Still Life with Remorse
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
From the critically acclaimed artist, designer, and author of the bestsellers The Principles of Uncertainty, My Favorite Things, and Women Holding Things comes a moving meditation in words and pictures on remorse, joy, ancestry, and memory.
Maira Kalman’s most autobiographical and intimate work to date, Still Life with Remorse is a beautiful, four-color collection combining deeply personal stories and 50 striking full-color paintings in the vein of her and Alex Kalman’s acclaimed Women Holding Things.
Tracing her family’s story from her grandfather’s birth in Belarus and emigration to Tel Aviv—where she was born—Maira considers her unique family history, illuminating the complex relationship between recollection, regret, happiness, and heritage. The vibrant original art accompanying these autobiographical pieces are mostly still lifes and interiors which serve as counterpoints to her powerful words. In addition to vignettes exploring her Israeli and Jewish roots, Kalman includes short stories about other great artists, writers, and composers, including Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, and Robert Schumann.
Through these narratives, Kalman uses her signature wit and tenderness to reveal how family history plays an influential role in all of our work, lives, and perspectives. A feat of visual storytelling and vulnerability, Still Life with Remorse explores the profound hidden in the quotidian, and illuminates the powerful universal truths in our most personal family stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Artist Kalman (Women Holding Things) poignantly examines loss, death, and regret in this idiosyncratic collage of vignettes rendered in verse and still life paintings. Her father and uncles flee to Palestine in 1939 from Belarus, where their parents are eventually killed in the Holocaust. In the following years, her family faces dislocation and regret: her sister, who was born in Tel Aviv with severe asthma, is sent to grow up apart from the family in Jerusalem, where the climate was supposedly healthier ("We believed it was /for her well being. /But no no no. /What remorse /we feel to this day"). After the family moves to America, her father learns by telegram that his younger brother had shot himself ("He walked wildly up and down /the living room holding the telegraph in his hand... /I don't remember anyone going to comfort him"). Each vignette is paired with a still life of furniture, fruit, and other everyday objects, where the pointed absence of the human form calls attention to an eerie culture of silence around the Holocaust. Though these tokens of daily life are portrayed as masking deep remorse, the author's art and writing highlight the unexpected links between sorrow and creativity. The account is also unexpectedly witty in places (the author's asthmatic sister was sent to what she describes as a "Hasidic-Dickensian orphanage"). It's a powerful exploration of the human condition. Illus.
