White on White: A Novel - Softcover

Savas, Aysegül

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593330528 ISBN 13: 9780593330524

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A "marvelous" (Lauren Groff) and "gentle, mysterious and profound” (Marina Abramović) novel about a woman who has come undone.

A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.

In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.
    
What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.

White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ayşegül Savaş is the author of Walking on the Ceiling. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Mornings, the apartment expanded with light. Light flitted across the walls and curtains, streaked the wooden floorboards, lay dappled on the sheets, as if a luminous brush had left its mark upon my awakening.

 

From my bed, I could see out onto the small, trellised balcony, lush with the thick foliage and purple flowers of a clematis climbing up a stone wall. White geraniums lined the railing. There was a single forged iron chair and a round table.

 

Any personal items, if they'd once been there, had been cleared for my arrival. There were no clothes, jewelry, photographs. On the dressing table beneath a mirror stood a green ceramic bowl; in the hallway, the dark, rounded arms of the coatrack were bare.

 

Still, everything was marked with life, rich and varied. Each room echoed a story of unknown proportion, appearing and disappearing out of focus. The sparsity gave the place its character, so distinct and so fleeting.

 

In the year that I lived there, I had the sense of having stepped inside another life.

 

 

There were two paintings in the apartment. One was a small portrait of a young woman against a dark background. She was wearing a loose shirt with a flowing collar. She had an intense, feverish look and wildly gleaming eyes. The painting hung unframed in the hallway, by the stairs leading to the upstairs studio, to which I did not have a key.

 

The second painting was even smaller, almost a miniature, inside a black frame on the bookshelf in the living room. It was of a crooked tree on a hill, with fields rolling behind it. A wispy cloud hung halfway above the landscape. It was this painting that I looked at most often, gazing at its gray-green skies when I read in the evenings.

 

 

The apartment had been advertised in the news bulletin of the art history department where I was enrolled for my doctoral research. It was situated in the cityÕs leafy eastern quarter, on a narrow road leading to a plaza. Yet the rent was low, even for my budget. IÕd received a year-long fellowship to live in the city and travel to several cathedrals in the region central to my proposed study.

 

The owner of the apartment, a medieval studies professor, lived some hours away in a prestigious university town. He had announced the flat in various departments' newsletters with the expressed hope that it could be of use to researchers. I was well acquainted with the professor's work but had never met him in person; it was with his wife, Agnes, that I corresponded regarding my stay.

 

A student coming for a short term would suit her well, Agnes wrote to me; she was a painter and came to the city from time to time to meet with her gallerist. One peculiarity to our arrangement, she added, was that she would stay in the upstairs studio, with a bed and separate bathroom, whenever she came. If I didn't object, she would be careful to keep out of my way.

 

I was quick to take the offer and moved in some months later.

 

 

Within days of my arrival, I had adapted to the changing moods of the apartment, sitting on the balcony during the early mornings, moving my papers to the kitchen as the sun ascended, then to the living room. Afterwards I went out for a walk, the work of the day settling into place and gradually fading away.

 

The city was empty during my first weeks. Streets were filled with dried leaves of late summer, entangled with garbage, all of it drifting slowly like the long afternoons. Most restaurants and shops were closed, with fading paper signs saying that they would open for business the following month, though it did not seem to me that they would ever be open, that the city could be anything other than its somnolent shell. Those who had remained emerged from buildings in the evening, walking to the plaza to sit on the benches around the fountain, in weary disbelief that the heat had passed as the sunlight deepened to gold.

 

I walked as far as the northern hills, the southern walls, the cloisters past the old city gate, or followed the course of the river inland. I had the feeling that the city had known of my arrival and kept a space for me, whose precise shape and meaning I was yet to discover.

 

 

I was researching Gothic nude sculptures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In my proposal, I argued that these nudes had largely been overlooked in art history. There were no studies on the iconography of the naked body in the Middle Ages nor any attempt to understand why the existing ones-few in number, that much was true-were given place within the medieval culture of dense clothing. My plan was to spend the first months creating an inventory of nudity in medieval texts before traveling to the surrounding towns to see the sculptures themselves.

 

Throughout the previous year, my adviser had questioned my interest in the topic. My earlier studies, she reminded me, had focused on sculptures of mourners, from which I could easily build a solid thesis. She didn't want me to abandon the topic on grounds of originality-there was still much work to be done on mourning figures. She found my sudden interest in nudes too hasty, and reminded me that the medieval body in art was one cloaked by drapery; if I wanted to study attitudes towards nakedness, she said, I would be better off focusing my attention on all the ways that the body was hidden from sight rather than revealed. Medieval clothing was so symbolic, she said, that inspecting its different forms would elucidate notions surrounding various body parts as well. Nor did it seem to her that I was able to articulate a very original perspective with which to examine the few nudes at my disposal, abstract in their soft, curved limbs and their unspecified sex. Of course, if I insisted, she would sign whatever documents were necessary for my funding. But she wanted me to understand that there may not be much to investigate.

 

It was not the lack of originality that had led me to abandon my initial topic but the clear position that mourners occupied in medieval art. I wanted to research an ambiguous topic, whose greatest challenge would be one of consciousness: to view the naked human form as medievals did. Nakedness, in its purely physical aspect, was exactly the same for medieval and modern humans. Yet, the perception of being unclothed might hold entirely different meanings, like a thin film obscuring the subject from view. In my studies until then, I'd felt confident in dates, periods, styles; I could make my way steadily through academic theories that cast each subject in a different light. But all this was an external framework when I had no impression of the internal force that propelled medieval life and art. I couldn't be certain that what I found beautiful, exaggerated, comical, or sad in the writings and art of the time had indeed been created with those sentiments.

 

There was no clear course of study for entering another's consciousness, historical or not. This was as difficult a task as undoing one's own mind, unraveling each layer of thought with all its prejudices and assumptions.

 

Early September, when signs of life were gradually appearing, I went to the gallery representing Agnes's work. I'd come upon a brochure of a past show in a drawer in my bedroom and wondered whether it could have been left there for me. I was curious about my landlord. The more time I spent in the apartment, the more I admired its sparse aesthetic. There was nothing out of place, nothing that called attention to itself in its restrained elegance.

 

I walked the hushed narrow streets of the city's chic northern neighborhood, lined with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593330528
• ISBN 13: 9780593330524
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: RIVERHEAD; https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar