Still Life with Books

Still Life with Books is a novel of a doomed love affair, by young English author Simon Lane. Is is set in Paris. Lane's voice is fresh and hilarious, as welcome an addition to the postmodern landscape as Jay McInerny or Martin Amis.

Like a prime Seinfeld episode, nothing really happens in this sometimes melancholy, often funny and always beautiful novel. Well, almost nothing: ultimately there is love gained and lost, betrayal and death. But this is merely the barest skeleton on which Lane, a peripatetic young English writer whose one earlier novel was published in France, hangs a parti-colored cloth of observations on Van Gogh, X-rays, dust, Aldous Huxley, reincarnation, waiting in a barber shop and the friendship between the ghosts of Borges (Jorge Luis) and Wilde (Oscar). The narrator, Leonard, is a self-deprecating " romancier creatif " who recalls the romance between his cousin Aldous and Azadina, an Egyptian woman. Fluctuating widely from the near to the distant past, from present reality to a lively dream world, Leonard describes the affair that consumed them for two weeks one summer in Paris and again, briefly, 10 years later. Leonard warns that he must disappoint readers who "are possibly still waiting for the appearance of a 'rounded character,' " but what Lane offers instead is a prismatic language that for all its obvious intelligence and wit never places the reader at a distance.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Leonard, the narrator, is a self-absorbed, unpublished English writer currently living in Australia but with a past in Paris. In this, his purported first novel, he alternates between describing the love triangle among himself, his hypochondriacal cousin Aldous, and the mysterious Azadina and denying his guilt over Aldous's accidental death by a wasp sting. This scenario is somehow related to a painting by Van Gogh with the same title as the book. Lane, a British writer ( Le Veilleur ) who himself has lived in Paris, has written a self-conscious rumination on love, obsession, and art that is long on sensual description and short on story and character. Not recommended.
- Donna L. Schulman, Cornell Univ. Libs., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.