“Notes on Falling”
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
Umuzi
Review: Beryl Eichenberger
“Notes on Falling” by Bronwyn Law-Vijoen is a rich novel if sometimes a little confusing, or maybe challenging is the better word, as the reader is required to concentrate to follow the threads, even when they appear to unravel.
What it gives us, though, is a creative arc and a lens through which to view the turbulent creativity of the 70s in New York and the lives of those who pursue the arts as a career, as it intersected with the challenges of 90s South Africa and an archival search to find a parent.
The characters are complex, as those involved in creative industries often are. Their depths are mined intricately for the reader.
Thalia is an art photographer in South Africa in the 90s, daughter of a newspaper editor in Johannesburg. She wins a scholarship to New York to study her craft. Her photographs are of construction and architecture - immovable pieces and yet not - but it is when she sees a photo of a dancer that she understands her need to search for her mother, Paige, who left her with her gay father in a pursuit of a ballet dancing career. New York is where the faint trail leads.
“It was a superb portrait of momentary stasis and unexploded energy. There was something in the grainy quality of the print, in the space where the image had been shot, in the unflinching gaze and the dramatically-held energy of the dancer that was uncannily familiar…”
Arriving in New York, she finds work in various places, one being in the library, and there she is tasked with sorting the collection of an almost obscure photographer, Robert Sander, whose dance and performance pictures of the 70s had given him some measure of fame.
It is this collection which provides much of the trail towards her mother as his story adds the substance to Thalia’s own. Three lives across time linked by movement – of the dance, the camera capturing the moves and the journeys that one takes through life.
“Falling” can have many meanings; here it is the exploration of positioning and expectation and trust for a dancer, but perhaps the greater meaning is how that relates to anyone’s life. Those non-verbal messages that are in a look, a space in a photograph, a turn of a head, the catch of the light on water. It is a dense story, an esoteric story, weaving as it does between two time frames, the reader must stay alert for the nuances of the times and places.
The book offers much in the understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics in photography. It will also make you look deeper into those artistic compositions to extract the creator’s meaning.
This is excellent literary fiction, not a book that you will whip through but one to be savoured and reflected upon.