who studied art before becoming a writer, has Frankie constantly pepper her narrative with "self-tests" about works that illustrate one point or another. The Van Gogh, though, is an exception, as being almost the only conventional painting she mentions; if I say that the only others are a despoiled industrial landscape by L. S. Lowry and the "exquisitely macabre" picture by Sir John Everett Millais of Ophelia drowning, you will see the extreme boundaries of the psychic landscape that these examples map out in Frankie's mind. Most of the references, however, are to contemporary works of Conceptual Art, where it is the idea rather than the execution that matters.
Works about Birds, again, I test myself: Wheatfield with Crows, 1890. Popularly believed to be the last painting Vincent van Gogh completed. An angry, churning sky, tall yellow stalks, a grass-green and mud-brown path cutting through the stalks, tapering into the distance; a line made by walking. And a murder of crows between the stalks and sky as though they are departing or arriving or have just been disturbed."Departing or arriving or just disturbed." The first-person protagonist of Sara Baume's new novel is all of these things. An artist by training, now in her mid-twenties, she feels lost in herself and has obvious empathy for Van Gogh's late vision. Leaving her Dublin bedsit, she moves back to her parents' house in the country, and from there to her grandmother's old bungalow, unoccupied for several years. Can the isolation and closeness to nature, coupled with the responsibility for cleaning the old place up, help her to overcome what is clearly a pretty severe case of depression? Tentatively, adhering to strict self-imposed rules, she begins an art project of her own: photographing animals that she finds in the hedges and lanes around her temporary home. Each chapter is headed by the name of one of these creatures: Robin, Rabbit, Rat, Mouse, Rook, Fox, Frog, Hare, Hedgehog, Badger. But if this gives you a warm sense of the countryside out of Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Graeme, think again, for all these animals are dead, often with their guts squashed out on the road beside them.
This will not surprise readers of Baume's miraculous first novel, , which follows a beaten-down old loner in his travels through Ireland with a half-blind dog. Baume is as unsparing in her sentiment as she is precise in her observations and brilliant in her use of language. Take a passage like this, from the present book:
I've never seen the mist lie as low as it does this morning. It has beheaded the bungalow, pruned the trees to shrubs, felled the turbine to a stump. It is was winter mist, it would be grey, but because it's summer mist, it's electric white. And from every direction, a cacophony of rustling; the sound of leaves and stalks and blades and petals sighing beneath the moisture's slow-building pressure. In the passage between the shed wall and the hedge, for the first time I see the threads I've only felt before. Each beaded by glittering alabaster, necklaces delicately strung. …] The mist is inert; I am the only detail which moves. Thrusting myself onwards through the decollated, albino world. Allowing it to bind me in necklaces, delicately, delicately.I referred to this as Baume's new novel, but actually I wonder if it was not the first to be written. It has the quasi-autobiographical quality typical of first novels, the same concern with the difficulties of entering adulthood. As opposed to the tight narrative of Spill Simmer Falter Wither, it has a looser structure, almost random jottings in a journal. There is very little overall plot, and although it has some action at the very end, I am not convinced it is the right ending. I have the feeling that this was written and then put away, only to be brought out again when the success of the other novel gave it coat-tails to ride upon. But make no mistake, this is the same Sara Baume: it has the same wizardry with language, the same emotional honesty, and a heroine whose sheer awareness of life almost denies her depression. Despite its subject matter, it is a stimulating book, and well worth reading.
+ + + + + +
One feature that especially appealed to me is the "playlist" of artworks that Frankie references throughout the book. The Van Gogh example above is just one of them; there are 74 others. Baume, who studied art before becoming a writer, has Frankie constantly pepper her narrative with "self-tests" about works that illustrate one point or another. The Van Gogh, though, is an exception, as being almost the only conventional painting she mentions; if I say that the only others are a despoiled industrial landscape by L. S. Lowry and the "exquisitely macabre" picture by Sir John Everett Millais of Ophelia drowning, you will see the extreme boundaries of the psychic landscape that these examples map out in Frankie's mind. Most of the references, however, are to contemporary works of Conceptual Art, where it is the idea rather than the execution that matters.
Works about Bed, I test myself: Tracey Emin, 1998. My Bed, she called it, but Emin's artwork was not simply the disarranged item of furniture upon which she slept, and it wasn't simply about furniture or sleeping or even disarrangement. There were cigarette butts and besmirched knickers. Bunched-up tights and empty bottles of vodka. Moccasins and newspapers and a white toy poodle sitting obediently back on his haunches, regarding everything. It was about feeling shit first thing in the morning. About tossing beneath the covers, not wanting to get up and yet making everything worse by not getting up. It was about workaday despair.I include a few pictures here because I can—and the reader can always look them up on Google or YouTube (some are videos)—but Baume's words alone are often enough. Taken together, these 75 artworks make a more precise analysis of the character's mind than even the straight narrative does, a map as it were of what it feels like to be lost:
Works about Lostness, I test myself: Stanley Brouwn, This way brouwn, 1960�64. A performance and its documentation. The artist would stop people on the street and ask them to draw him a sketch to a particular point. Most of the maps do not have any words, only wiggly lines and circles, Xs and arrows. Perhaps more so than any piece I have ever encountered, This way brouwn is an apt and forcible metaphor for living. For how: we start out trying to decipher other people's plans for us, a process which might last decades. For how: throughout all of this time, these decades, we have no choice but to obtusely, optimistically, follow.I realize that in giving these examples, I risk making the novel sound sordid and depressing, when in reality it's not. So let me end with one further example, first the description then the photo, a perfect visual metaphor for the brilliance that Baume can also create in words, out of the debris of disorder and destruction:
Works about Sheds, I test myself: Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. In 1991 the Banbury School of Ammunition agreed to blow up a perfectly ordinary garden shed at the artist's request in order that, after it had been reduced to kindling and splinters, Parker could pick up every piece and suspend them in a maelstrom from a gallery ceiling. Backlit by a single bulb, this is what the best of art does: uncovers an unrecoverable view of the world.
