Hello Gentle Reader,
The paintings of Claude Lazar are still lives of cityscapes, neighbourhoods, private interiors, intimate views looking out on the world. They are ubiquitous scenes, who, in large part thanks to the magic of painting and art, are brought forward from the background and are now taking centre stage. Lazars subjects are haunted by absence. Their original mundanity, however, is inflected with tones of menace. In one painting, a seamstress’s sewing room is vacant. A dressing mannequin stands bare. A blank canvas waiting to be adorned, pinned, and sewn into existence. The shelving behind the mannequin is slightly less perceptible. Does it contain threads, ribbons, fabric cuttings? Maybe there are jars of buttons, catalogues of sewing patterns, cushions of pins, boxes of scissors. Then again, the walls are showing their age and their lack of maintenance. Plaster giving way. Wallpaper peeling. A dampness seeps in from the walls, permeating the room. The shelving unit may be completely separate from the sewing. Perhaps it’s not a sewing room at all, but a studio apartment. A garret, yes, the romantic inclinations of a Parisian garret. Where such artistic genius gestates in artistic isolation and austere poverty. The German romantic painter Carl Spitzweg captures this romantic image perfect in his painting The Poor Poet, whereby the flâneur subject is captured in his splendid squalor, daydreaming up his new masterpiece. If it is a garret, then perhaps the shelving is more utilitarian. Maximising on limited space. It’ll house the plates, the bowls, the glassware, and the coffee cups. The percolator sits on the stovetop, but the teapot is welcome on the shelves. It’ll have canisters of dry goods, be it flour, sugar, coffee, or other spices. There will be jars of preserves or other canning. There will be recipes written down on index cards and two slim cookbooks. There will be a ledger too, the records of money in and money out. Whose accounts are in arrears and where to collect. There may even be a stack of letters or important upcoming bill payments requiring attention. In a place of such limited space, singularity is a luxury, and as such, something must always double as another. The singer sewing machine table is the rarest exception. Then again, when you’re the bread and butter. The tools of the trade. The sole industry of the operation and sustaining the livelihood, then you can never double as another. The table and the machine show expert care and respect. Though their noticeably vacant. No fabric or thread. The stool is pulled out. Is work becoming scarcer? The machine remembers all the items that have passed beneath it. Men’s trousers being hemmed and altered. Bridal gowns stitched together; the measurements taken from giddy giggling women, barely beyond girlhood. Men’s coats and jackets that needed to be stitched up and mended. There was always a variety of work. Stitching and darning; sewing and serging – may be dull, but dreams don’t pay. Though they do hang to the right of the sewing machine table. Drawings and designs of all the dresses and outfits that would grace runways and red carpets. They would be present at dinner parities and wedding receptions. They catch the eye with their elegance and charm. Crafted from the finest fabrics, accompanying beautiful designer jewelry. They will grace the covers of magazines and shine within the covers. Whoever said the man makes the clothes, didn’t know what they were talking about. While the deigns are added to their portfolio, they remain incorporeal. Existing as sketched dreams. There are alterations to be conducted; stiches needing mending. Is reality starting to roost? Parcels and boxes on the floor below the designs. What appears to be a suitcase on top. Dreams of designing in the city may only have been just that, dreams. Rent – even for a garret – is not cheap and so with needle and thread or sewing machine, you hone your craft and learn to live, putting the dreams on hold. Rents going up, it was always now or never. Turns out never is patient and at times inevitable. The floor is neat and tidy. Always swept and mopped. Hardwood floors, solid as they are ancient. The only thing in the garret not showing signs of decrepitude. The landlady praises her own frugality. Where in actuality its stingy. Old miser of a bat. To spend a penny is to sin in her eyes. Why fix when it can be put off. All the better when the tenants move out, fed up and frustrated with her cheapness. The view from the window, in front of the singer sewing machine table was never much. The railing is ornate and scrolling. Craftsmanship with flourish. From one craftsman to another there’s admiration in the work. A sense of ownership and pride manufactured goods can never replicate. The street below is lacking. Working class and industrial. Always has been always will be they say. It attracts bohemians and dreamers. Though they always fall through. Their failures foretold.
