Architect and designer, Antonio Pio Saracino, brings us his “Star Chairs”, recently premiered in Dubai’s annual design expo immediately prior to this show. Do we sit on these works of art, or just view and circle them? Certainly the artist would not be upset if anyone were to sit down, but the setting unquestionably gives one pause for reflection. The Star Chairs – manufactured in Italy by Lamberti Design – give us a rare opportunity to experience a threshold where art and functionality merge.

In the work of Verdiana Patachini, one senses a search, an existential exploration with no discernible map or direction. The amorphous quality of each work is simultaneously punctuated with symbols, words and vague images representing a dream-like state, while each work possesses a depth and passion in the desire to reveal her journey inward.

The “Stitched Bridge” of Borinquen Gallo, lies like an abandoned alien carcass. Closer inspection reveals intricacies of form that are both biological and emotive. Cloth spirals, vegetative and flower shapes project a human presence, the bridge-like structure providing a means of climbing towards a more ethereal plane. This bridge could be a ladder, beckoning the viewer to climb up or down, a returning to or escaping from. Commodification of emotion is revealed in Gallo’s cement castings of hearts like a display in an “organ store”, where the sale of body parts has become more common than most realize. Advances in science have fostered the feasibility of such businesses, yet what is the emotional and psychological fall-out from such “final” commodification?

The “Martyr” rests quietly on the wall, exhausted from struggle, dripping in pain, each ripple of tar silent in its tormented presence. Why do most of us find it both offensive and praiseworthy that one should be willing to endure torture and death for a belief? Paolo Pelosini presents us with love unto death, for mustn’t we be deeply in love if we are willing to die rather than renounce a belief?

Alessandro Del Pero gives us his martyr in “Effort”, a crucifixion seemingly in progress. The presence of the artist is palpable – one expects to see him step back, out of the frame of his work and continue with another swirl of line and form. Del Pero works his sacrificial figure, painting and sketching impatiently as if the image, as well as the environment, need to be captured immediately, before disappearing back into the spiritual cavern of mind and being. The “head” pieces of del Pero convey a comparable frenetic quality of motion and impatience. Nonetheless, particularly in his “Harlem Heads”, the images are a bit more grounded; the eyes, as anchors for the soul, transform each work with a special focus and presence.

In Andrea Bianconi’s videos, the artist portrays the “mental cinema” which never ceases in its projection of images, words, symbols and thoughts. In its circular logic, our minds are engaged in a constant activity of construction and deconstruction. We impose our psychological selves, along with experience, on all new events. To every such encounter we bring our most intimate thoughts, our most private emotions. What we choose to release to the world is different in each situation and for each individual. Our public self is but a fraction of that which lies within.

Despite the outwardly divergent conceptual messages as curated by Alessandro Berni, “Italian Vibrations” offers a uniquely coherent vision onto the stage of current international art. Italian blood flows at Provenance Center, infusing us all with strength and creative vitality.

The exploration of Indian culture clearly appeals to a wide public, as demonstrated by recent cultural events in Rome.

The exhibition “Indian Highway” at MAXXI is about to come to a close (22 September 2011- 29 January 2012). A 360° portrait of the sub-continent and its culture is interpreted through the works of thirty major contemporary Indian artists. Presented for the first time in London at the Serpentine Gallery back in 2009, “Indian Highway” has toured the most prestigious galleries in the world and will eventually close the circle and reach New Delhi in 2013.

In addition, an event called “Italia-India: le vie della Scrittura” (Italy-India: the routes of writing) was recently organized at the Casa delle Letterature (14-15 December 2011). It consisted of a two-day workshop led by both Italian and Indian female novelists. The likes of Anita Nair, Elisabetta Rasy, Priya Basil, Dacia Maraini and Bapsi Sidhwa all gathered for a two-day literature delight in the ancient Biblioteca dell’Orologio, a magnificent building hedging a peaceful citrus garden.  The leading theme of the event was women’s writing as a tool to stir modernity and tradition. An Indian printemps in Rome…

“Indian Highway” and “Le vie della Scrittura” share the same “India-is-going-global” flavor, while exposing several thorny issues: gender equality, caste-based discrimination, the exploitation of thousands of migrant workers, pollution and environmental disasters, the India-Pakistan ordeal.  The latter is the subject of “The Lighting Testimonies”, by Amar Kanwar, in which the conflict is recounted through the testimonies of women on both sides who suffered rape and other forms of gender-based violence. “I love my India” by Tejal Shah sheds light on the 2002 repressive policies against the Muslim minority of Gujarat.