March 17, 2017
The title of Baume’s second elegiac and exquisite novel is also the title of a photograph by photographer Richard Long, where he walked backwards and forwards in a Wiltshire field until the turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. What does it mean? Like Baume’s unusual novel, it demonstrates the ideas of impermanence, motion, and relativity. Throughout this novel, the protagonist, twenty-six year-old Frankie (a woman), an unsuccessful artist suffering from depression and inability to connect socially, inserts 75 asides concerning intrepid works of art by selected artists. Some are photographs, paintings and sculptures, but most are conceptual art, installations, and performance art that reach back from the 19th through 21st century.
As Frankie tells her story, the various works of art buttress and express the ideas and feelings that both entrap and liberate her. And then there are the dead animals. Frankie, who has retreated from her bedsit in Dublin to her dead grandmother’s bungalow out in the Irish countryside, next to a turbine (a somewhat disturbing totem of sorts) decides to photograph dead wildlife. It started when she found a dead robin, which inspired her to photograph a series. “A series about how everything is being slowly killed.�
Frankie has rules, though. She must not take part in the death of the animal, and they must be fully expired. She will be the observer, not a participant. I felt this concept even more when Frankie discusses surrealist painter’s “The Treachery of Images,� a painting of a pipe. The point of the painting though, is to stress that it is not a pipe, but a representation of a pipe. Throughout the narrative, Frankie grapples with the idea of simulacra and simulation—the thing vs. the representation of the thing.
(Unfortunately, in the ARC copy, we do not see the dead wildlife photos. This story is so breathtaking, so beautifully melancholy, that I am sure to eventually purchase a finished copy when it is published. I am itching to see these photographs).
This is a niche novel, not for everyone. It is more of a story than a plot, meditative rather than action-packed, interior and reflective. Frankie, the unreliable narrator of her unreliable life, is also flush with naked truth about herself, even as she repeatedly lies to her mother, and perceptive about the world around her. She is vulnerable, lonely, intelligent, curious, and suffused with a piercing humanity. Her prose is exquisite, imaginative, and visual, mournful but hopeful about the natural world and finding her place in it; her flaws, her contributions, and her crushing misunderstandings.
There’s a paradox of finding myself smile when Frankie is honest, deadly honest with others, who then are offended by her perceived cruelty. It left me almost in tears-- that smile that slipped from me. In the course of the novel, Frankie had saturated my heart and soul.
“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 an ordinary life we only get to look closely at the sublime once it has dropped to the ditch, once the maggots have already arrived at work.�
As Frankie tells her story, the various works of art buttress and express the ideas and feelings that both entrap and liberate her. And then there are the dead animals. Frankie, who has retreated from her bedsit in Dublin to her dead grandmother’s bungalow out in the Irish countryside, next to a turbine (a somewhat disturbing totem of sorts) decides to photograph dead wildlife. It started when she found a dead robin, which inspired her to photograph a series. “A series about how everything is being slowly killed.�
Frankie has rules, though. She must not take part in the death of the animal, and they must be fully expired. She will be the observer, not a participant. I felt this concept even more when Frankie discusses surrealist painter’s “The Treachery of Images,� a painting of a pipe. The point of the painting though, is to stress that it is not a pipe, but a representation of a pipe. Throughout the narrative, Frankie grapples with the idea of simulacra and simulation—the thing vs. the representation of the thing.
(Unfortunately, in the ARC copy, we do not see the dead wildlife photos. This story is so breathtaking, so beautifully melancholy, that I am sure to eventually purchase a finished copy when it is published. I am itching to see these photographs).
This is a niche novel, not for everyone. It is more of a story than a plot, meditative rather than action-packed, interior and reflective. Frankie, the unreliable narrator of her unreliable life, is also flush with naked truth about herself, even as she repeatedly lies to her mother, and perceptive about the world around her. She is vulnerable, lonely, intelligent, curious, and suffused with a piercing humanity. Her prose is exquisite, imaginative, and visual, mournful but hopeful about the natural world and finding her place in it; her flaws, her contributions, and her crushing misunderstandings.
There’s a paradox of finding myself smile when Frankie is honest, deadly honest with others, who then are offended by her perceived cruelty. It left me almost in tears-- that smile that slipped from me. In the course of the novel, Frankie had saturated my heart and soul.
“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 an ordinary life we only get to look closely at the sublime once it has dropped to the ditch, once the maggots have already arrived at work.�
January 20, 2018
We need to talk about how good this book is. I don’t know what’s going on over there but young Irish writers are blowing my mind.
March 3, 2022
Now shortlisted for the Goldsmith Prize.
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:
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
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
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.
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.
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.
May 28, 2018
U tezama, pošto mislim da ne mogu ništa kohezivno da kažem na temu romana, a sumnjam i da ću ikada uspeti. Više je razloga za to. Možda zato što me je nenadano pogodio. Možda zato što se plašim sebi da priznam da mi je i trebao. Ili prosto zato što ne znam šta da kažem o romanu koji je suštinski niz kratkih paragrafa na svakojake teme. Ali gotovo bez izuzetka na one mračn(ij)e.
