VIVIAN, #WITMonth biographical novel illuminating a complex woman from many angles

VIVIAN
CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT (tr. Paul Russell Garrett)
Fitzcarraldo Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In her new novel, Christina Hesselholdt delves into the world of the enigmatic American photographer, Vivian Maier (1926-2009), whose unique photographic body of work only reached the public by chance.

On the surface, Vivian Maier lived a quiet life as a loving, firm and feisty nanny for wealthy families in Chicago and New York. But throughout four decades, she took more than 150,000 photos, mainly with Rolleiflex cameras. The pictures were only discovered in an auction shortly before she died, impoverished and feasibly very lonely. In a time when self-obsession and representation are at an all-time high, Vivian Maier holds a particular fascination. Who was this eccentric person? And why did she not try to make a living from her art?

In VIVIAN, a chorus of voices, including Vivian's own, address these questions. We watch Vivian grow up in a severely dysfunctional family in New York and Champsaur in France, and we follow her as a nanny in Chicago and as a photographer on the streets of these American cities and in rural France. The novel comprises multiple voices: Vivian's, her mother's, one of the children she looked after and her parents. And crucially, the voice of the inquisitive narrator, who pulls the threads together and asks Vivian prying questions.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There's a chorus in this book, all right, one that talks around Vivian Maier's life...because there are so few real reliable sources on the life of this odd, fragmented woman...because the film about her already plowed the factual field of her life...because she was a pretty ordinary person as well as an extraordinary observer.

All of which adds up to a life that doesn't have enough factual meat but has very interesting story-bones to carry a text treatment that adds to the excellent films that center her wonderful visual legacy. A polyphonic novel can stitch together points of view that can't bear non-fiction's scrutiny while making truthful points about how Vivian became the figure, the outsider icon, the feminist parable that she was so perfectly suited to become.

A woman doing childcare as a career while creating hundreds of thousands of photographs, many iconic now they're public, is proof of women's clear statements that The System&8480; is set up to ignore women's creativity. Her life wasn't just odd, though, because she was brought up oddly; I think her personality as it comes through literally everywhere she is discussed is that of an outsider. It makes one a better observer to feel and to be perpetually outside the herd, away from the hearth, looking in at it with removed detached clarity.

This novel, from structure to execution on a sentence level, reinforces that sense. As I read the story, I realized how much it added to my appreciation of Author Hesselholdt's presentation of Vivian to realize that she researched her subject in a foreign language source pool; wrote her story in Danish (to wide praise); and then I read it in English translation.

It is perfection as an origin story; it has some concomitant infelicities on the gestalt. The multiple PoV structure gets wearing because it demands one exercise memory to connect what that character said quite a reading-while ago. It also, while illuminating Vivian in the light she blocked for different people, makes me wish for fewer shifts and a shorter book. At under two hundred pages, I was sure I'd knock out the read in a day and a half; it took over five years because he aforementioned required concentration wasn't always available for me to give leading to five separate re-starts.

While I ended up a true aficionado of the story I was there because I'm really stubborn. Others might not feel like putting in the effort of resolving polyphony into its complex harmony, in focusing the varying wavelengths of light into a very slightly blurry image. I'd recommend you do, but I know it's a style that won't suit all. If possible read the ebook sample available to check how you vibe with the style.

Authors who take unusual approaches to storytelling are to be praised; it's down to your unique taste if they're to be supported. I'm praising, are you supporting?