Jitish Kallat transformed an old rickshaw in a work of art: his “Autosuarus Tripous” looks like a relic of a distant past, especially since it shares the hall of MAXXI with “Transit”, a glittering aluminum truck designed by Valay Shende symbolizing the massive urbanization of farmers, fuelled by promises of luxury and a modern life.

Large enameled panels by Nalini Malani allude to ancient mythological stories and evocate a mysterious and sensual India, where we can definitely feel the string that attaches today’s life to long-gone eras.

These themes are recurrent in contemporary writing as well. Anita Nair explained during the workshop that her world revolves around the feelings of Indian women, who struggle to find their way, caught between tradition and innovation. In one of her novels, Ladies Coupé (2001), Nair addresses the question of whether a woman can survive in this world without a man by her side. Her main character, a 45-year old single woman in India, asks herself: “Is there a place for me here?”. Another character, another woman, metaphorically embodies the answer to her question: she learns to swim. Isn’t staying afloat in a swimming pool just as easy and possible as staying afloat in life? Hard to tell for the average woman living in a macho society.

“Le vie della Scrittura” was an amazing chance to dive in the world of the Indian woman, get an impression of her joys and pain, the restrictions imposed on her by tradition and her great strides towards modernity. In one word: her Indian-ness. The same charm, doubts and contradictions that emerged in the artworks of  “Indian Highway” and that render India so unique.

Trees grow a new layer of wood every year. Due to changes in growth speed through the seasons, annual growth usually comprises two layers: an inner layer, called earlywood, which is lightly coloured because the growth is rapid early in the growing season and the new wood is less dense and thus lightly coloured; and an outer layer, called latewood, which is darker and denser. The process is actually not dissimilar to the way varve or ice core patterns are formed. When a tree is felled this biannual growth can be seen on the cross-section of the trunk in the form of rings. From this view it is also possible to distinguish the sapwood from the heartwood, that is to say the young wood closer to the bark where sap flows, and the old wood forming the core of the trunk respectively.

The thickness of the tree-rings depends particularly on climate and factors such as rainfall, temperature and sunlight. Favourable conditions for growth result in a wide ring and vice versa. Trees growing in the same region will have similar tree-ring patterns, because of their mutual response to climate changes.

Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is a method of determining the age of wooden objects, based on their tree-ring pattern. The idea in a nutshell: you have an object of unknown age but with visible tree-ring pattern and you compare it, like a fingerprint, to patterns developed on akin tree species grown during a known period under similar climatic conditions, until you get a match, ring for ring. This process is called cross-dating and, depending on the state of the undated wood, dendrochronology in theory can provide annual or even sub-annual resolution. The technique works only with clear annual growth rings; tropical species where annual ring boundaries are not visible or orchard trees whose growth is dependent on the ardour of the gardener rather than Mother Nature herself are not suitable for cross-dating.

The ‘fingerprint database’ against which you compare the tree-ring pattern that needs cross-dating is called reference or master chronology. For a specific tree species and region, it is produced by overlapping the ring patterns of successively older timber, starting with living trees of known chronology and progressively superimposing older timbers from buildings or even archaeological sites to gradually extend the chronology into the past. The pattern to be matched is the relative increase and decrease in ring width year after year.

Dendrochronology has found numerous art-historical applications, ranging from panel paintings to antique furniture. It is necessary for the wooden object to contain an adequate number of clearly visible rings, usually no less than sixty, and there must be a master chronology for the particular tree species and geographical area or you might end up… barking up the wrong tree! The application I myself find most intriguing is the dating of stringed instruments of the violin family – violins, violas, cellos and double basses – an application that instrument appraisers, sellers, players, authenticators and purchasers alike are gradually starting to acknowledge.

