(by Maira Kalman)
I read this aloud to/with my husband over the course of an afternoon and evening, and I think I enjoyed it more this way than I would have if I’d just read it on my own. Reading it aloud with someone else encouraged me to pause after each vignette (there are 39 of them) and to linger over the paintings (of which there are 51) more than I might have if I were reading silently (I’m a fast reader). This book, whose subtitle is “Family Stories,” has a lot in it about Kalman’s family—her parents, her grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, her husband, her in-laws, her sister. As the title suggests, remorse figures in a lot of the vignettes: remorse about arguments, about rifts, about grudges held, about things said. There are also vignettes about the lives of some writers and musicians—Tolstoy, Schumann, Gérard de Nerval.
In general I liked the paintings (which are gorgeous—I love Kalman’s use of bright color) more than the text, but I liked the interplay. And some of the text is great—my husband and I both laughed at this, at the end of a story about Kalman’s uncle: “He could have been swept out to sea. But he was not. But he could have. This is what we call the possible-probable remorse tense. Suffering after the fact over a disaster that could possibly have happened but did not. This tense occurs very frequently in our household. Daily. Even hourly.”
You can see some images of this book on Kalman’s website to get a sense of what the book looks like—it really is beautifully designed and printed. Also: if you read this book, look at the index: it has some very funny things in it.
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