Počeo sam ovaj roman i umalo odustao posle dvadesetak strana. Mislio sam: depresija je tako melodramatična nekad. A završio ga sa osećajem totalne iznurenosti. I, mislim, novim favoritom.
Pa evo:
-pravo mesto, pravo vreme: knjiga me je pronašla tačno kada mi je trebala; kada se javljaju dileme o sopstvenoj prosečnosti, o budućnosti; egzistencijalna kriza je druga reč-isto značenje (sinonim!) za ispitni rok, hoću reći
-reference done right: imam svadju sa referencama u romanima zbog toga što mislim da stare izuzetno loše i suviše zavise od te neke kvaziširine (elita piše za elitu) osobe koja čita; ovde je to drugačije, svaka referenca je detaljno objašnjena (ima smisla zašto je tako, nije nakaradno), mahom na temu konceptualne umetnosti koja gle čuda i nije tako idiotska kao što sam prethodno mislio
-beskonačna karakterizacija: narative gotovo nema, a mislim da sam bar sto puta rekao kako su meni to i omiljeni romani; postoji nešto u tom bestelesnom talasanju u tudjoj glavi, zamišljanju jednog celog života sa druge strane stranice
-ekonomična poetičnost: iako ponekad volim onako kada mu baš daju na dušu (da ne upotrebim onaj drugi izraz) sa stilom, mislim da je ovo prava mera liričnosti; pitko i gorko-slatko (neću reći bitersvit; ups) i ume da zaustavi u mestu
-sentimentalna vrednost: knjigu sam kupio u Dablinu u nekoj lokalnoj knjižari sa idejom „zašto bih kupovao nešto što ću i u Srbiji zasigurno kad tad kupiti�, pa sam na preporuku knjižarke (ne mogu baš da tvrdim da je to pravi izraz), uzeo ovu � hvala joj
Možda ovo i jeste ipak koliko toliko kohezivno, ali nisam mogao da se bakćem sa spojnicama. Kao što rekoh � umoran sam, sve su mi kosti polomljene. Ali na mestu su i zato (verovatno) mogu da zacele samo snažnije.
5
Počeo sam ovaj roman i umalo odustao posle dvadesetak strana. Mislio sam: depresija je tako melodramatična nekad. A završio ga sa osećajem totalne iznurenosti. I, mislim, novim favoritom.
Pa evo:
-pravo mesto, pravo vreme: knjiga me je pronašla tačno kada mi je trebala; kada se javljaju dileme o sopstvenoj prosečnosti, o budućnosti; egzistencijalna kriza je druga reč-isto značenje (sinonim!) za ispitni rok, hoću reći
-reference done right: imam svadju sa referencama u romanima zbog toga što mislim da stare izuzetno loše i suviše zavise od te neke kvaziširine (elita piše za elitu) osobe koja čita; ovde je to drugačije, svaka referenca je detaljno objašnjena (ima smisla zašto je tako, nije nakaradno), mahom na temu konceptualne umetnosti koja gle čuda i nije tako idiotska kao što sam prethodno mislio
-beskonačna karakterizacija: narative gotovo nema, a mislim da sam bar sto puta rekao kako su meni to i omiljeni romani; postoji nešto u tom bestelesnom talasanju u tudjoj glavi, zamišljanju jednog celog života sa druge strane stranice
-ekonomična poetičnost: iako ponekad volim onako kada mu baš daju na dušu (da ne upotrebim onaj drugi izraz) sa stilom, mislim da je ovo prava mera liričnosti; pitko i gorko-slatko (neću reći bitersvit; ups) i ume da zaustavi u mestu
-sentimentalna vrednost: knjigu sam kupio u Dablinu u nekoj lokalnoj knjižari sa idejom „zašto bih kupovao nešto što ću i u Srbiji zasigurno kad tad kupiti�, pa sam na preporuku knjižarke (ne mogu baš da tvrdim da je to pravi izraz), uzeo ovu � hvala joj
Možda ovo i jeste ipak koliko toliko kohezivno, ali nisam mogao da se bakćem sa spojnicama. Kao što rekoh � umoran sam, sve su mi kosti polomljene. Ali na mestu su i zato (verovatno) mogu da zacele samo snažnije.
5
February 22, 2017
What place does art hold in our day to day lives? That's one of the questions at the centre of Sara Baume's second novel. Frankie is a twenty-five year old woman who has left her rented apartment in Dublin after studying art and working in a gallery. Finding it impossible to integrate into a working and social life as her uni friends have and concluding that “The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed�, she retreats to her late grandmother's rural bungalow. She endeavours to create art on a daily basis and continuously quizzes herself finding thematic connections between incidents in her life and specific pieces of art. Her family come to visit and hover close by as they are concerned about her mental health. Frankie experiences depression and she becomes increasingly isolated because of her prickly demeanour. The author's debut novel recounted the reclusive life of a man and his dog at the fringes of society. With this inventive and fascinating new novel Baume proves that she is the master of describing the intense poignancy of solitude within a noise-drenched world.
Read my full
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March 23, 2017
Quiet, yet unsettling account of a young woman struggeling with her depression and with the question what it means to be alive.
4.5*
4.5*
October 28, 2018
4.75/5stars
i fucking loved this
i fucking loved this
November 6, 2017
4.5, rounded up. To my mind, this is the perfect Goldsmiths Prize nominee, since it very much stretches the boundaries of what a novel can be. It took me a while to get into it, and it initially drove me crazy that I had to keep rushing to the computer to check out the 76 examples of conceptual and/or performance art referenced throughout (this is ONE time when I wish I had read the Kindle version, so I could have quickly found such citations. If you do decide to take the plunge, I would strongly suggest doing so however, as it enhances the book tremendously). I unfortunately was reading a library copy of the US version, which does NOT include the narrator's photographs either, which I think would also enhance, if not indeed form an integral part of the reading experience here.
I don't have much to say about the actual plot (such as it is), nor its meaning - suffice it to say I just really enjoyed both the uniqueness of the work, and the thoughts and feelings of Frankie, despite her sometimes morose and depressing wanderings... and looking forward to reading Baume's initial novel now also.
I don't have much to say about the actual plot (such as it is), nor its meaning - suffice it to say I just really enjoyed both the uniqueness of the work, and the thoughts and feelings of Frankie, despite her sometimes morose and depressing wanderings... and looking forward to reading Baume's initial novel now also.
April 16, 2019
A young woman labeled as having a happiness deficiency. Perhaps it was too great a responsibility to hold in all those secrets and then to convey them as if they were meant to be written to the world. She sorts through what she thinks is expected of her all the while trembling inside. She risks ridicule and her reputation as she searches for answers that hang like smoke in the air around her. Sometimes all she can do is weep, for the worries and pains of her own and of the world. All those nightmare like memories and dead animals. Sometimes she tries to be like others but this ends up a pointless creation. She cries openly and uncontrollably for the things she’s lost and for the changes she knows she must make. She’s got to adapt to survive. At last, growing tired of the sameness of her environment ,she boards a ship at sea. I think this is her way of letting go of the past. This comes with great sadness for it holds who she was. The future is only a possibility of who she might become - if she can just get through this.
February 25, 2017
Possibly my favourite author at the moment. I love the way she describes the Irish countryside, the way she weaves her story around animals and art, or art and sadness as she says at the very end. Good literature does not emerge from contentment and there is a dark side to this book and indeed her amazing first book. The dark side of Ireland. Nevertheless Sara Baume an exciting talent and this is an extraordinary novel.
May 1, 2017
I go in the back door to the kitchen. Open a cupboard, click. Take out a tin of tuna chunks and close the cupboard, thunk. Pull the ring on the can, click, again; a smaller, sharper click. Open the cutlery drawer, jangle, and select a fork, clink. Pick an ant off my sleeve and flick it down the sink. I breathe. I breathe. I breathe.
And all of this time, I am trembling.
is apparently semi-autobiographical � like the main character, Frankie, author Sara Baume attended art school in Dublin, worked in a gallery there, and had some kind of existential/emotional breakdown � and that knowledge nudges me to tread carefully: Who am I to say that this book doesn't precisely capture the essence of a very real human experience? Here's my overthought takeaway: I really loved Baume's writing about Frankie's inner struggles and the details of how she dealt with them, and I was interested in Frankie's ideas about art and how she uses it to understand her own life, but there are formulaic devices in this book that strained my patience and drained away much of my empathy. After , I wanted to love everything Baume; and I didn't love this.
When we meet Frankie, she's a twenty-five-year-old gallery worker who, after completing art school years before, lost her passion for creating art. She has some friends � or, at least, co-workers � a set routine, and a bed-sit apartment in Dublin. And then one night she realises it isn't enough � she collapses to the floor and sheds unending tears into her grimy carpet � and when she finally gathers the strength, she asks her mother to come and get her and bring her back to their village home. Because Frankie's grandmother had died a couple years earlier � and Granny's country bungalow wasn't attracting any buyers � Frankie is able to convince her parents to let her live there for a while as she figures out her life.
It wasn't my parents who annoyed me; it was the forsaken version of myself I helplessly revert to in their presence; it was the fact that my life was suddenly wide open. I had not yet, at that point, decided whether I wanted to get better or die altogether.
Frankie makes several references to “waiting to die� and not caring if she does or not, and while her mother recognises her daughter's fragility and insists she visit the family doctor before moving out to the country alone, Frankie is unimpressed that two different, harried doctors immediately wrote her a prescription; both of which Frankie refused to fill. Again, I understand that this mirrors Baume's own experience, and while I can't deny that there is an overmedicalisation in the mental health field, I don't know what to think about this: Neither doctor spends enough time with Frankie to properly diagnose her, but the reader can see that she's in trouble; yet, as a reader with no experience of mental illness, I have no idea if Frankie should be medicated (and I'll note that Frankie doesn't just seem to suffer from depression, but she describes a lifetime of OCD and serious paranoia, as well). Is this just some “quarter-life crisis� that everyone needs to wait out, as Baume apparently did? Could “wait it out� be a dangerous message for those who would benefit from medication? No clue, and I wish Frankie's mental state had been made clearer.
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.
As to the art: Not long before Frankie's breakdown, she decides to photograph a series of found, dead animals; starting with a robin in her city garden. Each chapter is named for a type of animal (Robin, Rabbit, Rat...), and it immediately becomes clear that Frankie will eventually find a dead robin, rabbit, rat, etc. in each so-titled chapter. That was one of the devices that began to wear on me (there's nothing shocking [or artful?] or otherwise emotional about happening upon the dead frog one has been expecting), but the more wearying device was Frankie's mental “testing� of herself: She would see an object or think of a concept and then conjure from an apparently eidetic memory an art piece centered on that object/concept:
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. And, from scratch, I must build new frames and appendages; I must fill the drawers and roll along.
There's something ironic about this particular metaphor � taking responsibility for the furniture in her head � when Frankie can't muster the energy to take care of the furniture in her grandmother's house; no urge to sweep up the dead flies by the sitting room window; no desire to remove the desiccated slug from the bathroom mirror. To demonstrate this “testing� device, this is the book's titular example:
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 expanse of grass. Long doesn't like to interfere with the landscapes through which he walks, but sometimes he builds sculptures from materials supplied by chance. Then he leaves them behind to fall apart. He specialises in barely-there art. Pieces which take up as little space in the world as possible. And which do as little damage.
I do like this example � as the artwork captures and makes visual something of Frankie's barely-there existence � but this device is used over seventy times in ten chapters, and that's too much for me; they eventually felt like filler and I grew to dread coming upon another. And it probably exposes me as a Philistine, but I couldn't engage with most of the conceptual artpieces that Frankie describes, even though she explains what's important about them (and as Baume explains in an afterword, these are only meant to be Frankie's interpretations; we are encouraged to discover and interpret the art as we like). I was already one of the great unwashed who doesn't “get� My Bed by Tracey Emin (People were so angry over that bed; they did not realise it was the easiest piece of art in the world with which to identify), so there's not much chance that I'd see the genius in someone punching a clock-card at the strike of every hour for a year (Hsieh's One Year Performance) or the blinking lights of Creed's Work No. 227: The lights going on and off; as Baume says of the latter:
I love what it might mean. The light and dark in everything, the reaction to every action, the prodigious unpredictability of life. And I love the possibility � the audacity � that it might mean nothing at all.
And a last observation: We eventually learn the extent of Frankie's paranoia about strangers, and where it may have come from. When I read the bit about Frankie and her sister having discussed the bad guys' method of rolling an empty pram onto the road to get a car to stop, I thought there was probably something very significant about them having decided as a credo: Remember the golden rule? Always hit the baby. I thought that this � hit the baby/photograph the roadkill � was likely the nexus around which the whole narrative revolved, but there's always the possibility � the audacity � that it might mean nothing at all.
There's not a whole lot of plot to A Line Made by Walking, so it really comes down to what's going on in Frankie's head. Where she was dealing with what was real (her experiences, emotions, fears), I was totally engaged. But all the parts that read as little more than a catalogue of Tate Museum exhibitions felt formulaic and left me cold; not least of all because I don't feel engaged by the type of high concept art that she's describing (my own failing, I know). I understand that Baume has become motivated to take up her visual art again, and I'd be interested to see what she creates. And if I need to wait years and years before she writes another book, I'll be interested to see what she creates on the page at that time, too.
October 10, 2017
The film is almost over when Herzog conducts an interview with an ornithologist alongside footage of a colony migrating towards their feeding grounds. The camera zooms in on a single penguin that has broken away from the group and set off in the opposite direction, towards the mountains. The ornithologist explains how it often happens that there is one member of the colony who becomes deranged. How, even if he fetched the misdirected penguin back, reunited it with its fellows and pointed it the right way, as soon as he let go it would immediately turn around again and resume its own course towards the hostile, boundless mountains which mark the southern limits of the Earth. ‘The deranged ones couldn’t possibly survive,� the ornithologist says, and in all his years of study, he still doesn’t understand why they do it.
There are several repeating motifs in this story of someone coping (or not) with depression. The deranged penguin is one of these and it seems to sum up the life of the protagonist (Frankie) who returns to her family home and then moves into the house her grandmother used to live in as she attempts to work out how to live a "normal" life. The book is mostly her somewhat rambling thoughts over the period in which she lives alone in this house. Frankie is an artist by training. She begins a project where she photographs dead animals, but she sets strict rules for herself (e.g. she can’t photograph an animal she killed - this to prevent her descending into cruelty). These animals then give us the titles of each chapter of the book. And Frankie continually tests herself by thinking of works of conceptual art that relate to where she is in her thinking process - the narration of the novel repeatedly drops into short section that begin "Works about �, I test myself" followed by a description of an art work. All of these works are real and can be looked up by an interested reader - there is a full list provided at the end of the book.
You would think that a book detailing a depressed person’s thoughts would be, well, depressing. And potentially rather boring. There are times when it starts to head in that direction, but it is always rescued by Baume’s observational skills and her descriptive writing. When writing about the discovery of an abandoned child, we read of the newsreader that
he says the driving man stopped to ‘answer a call of nature�. What a pretty way of describing such a mundane, mandatory bodily function. In the face of immense tragedy � yet again � unexpected poetry.
The book is also enlivened by Baume’s ongoing meditation about the purpose of art. When considering Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter, as just one example, she writes
Backlit by a single bulb, this is what the best of art does: uncovers an unrecoverable view of the world. Now I wonder did Parker reorder the pieces according to how they were originally ordered? I hope so. Because this is something else the best of art does: the seemingly impossible.
Given Frankie’s on going self tests, the book is peppered with thought provoking observations about art.
Two things confused me about the book. Firstly, a repeated motif of someone holding a shell against their ear. In the book, the narrator says they were told it was the sea they could hear but now they know it is the wind. But, I am fairly sure, there is a more scientific explanation than that and that it is the blood flowing round your head that you hear. And I thought that was common knowledge which makes me wonder if it is a deliberately wrong statement. This then makes me wonder whether the apparent confusion of the difference between a Crow and a Rook (they seem to be assumed to be different words for the same thing, which is simply not true) is also deliberate.
This is a very engaging story that held my interest all the way through despite the potential for a rather dull and depressing narrative. It feels like Baume knows what she is writing about both when it comes to depression and when it comes to art. I am slightly less convinced by her nature writing, although some of it is spot on and, as I say, other bits may be deliberate.
There are several repeating motifs in this story of someone coping (or not) with depression. The deranged penguin is one of these and it seems to sum up the life of the protagonist (Frankie) who returns to her family home and then moves into the house her grandmother used to live in as she attempts to work out how to live a "normal" life. The book is mostly her somewhat rambling thoughts over the period in which she lives alone in this house. Frankie is an artist by training. She begins a project where she photographs dead animals, but she sets strict rules for herself (e.g. she can’t photograph an animal she killed - this to prevent her descending into cruelty). These animals then give us the titles of each chapter of the book. And Frankie continually tests herself by thinking of works of conceptual art that relate to where she is in her thinking process - the narration of the novel repeatedly drops into short section that begin "Works about �, I test myself" followed by a description of an art work. All of these works are real and can be looked up by an interested reader - there is a full list provided at the end of the book.
You would think that a book detailing a depressed person’s thoughts would be, well, depressing. And potentially rather boring. There are times when it starts to head in that direction, but it is always rescued by Baume’s observational skills and her descriptive writing. When writing about the discovery of an abandoned child, we read of the newsreader that
he says the driving man stopped to ‘answer a call of nature�. What a pretty way of describing such a mundane, mandatory bodily function. In the face of immense tragedy � yet again � unexpected poetry.
The book is also enlivened by Baume’s ongoing meditation about the purpose of art. When considering Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter, as just one example, she writes
Backlit by a single bulb, this is what the best of art does: uncovers an unrecoverable view of the world. Now I wonder did Parker reorder the pieces according to how they were originally ordered? I hope so. Because this is something else the best of art does: the seemingly impossible.
Given Frankie’s on going self tests, the book is peppered with thought provoking observations about art.
Two things confused me about the book. Firstly, a repeated motif of someone holding a shell against their ear. In the book, the narrator says they were told it was the sea they could hear but now they know it is the wind. But, I am fairly sure, there is a more scientific explanation than that and that it is the blood flowing round your head that you hear. And I thought that was common knowledge which makes me wonder if it is a deliberately wrong statement. This then makes me wonder whether the apparent confusion of the difference between a Crow and a Rook (they seem to be assumed to be different words for the same thing, which is simply not true) is also deliberate.
This is a very engaging story that held my interest all the way through despite the potential for a rather dull and depressing narrative. It feels like Baume knows what she is writing about both when it comes to depression and when it comes to art. I am slightly less convinced by her nature writing, although some of it is spot on and, as I say, other bits may be deliberate.
November 1, 2020
Dit lezen was de tijd vertragen, een stap naar achteren zetten en naar binnen keren.
'Die nacht regent het. Zachte regen. Ik poedel wat in de ondiepe plassen van de slaap, luister naar het regengemurmel, de slag van de turbine.
Ik hou van de nacht, houd ik mezelf voor. 's Nachts ben ik immuun. Niemand verwacht dat je de uren vult; ik moet niets en hoef niets van mezelf. De nacht is een niets dat je moet koesteren.'
October 25, 2017
This was my final read of the six Goldsmiths nominated books for 2017. "Books that break the literary mould".
First person, narrator led, books are often introspective, and strangely maudlin, tales of lives less well lived. Sara Baume's is the story of Frankie, a young woman exhibiting classical signs of depression. Her mother comments
You're depressed.. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's basically a happiness deficiency(108).
The stark inevitability of a person's decline into reclusiveness, of morbid thoughts, of the seeking out of an anti social, solitary, existence does not make for an uplifting read.
Knut Hamsun's Hunger written in 1890 is my unsurpassed standard for this type of writing.
Baume writes well enough, and the introduction of two literary devices is welcome as a break from the deliberate monotony of self imposed withdrawal from society.
Firstly, there are no less than seventy five works of visual art referenced, which Baume suggests the reader 'googles'.
Secondly, ten wild/ rural animals are featured, all in their death stares.
Our narrator declares them:
"A series about how everything is being slowly killed"(2)
Both of these narrative devices serve to underline our narrators creative spirit, one which is creative in a suitably uncomfortable, unconventional way.
The inclusion of actual photographs illustrating the ten featured corpses struck me as unnecessary, and added nothing to the message being portrayed.
When Goldsmiths College announce their winner next week I don't expect A Line Made By Walking, nor its companion piece in human misery (First Love) to win the prize.
First person, narrator led, books are often introspective, and strangely maudlin, tales of lives less well lived. Sara Baume's is the story of Frankie, a young woman exhibiting classical signs of depression. Her mother comments
You're depressed.. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's basically a happiness deficiency(108).
The stark inevitability of a person's decline into reclusiveness, of morbid thoughts, of the seeking out of an anti social, solitary, existence does not make for an uplifting read.
Knut Hamsun's Hunger written in 1890 is my unsurpassed standard for this type of writing.
Baume writes well enough, and the introduction of two literary devices is welcome as a break from the deliberate monotony of self imposed withdrawal from society.
Firstly, there are no less than seventy five works of visual art referenced, which Baume suggests the reader 'googles'.
Secondly, ten wild/ rural animals are featured, all in their death stares.
Our narrator declares them:
"A series about how everything is being slowly killed"(2)
Both of these narrative devices serve to underline our narrators creative spirit, one which is creative in a suitably uncomfortable, unconventional way.
The inclusion of actual photographs illustrating the ten featured corpses struck me as unnecessary, and added nothing to the message being portrayed.
When Goldsmiths College announce their winner next week I don't expect A Line Made By Walking, nor its companion piece in human misery (First Love) to win the prize.
November 24, 2021
I was hesitant to start this knowing it was the last of Sara Baume's books I had on my shelf to read. I find her work so nourishing. So what joy, part way through reading, to learn there is a new novel due out in Apr 2022, Seven Steeples.