The back, sides and neck of stringed instruments are typically made of maple or sycamore, which are not suitable for dendrochronological investigation, but the front of the belly is usually made of Norway spruce, which is ideal for the technique. It is a lucky coincidence that wood with optimal acoustic properties, such as spruce of good quality without defects, knots and whatnot, is also dendrochronology-friendly. On the other hand, heavily restored instruments, patches of transplanted or later wood, painted year rings, dents, scratches, varnish that obstructs the wood grain, send dendrochronologists climbing up a tree…!

To obtain the desired symmetry on the front of the instrument, the craftsman starts with a wedge of wood, split from a cylindrical slice of tree trunk and with the oldest growth at the thin end of the wedge. This is split down the middle and the two half-wedges are opened like a butterfly and joined usually along the bark side of the wood. Therefore symmetrical ring patterns should be displayed on the two pieces with the youngest growth rings towards the centre. More than two pieces might be used in larger instruments, such as double basses.

Dendrochronological findings are used as an adjunct to information about the instrument based on styling or labelling criteria and historical records, and although dendrochronology can obviously not identify the maker, in some cases it can prevent erroneous or fraudulent attribution. Proof that the tree was still growing when the attributed maker was already deceased, for example, is somewhat suspicious. Dendrochronology provides the terminus post quem date of manufacture – the date after which the instrument could have been built based on the youngest identifiable tree-ring. Depending on the completeness of the sampled timber (if a significant amount of sapwood is preserved) it is possible to determine the date the tree was felled with some accuracy. Uncertainty in this estimation is however introduced because of the removal of an unknown number of outermost rings during the planning process prior to joining the front pieces. Even if the felling date is determined accurately, wood stored for many years before use or reused wood from older structures can introduce errors in the cross-dating, which are further amplified in cases of wood imported from another climatic region, if the wrong reference chronology is used.

How would you like to take a peep at the workshop of a master violinmaker? Have you seen The Red Violin? I’ve always felt a bit disappointed they didn’t show the early stages of the construction of the violin. Apparently tree-ring dating can provide information not only about chronology, but also about the technique and working habits of the luthier, which could indirectly help support or refute an attribution. Examples of this are: the way the pieces are joined at the centre of the front piece (bark to bark, bark to core or a combination), whether the front pieces are from the same wedge or not, use of common trees and exchange of pieces between makers, the provenance of the wood and the amount of time it was kept in storage for seasoning.

Although I love a fireplace with a crackling fire during winter, I have to admit that next time I have a fire to stoke, every log I throw will probably feel like burning a piece of history…

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” is the legendary opening line. Following its publication and the trial for obscenity, ambulance Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl became – and still is today – the symbol of the beat generation and of a new form. The homonymous movie, which was scarcely shown and received fairly quietly in the UK, is visually compelling, mixing black and white lyrical shots with animations. Alongside fellow beat authors Kerouac and Cassidy and lover Peter Orlowsky, his voice not really narrating the movie but accompanying it (now reading triumphantly, now responding calmly to the interviewer), Ginsberg was masterfully played by James Franco.

Franco, 33, can swing between arthouse and commercial with great ease and has not been limiting himself to being “just” an actor (and a very successful one). He is known for his famous interpretation of James Dean, movies such as 127 hours and Milk, blockbusters like Spiderman or the forthcoming The planet of apes prequel, art exhibitions at the Gagosian gallery, working on a PhD, studying design and creative writing, publishing a collection of short stories, and soon realising an EP. Overall, he has shown a great creative hunger, including a strong literary ambition. While it was reassuring to hear him humbly (?) confess in an interview with Charlie Rose at Brown University that he “did not intend to write Ulysses”, his involvement with literature and writing adds an interesting layer to his interpretations.

In fact, he has now tackled the character of another poet, the complex Hart Crane. Crane (1899-1932) was heir to a Cleveland fortune and a poet in 1920s New York City. Author of White buildings (1926) and The bridge (1930), known for the difficulty of his style, Crane was admired by the likes of Allen Tate, E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams, and influenced later generations of poets, including Allen Ginsberg. James Franco was so fascinated by the character that not only he interpreted Hart Crane, but he also wrote, directed and produced the biopic.

