I found Light on the sidewalk and brought it home on the strength of the back cover blurb, a quote from The New York Times Book Review that says the book is “a luminous prose poem of a novel” and also calls it “unhurried” and “richly descriptive.” I’d never heard of Figes, and have never been particularly interested in Monet, who is the book’s subject (though someone, probably my mom, bought me a copy of Linnea in Monet’s Garden when I was a kid and I remember liking it well enough). Maybe my relative lack of interest in Monet is part of why it took me nearly a week to read this book, despite it being quite short. But I think my slow reading pace also had to do with the style of the narration, which is heavy on the description and not so heavy on plot—which isn’t actually normally a problem for me, but maybe wasn’t the best fit for my current reading mood. Light is the story of a single summer day in 1900 in Monet’s household, and it jumps from character to character—Monet, his second wife, her children and grandchildren, the town priest—but the setting, the house and the verandah and of course the garden, are as central to the story as the people. The book is concerned with light/vision/seeing, not surprisingly, but also with other senses, with sounds and smells too: birdsong, the sound of water flowing, the smell of the earth, of roses, of mint. The descriptions are dense and, often, lovely: I really liked this, about a canvas Monet is working on:
Almost square. A total balance between water and sky. In still water all things are still. Cool colours only, blue fading to mist grey, smooth now, things smudging, trees fading into sky, melting in water (9).
And this:
And even as he was studying the changing light it changed further, the river itself had turned to silver and gold, a moving flood, and now as the sun rose it was as though the overhanging trees could no longer hold it back, the air itself was flooded with light, white and gold, so that nothing was visible but light itself. (26)
And there are some wonderful passages centered around the grandkids, passages that brilliantly evoke things like the warmth of summer sun or the excitement of getting a red balloon. But, I don’t know, somehow this book wasn’t quite for me, or wasn’t for me right now. Joyce Carol Oates, writing in the The New York Times Book Review (indeed, the same review that the back cover blurb comes from) says that “The parallel with “To the Lighthouse” and “The Waves” is instructive rather than distracting,” but I disagreed: I kept wanting to be re-reading Woolf, instead of reading Figes.
Leave a Reply