A Line Made By Walking takes place over one summer when 26 yr old Frankie quits her Dublin bedsit and returns briefly to her parents, before deciding to move temporarily into her grandmother's slightly decrepit cottage that has been long on the market since her death.
It is a place where she can wallow and wait out a period of depression, create art, take walks, cycle and test herself on works of art. Her art school days are over, but finding meaning through art and noticing it remain important.
Each chapter is titled with a different roadkill or animal species (not living) she has encountered nearby. Everything around her and her stream of consciousness thoughts link together to create a seamless narrative, like the ripples of a stream bubbling over stones, moving around obstacles. Separate but part of something.
Though she is not herself at this time, she creates purpose in each day, and while not being under observation, makes slow progress. Her mother worries, but allows her the freedom she needs. She resists conventional treatment.
Though the barest of plots, I loved it's meandering style and waymarker structure through an incredible recollection of art installations, which are like inviting rabbit holes the reader can burrow into, something she encourages us to do.
The line made by walking crops up three or four times in the novel, in reference to artworks, the first time in Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows (1890) and represents the division between the field and sky, the sadness inherent in life. It was his final painting.
Again, the novel reads for me, as if the author is speaking, I forget there is a fictional protagonist, after reading her nonfiction Handiwork and listening to Sara Baume talk about her own art making projects, her presence is always there, lurking within the brush strokes of her characters.
Absolutely loved it.
The rest of my review here at
A Line Made By Walking takes place over one summer when 26 yr old Frankie quits her Dublin bedsit and returns briefly to her parents, before deciding to move temporarily into her grandmother's slightly decrepit cottage that has been long on the market since her death.
It is a place where she can wallow and wait out a period of depression, create art, take walks, cycle and test herself on works of art. Her art school days are over, but finding meaning through art and noticing it remain important.
Each chapter is titled with a different roadkill or animal species (not living) she has encountered nearby. Everything around her and her stream of consciousness thoughts link together to create a seamless narrative, like the ripples of a stream bubbling over stones, moving around obstacles. Separate but part of something.
Though she is not herself at this time, she creates purpose in each day, and while not being under observation, makes slow progress. Her mother worries, but allows her the freedom she needs. She resists conventional treatment.
Though the barest of plots, I loved it's meandering style and waymarker structure through an incredible recollection of art installations, which are like inviting rabbit holes the reader can burrow into, something she encourages us to do.
The line made by walking crops up three or four times in the novel, in reference to artworks, the first time in Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows (1890) and represents the division between the field and sky, the sadness inherent in life. It was his final painting.
Again, the novel reads for me, as if the author is speaking, I forget there is a fictional protagonist, after reading her nonfiction Handiwork and listening to Sara Baume talk about her own art making projects, her presence is always there, lurking within the brush strokes of her characters.
Absolutely loved it.
The rest of my review here at
June 14, 2017
After the protagonist of this terrible, terrible book says something deeply rude to her hairdresser for no reason at all, she introspects the following:
Yes, you heard it here first - depressed people are just unique, they're so much more authentic, NORMAL people can't handle the REAL CAPITAL T-TRUTH, that's why they're so happy and functional, unlike me, the most specialest artistic deep girl in the whole wide world.
This is a weepy, self-indulgent read about a Very Sad Person; particularly disappointing if you (like me) loved Baume's oeuvre Spill Simmer Falter Wither, which presented such a new take on precisely this "Very Sad Person" genre of fiction. Missing here are the pointed and creative observations that made her first work so great. Instead, Baume writes cringey, banal filler statements about life that would be more at home in an 8th grade journaling assignment, like "we are all an enormous waltz, I think...some get to join in; others don't. Some end up waltzing against their will." ???? STOP.
There is more to say on the subject of modern mental illness than has been said so far in popular fiction, especially about depression in the lives of women: the last great writing along these lines came from Woolf, Chopin, and Gilman an entire century ago. What the literary world does not need more of is wealthy white women mewling over the course of 300 lifeless pages about how they can't relate to anyone because - of course - no one except other depressed artists have rich internal lives.
"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 which encourage others to feel comfortable...People don't like it when you say real things."
Yes, you heard it here first - depressed people are just unique, they're so much more authentic, NORMAL people can't handle the REAL CAPITAL T-TRUTH, that's why they're so happy and functional, unlike me, the most specialest artistic deep girl in the whole wide world.
This is a weepy, self-indulgent read about a Very Sad Person; particularly disappointing if you (like me) loved Baume's oeuvre Spill Simmer Falter Wither, which presented such a new take on precisely this "Very Sad Person" genre of fiction. Missing here are the pointed and creative observations that made her first work so great. Instead, Baume writes cringey, banal filler statements about life that would be more at home in an 8th grade journaling assignment, like "we are all an enormous waltz, I think...some get to join in; others don't. Some end up waltzing against their will." ???? STOP.
There is more to say on the subject of modern mental illness than has been said so far in popular fiction, especially about depression in the lives of women: the last great writing along these lines came from Woolf, Chopin, and Gilman an entire century ago. What the literary world does not need more of is wealthy white women mewling over the course of 300 lifeless pages about how they can't relate to anyone because - of course - no one except other depressed artists have rich internal lives.
March 28, 2017
A year ago, Sara Baume knocked me off my feet with her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither. It was such an original idea so beautifully and unconventionally told. In June, I was privileged to see her participation in a panel of Irish writers which also included Colum McCann, so it is no surprise that he expresses his admiration for this, her second novel, equally mesmerizing and original.
