Lepopisana

Julia and Valentina, twin sisters living in America, inherit a appartment in London from their aunt Elspeth. They decide to move to England and live in the apartment just across the road from Highgate cemetery. Julia and Valentina are 21, but they seem like they are twelve. They dress in matching clothes, they do everything together and appear to be helpless in everyday matters. Most of the people living in the same building as the twins are weird. Robert was Elspeth’s lover. He works at Highgate cemetery and in a way deals with death every day. Martin suffers from a severe case of OCD and refuses to leave his apartment. His wife Marijke left him and returned to Amsterdam. Elspeth still lives in her apartment even though she is dead. She finds a way to communicate with the twins and Robert. Valentina would like to break free from Julia, so she and Elspeth hatch a plan into which they manage to drag Robert. It’s when weird turns into twisted and dark becomes even darker. The t

"Nothing is perhaps more peculiar than the process by which one obtains Prussian blue, and it must be owned that, if chance had not taken a hand, a profound theory would be necessary to invent it." Prussian Blue The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair 

Sylvia is a fictionalized memoir / short novel about a couple living in New York in the 60s. The narrator (Michales) meets Sylvia through a friend he visits soon after he returns home from college. Sylvia is mentally ill, although she refuses to see a doctor and is never properly diagnosed. Judging by what he says about her college activities, she is quite an intelligent woman. He ends up marrying her even though he's not certain it's what he wants to do. He expects his father would oppose the marriage, however he just points out his son’s duty not to abandon the poor orphan girl. They live in a tenement they share with cockroaches and an occasional rat, which they don't seem to mind. Their life is full of quarrels, drugs, jealousy and emotional blackmail. I didn't like Sylvia and I didn’t like the narrator for various reasons I am not going to go into to avoid spoilers in case you didn't read the book and would like to. Even though I didn't like Sylvia I

Since I finished my master’s programme in January I find more time to read. Apart from non-fiction art books I didn’t read much of fiction. So, two days ago I finished Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. I liked it even though I found it slow paced. It’s a weird story, especially what happens near the end. I had the impression it was a perfectly normal thing to do and at the same time deeply disturbing. I’ll write more about it in a separate post. Another book I read even before Her Fearful Symmetry is The Cyclist Conspiracy by Svetislav Basara. I liked this one even more than Niffeneggers, but it’s a totally different book, so in a way incomparable. I will be writing about it in connection with What’s in a Name 2017 book challenge. I started Quiet Life by Kenzaburo Oe, a book my mom gave me after she got it from my uncle. I read the first two chapters which seem like vignettes from a life of a young woman left to care for her mentally handicapped older brother after their

I wrote about visiting S, my watercolour guru and how he was pleased with what I have managed to do with my watercolours. He saw my Actias Luna series, green moths and wild roses, representing Romance Sonambulo by Federico Garcia Lorca. In retrospect, this visit was sort of an ending to green moths. I know I wrote about it at least twice already, but I'll move to another moth, the blue one. This time I mean it. I have washed a ceramic plate I use instead of a palette (I love to improvise) and taped a new piece of paper to a board. I loosely sketched the moth and applied a layer of golden ochre and raw sienna to the background part. I intentionally let the paint drip down the paper and there are some places I didn’t even paint the background. It’s where I want my moth to disappear, to fuse with the paper. We’ll see what happens next. Zephyr, work in progress / Zefir, delo v nastajanju After I painted the series for my master’s degree, I didn’t much paint in acrylics. I

This is weird. After I wrote the last post, I had no idea this one will sort of follow with similar numbers. My faithful 3,62 readers know about my polyptych, composed of eight paintings depicting a mesh of letters painted over meaningless text. After almost two years I painted the ninth painting I never planned. It felt strange, like returning to the scene of the crime I never committed. I needed some time to remember the blue-green darkness engulfing the medieval manuscripts, leaving only meaningless words in a language that never existed. The feeling came back, although different. The smell of pine sap was unmistakable. If I may paraphrase Mitchell: Number nine comes after every ending. So it does. And now? Is this finally the end? avmr lv frvr * Čudno je. Potem, ko sem napisala zadnjo objavo, se mi niti sanjalo ni, da bo naslednja sledila istim številkam. Moji zvesti 3,62 bralci vedo za moj poliptih, sestavljen iz osmih slik, na katerih je preplet črk naslikan pre

Eiji Miyake leaves rural Japan and comes to Tokyo to find the father he has never known. He finds a room above a video shop and gets a job in Tokyo subway lost property department. While getting to know the big city he stumbles upon a number of questions he needs to answer. What started as the search for his father turns into the search for Eiji's own identity. Among the themes Mitchell explores in this novel, I found memories, dreams and the search for meaning the most powerful. Memories are important: individual as well as collective. Memories are what we are made of: »All we are is our memories.« History is also important, since it's our collective memory. It's expressed via the journals Eiji's grandfather writes during the Second World War when he went through a kaiten pilot training. Among other things he writes about the meaning of his life. At first he knows what the meaning of his life is: to defend the Motherland, his country. As time goes by, his cert

A couple of weeks ago I visited my watercolour guru. He lives on the edge of the flatland in the city of constant winds. His house sits on the slope just below the hill top. We sit on the terrace overlooking the city which slowly disappears towards the horizon. My pink folder looks strange in his wrinkled hands. He gently lifts each of my watercolours from the folder, turning them around to view them from different perspectives. Every now and again he nods silently. I can say he likes what he sees.  »You could include all of them in an exhibition.« He says. »Well, perhaps not this one.« He holds up the watercolour in question for me to see. It's too different; the others are abstract moths, that one isn't abstract enough, so it stands out.  »Mhm …« I murmur. »I know.« He nods. »Have you ever thought about anchors?« He asks. »You could try to paint something to enable the viewer to know what the top of the painting is … or the bottom. Like squares or circles or wh

Toru Okada is currently unemployed; he peruses job adds, waits for his wife Kumiko to come home from work, while he takes care of the household. One day he notices that their cat disappeared. Soon Kumiko fails to return from work. While trying to find her and the cat, he encounters several strange people, mostly women, strange things start happening to him, and the world around him becomes more and more chaotic and violent.  Toru meets lieutenant Mamiya, who tells him about his war-time experience in Manchuria. He was thrown into a well and it changed him, made him an empty shell. There are a lot of references about emptiness. Lieutenant Mamiya becomes an empty shell after sunlight floods over him while sitting in a well. Noboru Wataya, Toru’s brother in law, seems to Toru like he has incredible emptiness inside, which has the power to make everything appear hollow. After reading about lieutenant Mamiya’s experience in a well, Toru decides to go down a well in a garden of an

Spiders, flour and time ... Pajki, moka in čas ...