The movie, shot entirely in black and white, is titled The broken tower, from one of Crane’s last poems inspired by his only known heterosexual affair with a friend’s wife, Peggy Cowley, who joined him in Mexico in 1932 where he was on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Returning from Mexico, Crane committed suicide jumping overboard the steamship that was bringing him back to New York. He drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. The broken tower is also the title of Crane’s biography, published in 1999 by Paul Mariani, who worked with James Franco on the movie.

Presented last Monday at the Los Angeles Film Festival, The broken tower received mixed reviews, which was predictable. We now await the release of the movie.

Bookworms with an open mind for comic fantasy and a taste for word-play will love Jasper Fforde’s novels featuring Thursday Next. With One of our Thursdays is missing, discount the sixth novel of the series, rx just around the corner, it’s a good time to go through the BookWorld ABCs before gulping down the new book. Summarising Jasper Fforde is impossible and literary scandalous because all the quick plots and puns are lost, so this is just a taster of the story so far.

It’s 1985 in an alternative England. Illegal cheese trafficking is a booming business, travelling from London to Sydney via Gravitube is just a forty-minute DeepDrop through the centre of the earth and the annual migration of genetically re-engineered mammoths causes havoc in the streets. In this England literature is paramount and there is a whole division in the Special Operations Network dedicated exclusively to literary crimes.

Thursday Next is a literary detective, investigating the mysterious theft of the Martin Chuzzlewit manuscript. While she’s on the trail of Acheron Hades, a malicious villain, her aunt and uncle are kidnapped. Mycroft Next, her uncle, invents ingenious devices of more-often-than-not equivocal usefulness. He and his wife Polly have disappeared while testing the Prose Portal, which allows real people and literary characters to travel respectively in and out of any book the portal is connected to. It’s soon revealed that Hades has stolen the portal and kidnapped Mycroft. He deviously leaves Polly trapped inside Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils as leverage for blackmailing Mycroft into operating the portal. Hades’s plan is to hold literary characters for ransom. First, a minor character from the stolen Dickens novel disappears from all editions in print and his body turns up in the real world. Then Hades steals the original manuscript of Jane Eyre and kidnaps her; without Jane Eyre the favourite classic ceases to exist. Thursday goes after Hades in a chase that ends inside the novel. There, aided by Mr Rochester she manages to kill Hades during a fire that destroys Thornfield Hall, injures Mr Rochester gravely and kills his mad wife. Thursday cannot resist intervening to prevent Jane from following St.John to India (the lukewarm end Charlotte Brontë had written) and instead mediates her return to Thornfield Hall.

In this alternative England Goliath Corporation, a corrupt multinational company, pulls the strings. They erase Thursday’s husband, Landen, from existence and blackmail her to release one of their top executives who has been (justly) imprisoned inside Poe’s The Raven. At the same time Thursday discovers Jurisfiction, the BookWorld’s own police force for maintaining the integrity of fiction. They have charged her with Fiction Infraction for changing the end of Jane Eyre and she has to appear in front of the magistrate from Kafka’s The Trial. Thursday seeks the help of Mrs Nakijima, who has been running a profitable business for years bringing tourists into Jane Eyre, to teach her how to bookjump without the Prose Portal. Her first bookjump is into the Great Library, a colossal library holding all books that will ever be written. Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, the librarian, informs her that despite her upcoming trial she has already been accepted as a Jurisfiction cadet and apprenticed to Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham is quite a character and, when she doesn’t need to keep appearances for Great Expectations, wears sneakers, is well known to the real-world traffic police for serious driving offences with her Bugatti and carries a gun. Once Thursday gains some confidence in her bookjumping skills, she goes inside The Raven; Goliath predictably double-crosses her, but Miss Havisham rescues her spectacularly. With trouble everywhere in the real world, Thursday, who is pregnant with her still-eradicated husband’s child, decides to seek refuge in the BookWorld.

The Great Library doesn’t contain only published novels; all unpublished novels are also shelved in twenty-six sub-basements known as the Well of Lost Plots. Under the character exchange program, Thursday substitutes a secondary character inCaversham Heights, an unpublished detective story. She makes her home in a flying boat docked next to Nautilus, together with two generic characters who attend St. Tabularasa’s school until they develop personalities and form physical characteristics. Thursday’s diverse training for Jurisfiction continues. Killing Verbisoids (parasites that eat grammar) with irregular verbs, feeding the Minotaur (yoghurt rather than people!), attending Jurisfiction meetings at Norland Park in Sense and Sensibility, helping Miss Havisham chair a Wuthering Heights rage counselling session and classes in bookjumping using the ISBN positioning system are an integral part of her curriculum. The real world is still haunting her and things take a turn for the worse when senior Jurisfiction members are found dead. They had all been testing UltraWordTM, the upgraded Book Operating System which transforms words into pictures inside the reader’s head. Text Grand Central, the Intelligence of the BookWorld, is pushing the deadline for the upgrade of BOOK v8.3 into UltraWordTM and promises that reading will become an unprecedented experience with the new system that operates on a thirty-two-plot architecture rather than the old eight-plot per book. Some Jurisfiction members are sceptical about the upgrade, since an older upgrade erased the library of Alexandria. Thursday discovers several downsides of UltraWordTM which TGC was trying to cover up, saves the day and becomes the new Bellman (head of Jurisfiction).

A couple of years pass and Thursday decides it’s time to return to the “Outland” with her toddler Friday. The Council of Genres, the BookWorld’s government, doesn’t accept her resignation and suggests that while in the Outland she tries to capture a runaway fictional character, Yorrick Kaine. Hamlet joins Thursday, wanting to find out if the Outlanders really think he’s a major ditherer, as rumour has it in the BookWorld. In the real world there’s a lot of excitement about St Zvlkx’s resurrection. His worshippers believe he’s a 13th century saint whose prophesies are always very accurate, but in reality he’s a rogue time-traveller and his Revelations are nothing more than bets he placed centuries ago with astronomical odds. In the meantime, Goliath Corporation are seemingly trying to change their profile and have established an Apologarium fully stuffed with professional apologists. They bring back Landen, although he flickers on and off for a while, until his uneradication holds. Goliath are also major supporters of the rising politician Yorrick Kaine, whose preposterous plans to become dictator and whose campaign against Denmark and anything Danish (Andersen, Blixen, pastries, Hamlet) find surprisingly little resistance. He uses the Ovinator, stolen from Mycroft, to make everyone around him behave submissively like sheep. After Thursday manages a spectacular and impossible win for Swindon’s croquet team in the World Cup, the earnings from St Zvlkx’s betting book are enough to gain control of Goliath. Without their financial support and with the Ovinator destroyed, Kaine soon loses power.

Fourteen years later Thursday seems to have settled into a low-key family life, with a husband and teenage kids, a mortgage and a carpet-fitting business. Her adventures have been published into a series of novels, warranting her a mediocre celebrity-status and her own stalker. Motivating grumbling Friday to get out of bed and pursue a career in the Chronoguard (the SpecOps department dealing with temporal stability) and knitting dodo-cosies for her twenty-nine-year old dodo, Pickwick, is all she has to worry about. Or not? The carpet fitting business is just a cover and her SpecOps work continues as hard as ever together with Jurisfiction. Ever since her adventures were published, Thursday has two fictional alter egos: Thursday1-4 (featured in the first four novels) and Thursday5 (featured only in the fifth novel). Thursday1-4 is cruel, arrogant and violent, with a taste for guns and black leather. Thursday5 is caring, compassionate, girly, pacifist, vegetarian and a naturist who loves yoga. In Jurisfiction Thursday finds herself in the awkward position of having both Thursday1-4 and Thursday5 apprenticed to her at the same time. The first mission of the three of them together is Piano Squad; there are only fifteen pianos in the BookWorld and they need to be juggled between books. Things start to unravel from then on. Thursday fires Thursday1-4, who seeks revenge by marooning Thursday in the Outland and taking her place in the Council of Genres. There Thursday1-4 approves interactive books and Pride and Prejudice is going to be the first classic to be turned into a reality show with the Bennets as ‘housemates’. Thursday manages to take some control of the situation, but not before Thursday1-4 and the fifth novel of the series are permanently erased.

The rest… in the bookstores from February 22nd. Information for book signings can be found here.