Claude Lazar paintings always insinuate of the life being lived within these private interiors, or the ones who vacated them. Presence lingers. Smells loiter. Shadows of lives lurk. Personal histories and memories imbue the floorboards, the walls, the doors, will no longer by summoned, recalled, or recollected. Claude Lazar captures the emptiness of space, while providing viewers enough room to imagine the lives who once resided and occupied these spaces. Lazar remains one of my favourite artists, for his ability to capture the drama of emptiness. Now if Lazar is a curator of the afterimage. The biographer of the empty room. Then diaries (or journals, depending on your disposition) are the hidden narratives. For Virginia Woolf the diary is an unrestrained literary form. A freeform of expression. The truest liberation of the mind:
“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”
Diaries record the immediate and the quotidian. Their entries exist in the snapshot of time in which they are recorded. The moments are inconsequential. The details unimportant. An entry is barely a few precipitable scratches on the sands of time. Yet they codify and fossilize time. Moments now encased within the amber of the pages. Whereby diaries, when reviewed within the fullness of time, are capable of resurrecting and summoning the past with preserved palpability. Historian Margaret MacMillan once described history is the study of the collage of life, which included newspaper articles, obituaries, advertisements, correspondence, and even diaries. These are what give history their context, but also provide a clearer understanding of what life was like and how it was lived, beyond the official records, which only capture a filament of a fragment. Virginia Woolf is quite correct, diaries are indeed a junk shop of miscellany. A pawnshop of the discarded. Yet when reviewed from a temporal distance, all the rust and weariness of then is polished up. All those odds and ends, bits and pieces, hob knobs, and what-have-you are revitalized with the clarity of time. In “A Change of Time,” Ida Jessen captures the temporal fabric of time and its passing by framing the novel as a school teachers diary. Entries range from reminisces to the immediate events of the day, which gradually reveal insight into the character and life of fru Lilly Bagge (née Høy), whose gradual transparent existence gains form and colour throughout the novel.
Set in the early 20th century Denmark, “A Change of Time,” starts as with simple enough realistic entries. Notes and commentary on the weather. Recollections of appointments and events. Then there is the introduction of Vigand lying sick in a hospital. Bed ridden. A complete invalid. There’s the matronly Nurse Svendsen, whose sunshine disposition is both tonic and relief in a hospital, while equally nauseating in its undiluted saccharine administration. Gradually it is revealed that Vigand is the husband of our narrator and diarist. What is set to be a narrative of preparation for death and grief is ultimately thwarted, by Vigand dying early on. The death, however, is a catalyst for the novel, but not the singular subject. Despite being husband and wife, Vigand and frue Bagge’s relationship is marked by a cold sense of indifference. This indifference remains long afterwards, a frost that haunts our diarists as she imagines Vigand’s voice and remembers his gruff mannerism, his otherwise condescending impatience with people in general, let alone his own patients.
“A Change of Time,” maybe framed as a diary, but it unfolds like an onion. With Vigand’s death frue Bagge begins the process of clearing up the house – county doctors lodgings – and taking stock of her own life. Throughout the course of the novel, the transparent minuscule presence of fru Bragge steadily grows more robust, as she used to be as a young woman and school teacher, full of life and purpose. Fru Bagge’s entries delight in moving beyond the intrapersonal recollections and provide an overview of the local history and survey of Thyregod, a small hamlet in the Jutland of Denmark, which like the rest of the early 20th century is experience rapid change. Now in widowhood and middle age, fru Bragge is forced to reexamine her life and confront the small and simple acts which have inevitably defined the life she has left. Frequently there’s a sense that the relationship with Vigand was complex, but fru Bragge’s grief is not necessarily directed towards the death of her husband, but rather the loss of her own life due to the marriage.
“In my darkest moments I understand only too well what misfortune can leave a person in such a place. Bitterness is a very soft and comfortable armchair from which it is difficult indeed to extract oneself once one has decided to settle in it.”
“A Change of Time,” is a masterful use of the epistolary novel form, which is a literary form always at risk of revealing its own artifice. Ida Jessen, however, carries it off with ease. Entries move between languid reminiscences, observations, and an account of the daily business and happenings. The passage of time is captured through this embroidering of details and gradually, the narrator who initially is imperceptible, becomes more paramount and confident, pulling away from the shadow of her strict and severe husband. Fru Bagge reveals herself to be a complex and confident character, who is set to reimagine and re-envisions herself a new life. “A Change of Time,” opens in the beginning of October, which is a perfect time and landscape for the novel, extending dusks and redacted days. Autumn is a transitory season, one of bitter truths providing renewed perspectives. It’s a month conveyed as a crossroads and in the case of fru Bragge, she has been granted an opportunity to take advantage of the change of time and renew and reinvent her life anew. “A Change of Time,” is a quiet and passionate novel tracing and capturing the distinct changes of time and a psychological portraiture of an everyday individual and their own relation to the world, their own sense of self. It’s a gradual metamorphosis tucked in between the business of daily life and the meaningful silences that comes to rest.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
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