Frankie, an artist working in a Dublin gallery, upon finding herself in the throes of a breakdown, gets permission to inhabit her late grandmother's cottage in the country. As she pedals the countryside, she photographs creatures dead by natural means or roadkill, ruminating about her knowledge of the world of "outsider art" with examples that fit her current experiences. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to become familiar with her references, which gave a complete dimension to Frankie's story. Unfortunately, since I had an ARC that did not include Frankie's photographs but had indications of where they were, I felt my understanding of Frankie is incomplete until I can see them when the novel is published . Baume writes about damaged characters with empathy, intelligence, and realism. Highly highly recommended.
Frankie, an artist working in a Dublin gallery, upon finding herself in the throes of a breakdown, gets permission to inhabit her late grandmother's cottage in the country. As she pedals the countryside, she photographs creatures dead by natural means or roadkill, ruminating about her knowledge of the world of "outsider art" with examples that fit her current experiences. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to become familiar with her references, which gave a complete dimension to Frankie's story. Unfortunately, since I had an ARC that did not include Frankie's photographs but had indications of where they were, I felt my understanding of Frankie is incomplete until I can see them when the novel is published . Baume writes about damaged characters with empathy, intelligence, and realism. Highly highly recommended.
January 8, 2020
An age old question is whether art reflects life. With Sara Baume’s second novel, A Line Made by Walking, art not only reflects life but is wedged into it.
The book’s title is inspired by a piece of art of the same name, created by Richard Long, which consists of a lawn with a line in the middle created by Long’s constant treading of the specific area.
The significance of this line is to ruin the tranquility of nature and to prove that a work of art can be a journey. Considering the themes of Baume’s novel, this is apt.
Frankie is depressed and decides to move into her grandmother’s house in order to find some sort of direction for her life. In the process she is working on a art project which consists of taking pictures of dead wildlife and in true Sebaldian fashion, Baume inserts the pictures as part of the text. To add more to this rich storyline, Frankie tries to recall a piece of art which is similar to the situation she is in. For example when she is seeing a white wall she tries to remember a work of art which is white.
Franki’s depression worsens throughout her stay, as her mental state is frail she delves deeper into her art project, which, like, Long’s picture shows a disruption of nature and is a record of her journey from the city to her hometown. However I saw this as a journey of someone trying to overcome depression. Eventually Frankie realises that the journey has to continue and she does move on.
I enjoyed reading A Line Made for Walking. Baume combines quirky narration and sharp observation (something I am a total sucker for) plus with the added info about art (there’s an index with all the works mentioned) Baume’s novel is an intellectual treat but still manages to be play with structure at the same time.
The book’s title is inspired by a piece of art of the same name, created by Richard Long, which consists of a lawn with a line in the middle created by Long’s constant treading of the specific area.
The significance of this line is to ruin the tranquility of nature and to prove that a work of art can be a journey. Considering the themes of Baume’s novel, this is apt.
Frankie is depressed and decides to move into her grandmother’s house in order to find some sort of direction for her life. In the process she is working on a art project which consists of taking pictures of dead wildlife and in true Sebaldian fashion, Baume inserts the pictures as part of the text. To add more to this rich storyline, Frankie tries to recall a piece of art which is similar to the situation she is in. For example when she is seeing a white wall she tries to remember a work of art which is white.
Franki’s depression worsens throughout her stay, as her mental state is frail she delves deeper into her art project, which, like, Long’s picture shows a disruption of nature and is a record of her journey from the city to her hometown. However I saw this as a journey of someone trying to overcome depression. Eventually Frankie realises that the journey has to continue and she does move on.
I enjoyed reading A Line Made for Walking. Baume combines quirky narration and sharp observation (something I am a total sucker for) plus with the added info about art (there’s an index with all the works mentioned) Baume’s novel is an intellectual treat but still manages to be play with structure at the same time.
October 13, 2023
Twenty-five-year-old Frankie works at a gallery. She has graduated from art school but has not been able to make her living at it and has become depressed while living in the city. She asks her mother if she can stay in her deceased grandmother’s house in the Irish countryside. Her mother agrees but asks Frankie to attend mental health counseling. After one session, Frankie refuses medication and does not return. The storyline follows her life in the country, where she walks about, bicycles, and takes photos of dead animals as part of a new artistic endeavor. She sets rules around her project, where she cannot kill an animal nor move it from where it has died. We spend a lot of time in her head, as she tests herself on her memory of (real) artworks and art history.
This is a low-key book. It portrays Frankie’s struggle with mental illness. It also details the manner in which art is an integral part of how she views the world. She sees things that others might pass by, bringing a critical artistic eye to what many of us would consider inconsequential. It is not earth-shaking, but the highlight for me is the elegant writing style. Sara Baume is one of my favorite authors. I didn’t like this one quite as much as some of her others (my favorite so far is Seven Steeples) but definitely worthwhile. I especially recommend it for those who enjoy art and art history as key elements of a story.
This is a low-key book. It portrays Frankie’s struggle with mental illness. It also details the manner in which art is an integral part of how she views the world. She sees things that others might pass by, bringing a critical artistic eye to what many of us would consider inconsequential. It is not earth-shaking, but the highlight for me is the elegant writing style. Sara Baume is one of my favorite authors. I didn’t like this one quite as much as some of her others (my favorite so far is Seven Steeples) but definitely worthwhile. I especially recommend it for those who enjoy art and art history as key elements of a story.
October 6, 2018
Sara Baume is my favorite living author. There, I said it. Always such elegant descriptions and poetic writing. A Line Made by Walking is a quiet and deeply affecting novel.
September 18, 2018
Generally not enjoyable especially with the smattering of racist, ableist and fatphobic comments throughout.
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