It all dates back to 1840, still in London.  The novelist Theodore Edward Hook sent the first postcard in history. Today, 170 years later, as Nicola Churchward remarks, “this postal innovation has come to epitomise our aptitude for communicating through images. […] It can inspire and remind us. Calm or excite us. Or indeed make us laugh. A marker in time and place the picture postcard might remain on the wall for a lifetime”.

In a celebration of this medium, the RCA organises an annual exhibition and sale in which hundreds of postcards signed on the reverse – hence the secrecy – are donated by renowned artists, designers and recent graduates from the College. Priced democratically at 45£ each, they are sold to at a maximum of four per buyer and the profit is entirely devolved to fund future scholarships.

Certainly, the affordability of the artworks attracted a wide public. This year’s edition of Secret included works by John Baldessari, Grayson Perry, Jake Chapman, Yoko Ono, Tracey Emin, Sir Peter Blake, and also by fashion icons (Sir Paul Smith, Mary Quant, Manolo Blahnik), photographers (David Bailey), filmmakers (Mike Leigh) and designers (Ron Arad, James Dyson). And recognisable names easily attract crowds. A ballot was set up, allowing 50 lucky ones to enter the sale first; certainly an indication of high public demand.

We are used to massively publicised exhibitions, to book tickets in advance to see an art show or to buy a membership to a museum in order to avoid the queues when we can only schedule our visits on the weekend. Art fairs are fundamental networking events for dealers and a restricted number of collectors, but are surrounded by a multitude of events. But this does not mean to be against this trend (or at least not entirely). I myself eyed a dozen postcards and dragged myself to South Kensington from East London on a Saturday morning. My journey did not end there: intimidated by the queue, I seek refuge at Wholefoods and, while consuming an exceptionally early breakfast for a Saturday, I thought of Walter Benjamin and his seminal essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction: “The kind of simultaneous viewing of paintings by large crowds that occurs in the nineteenth century is an early symptom of the crisis affecting painting, which was certainly not triggered by photography alone but, relatively independently of photography, by the work of art laying claim to mass attention”.

An (over?)enthusiastic response to an event such as Secret is certainly positive, with the public showing interest and, ultimately, scholarships being funded.

It is interesting, however, to meditate on the reason behind the long queue outside the RCA. Collecting art, as extensively and more authoritatively treated elsewhere, is driven by a variety of mechanisms – fetishism, social approval and economic investment being some of them. And today, as critic Rick Poynor recently¹ pointed out trying to answer the question Where is art now?, “[…] as twenty first-century network democrats, we fervently wish to believe that everyone deserves access, that we are all creative and perhaps even artists, that elitism […] is totally unacceptable from other people because it affronts our ego and sense of self-worth”.

But it would be healthy and objective (and certainly wouldn’t be a first) not only to meditate but also to question the authenticity of this artistic craving and its cultural foundations – when stunning exhibitions are sometimes scarcely viewed and outlandish purchases make the news more and more often.

What we should ask ourselves is: what am I queuing for? Which translates in: what am I seeking pleasure from? Or is it just the prospect of a bargain, the John Baldessari for 45 quid now happily hanged on the wall?

The more sceptical on the subject might enjoy a conversation with independent filmmaker Ben Lewis, who will be answering questions at the Aubin Cinema next Sunday November 28^th after the projection of his documentary The great contemporary art bubble. Given the small number of seats I suspect the tickets will sell out quickly, so hurry up to avoid… queuing outside…

(1) Elephant magazine, issue 4, 2010

The music and the lyrics are legendary, medicine and so are his women. Serge Gainsbourg relives – the unmistakable voice, sovaldi the cigarettes lit in quick succession – in the latest biopic about a French icon, doctor directed by Joann Sfar and masterfully interpreted by Eric Elmosnino. Following his evolution, from a child learning the piano during German occupation to the young student in art school to the musical myth, the epic story is accompanied by his music. La Javanaise. L’hotel particulier. And of course Je t’aime…moi non plus. And the epic is shared with his muses and lovers: Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis), Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta), Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon, who tragically committed suicide after shooting the movie and to whom it is dedicated). A surreal animation element is absolutly unnecessary to the story and is probably just an attempt for originality, whereas the brilliant performances of the actors and the musical score are by far sufficient to make the movie compelling. A man who revolutionised la chanson , who had the intuition of importing and incorporating reggae and whose story is ultimately pervaded by melancholy.

For all Gainsbourg fans (and not only) the movie can be a catalyst to go home and listen to his records: both his own work (the Histoire of Melody Nelson, but let’s not forget his contribution to Jean-Claude Vannier’s L’enfant assassin des mouches) and also the album Monsieur Gainsbourg revisited, a project coordinated by Jane Birkin in 2006 (15th anniversary of Serge’s death) in which his most famous songs are interpreted in English by the likes of Michael Stipe, Marianne Faithfull, Franz Ferdinand, Jarvis Cocker, Cat Power, Carla Bruni and Beth Gibbons.

The novel consists of a series of letters and notes exchanged mostly between the central character, Juliet, and others over the course of a few months in 1946. Juliet is a successful authoress in her early thirties, living in the gloominess of the bombarded post-war London, feeling rather restless, seeking for love, lacking inspiration and subconsciously longing for a fresh start in life. A member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society comes across a second-hand book once owned by Juliet and writes to her a rather reserved but extremely dignified letter to ask if she could help him get hold of more material from the same author. She is a fresh, completely unpretentious and cheerful correspondent, encouraging replies and more correspondence from the people of Guernsey. Mostly farmers and fishermen and feeling quite isolated from the rest of the world, the islanders are simply thrilled to discover someone so uncondenscending to whom they can express, in the most delightful and candid way, their strong opinions about books, authors and every other matter conceivable. Juliet soon uncovers, piece by piece, a fascinating story and makes a life-changing visit to Guernsey to learn more and meet her new friends.

Apart from the immediate sense of exhilaration, the element that drew and locked my attention to this book in the long term was the ingenious way the narrative spotlight is passed from one character to the other. Depending on the sender of the letter, there is an amusing change of storytelling style and pace, page after page. Even letters by correspondents frugal in their use of words are complemented by information dispersed in other letters, so that the need for the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps never feels arduous. The epistolary style of the novel combined with the fact that the presence of books is so prominent everywhere has certain similarities to 84 Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff: all correspondents – whether authors, publishers or readers – have in common their fondness of books and they form friendships through letter-writing that was initiated by literary enquiries. Compared to other books about books, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society might not be as autobiographical as 84 Charing Cross Road, nor as hysterically funny and surreal as the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde, nor as heartbreaking as the Book Thief by Markus Zusak, but it combines just the right dose of all these ingredients into one lovely book.

As I was reading through, I could not get The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by Gerald B Edwards out of my mind. That is not simply because both storylines concern the Island of Guernsey while it was under German Occupation, although the prominent sense of historical background and geographical location in both books undoubtedly triggered the connection. It is mainly because the picturesque Guernsey that emerges from the pages of G. Edwards, could not be any more perfect in its provinciality, insularity and superb detail, as the natural habitat of the Guernsey people we meet in the pages of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It is very easy to imagine Ebenezer and the other members of the Literary Society being neighbours, quarrelling in loud Guernsey patois, gathering after curfew to listen to the wireless and deceiving the Germans in every way imaginable. In addition, the characters in both books are presented to the reader in similar detailed plainness, which, at some subliminal level, strengthens the associations made between them. Ebenezer, being an old fisherman who has spent all his life on the island, could not have anything but a raw and blunt narrative style as he recounts his life’s story, despite his unambiguous astuteness. Similarly, linguistic ornaments in the letters written to Juliet by members of the Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society would be out of place. To this effect, the wonderful prose of M. Shaffer and A. Barrows immensely strengthens the credibility of the letters. In fact it is thanks to the prose, that the detail in which the characters are defined is not in the least restrained by the fact that the story is told via letters only. A few, carefully-selected words are enough to provide a vivid picture of each Guernsey correspondent, even when they do not write about themselves, but rather about village news and gossip. The authors have succeeded in everybody’s unrefined and natural way of speaking almost literally be vocalised through their letters.

All in all, a book highly recommend to everyone with a love for books and reading. A splendid leisure book, that will both entertain and stimulate thoughts.