Julia BlackburnRezensionen

Not really about Doggerland, is it. It’s the author trying to inhabit the passage of time over thousands of years and communicate that 2000 years distant from here was yesterday, and will be tomorrow, and the flow of irresistible change over time is natural and holds no terrors, whatever may happen in any given moment. Seems a comforting though somewhat anesthetized outlook. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it drones on in another repeat of the formula “author makes appointment to meet archaeologist type person, author is early as always, then author and person take a walk and author describes what they see on the walk with faithful exactitude (what remark a passerby said into his cell phone for instance), and imagines what was there thousands of years ago.”

A beautiful and personal story of the author's explorations of the submerged North Sea landmass known as Doggerland. She recounts her visits with various scientists and artists and others who have connected with this area, and intersperses these with short poems ("time songs").

OK partly fictional biography of a Victorian lady who lived among the aborigines in Southern Australia from early 1900s to about 1950 or so. Not much is known so author makes up things, but it is very well done. A lost woman among a lost people.

Simply brilliant!

Billie Holiday as Viewed by Others
Review of the Vintage paperback (2006) of the original Pantheon Books / Random House Inc. hardcover (2005)

With Billie consists primarily of journalist Julia Blackburn's selection from the archived taped interviews and transcripts by the eminent Billie Holiday researcher Linda Kuehl (1940-1978), who died before she could complete and publish her work. Kuehl recorded interviews with over 150 people on 125 tapes who had known and / or worked with Billie Holiday (1915-1959) from her childhood up until her passing at the age of 44. Kuehl's research forms the basis of every Billie Holiday biography written afterwards and also of a film documentary (see Links below).

The amount of material is staggering of course and Blackburn admits that she also had difficulty in attempting to fashion it into a convincing story line with many of the interviewees providing self-serving and often contradictory stories about the same events. Blackburn then decided she would simply present selections from the interviews 'as is' and include her own observations, bridging story chapters and footnotes to provide context.

The result is an all encompassing view of Holiday's life and career, which admittedly makes for sad and difficult reading at times with the amount of exploitation and abuse that Holiday suffered from various hangers-on, drug dealers, boy friends, husbands and often criminal agents and club owners. There is still enough light in the darkness, especially from the warm memories from her musician friends and in the descriptions of some of the classic performances and recordings. This is not recommended as a first Billie Holiday biography, but it should definitely be considered essential.

Reading With Billie continues my Billie Holiday deep dive which began with February 2022 readings of "Billie Was a Black Woman" (2021), "Billie Holiday: The Last Interview and Other Conversations" (2019), "Lady Sings the Blues: The 50th-Anniversay Edition with a Revised Discography" (orig. 1956/reissue 2006) and "Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth" (2015).

Soundtrack
These were the main Billie Holiday albums that I was listening to while reading With Billie:
1. The Essential Billie Holiday: The Columbia Years A 2-CD selection from the recordings first issued/recorded 1935-1942 on the Brunswick, Vocalion, Columbia and Okeh labels. This is a 'Best Of' selection from Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933-1944, a 10-CD boxed set.
See CD cover at https://i.discogs.com/ruSFuQLgTgA1B5Y2aDlMeJWhSUgTckFkagHB2OA8Meg/rs:fit/g:sm/q:...
Double CD set cover image sourced from Discogs.

2. Billie Holiday: Ray Ellis and his Orchestra (orig 1959), the final album, some later reissues rename it Billie Holiday: Last Recording.
See LP cover at https://i.discogs.com/8wr0sg-Ayue90UPZ7wXqGfHC84l3BD_v7Id_yTvZh5Y/rs:fit/g:sm/q:...
Vinyl LP cover image sourced from Discogs.

Trivia and Link
With Billie features an extended description of the filmed performance of the song "Fine and Mellow" by Billie Holiday and select musicians including Lester (Prez) Young (saxophone), for the CBS television program "The Sound of Jazz" in 1957. You can watch that excerpt on YouTube here.

The documentary film Billie (2019) dir. James Erskine also includes excerpts from the interviews by and footage of Billie Holiday researcher Linda Kuehl. You can read an article about the film here and watch a trailer here.

Moving to Liguria in 1999 Julia and her husband got to know the stories of the people with whom they became friendly and the landscape. This is the poetically written result.. A nice read - and having been to Liguria makes it all the more visual!

Still reading, but...

This is a magical book, a philosophical book, a time travel book. There is nothing fey about it, it is serious, death-haunted; it ambles about and it is curious—the book itself, not just its author, is curious, about time, death, shells, rocks, landscapes present and vanished.

I think I recall reading that Julia Blackburn is about my age. That is 68. I think it may have to do with being that age, but lately the books I read all seem to be written for me specifically, all wondering about the same sort of things, taking me to places I would like to go, and giving me glimpses of experiences that could have been my own.

I suppose it is what books do. But in a lifetime of reading, I don’t recall this degree of cohering, each book seeming to be attached to the next, commenting on each other, arousing thoughts in me that I might never otherwise have thought. I consider this phenomenon to be one of the signal blessings of being alive.

31/2021. This is a lightweight examination of geography, archaeology, and personal history, in this case in and around "Doggerland" the undersea bank and plains that have sometimes formed a land bridge between Britain and continental Europe. The basic journalistic-style text is full of anecdotal "human interest" stories written with banal straightforwardness, especially in the "songs" which are chopped-up prose, but also in the author's passing encounters with local people and their stories. These commonplaces of ordinary everyday life contain fleeting contacts with prehistoric normalities that were equally banal in their originating time but are now extraordinary and are only revealed to us by fluctuating geography.

Quote

Pontin's holiday park, Suffolk: "I stopped off at the reception desk. A woman with shiny orange make-up had 'Faith and hope and' tattooed on her forearm, but I couldn't read the last word and so I asked her what it was. 'Pixie Dust', she said proudly and she twisted her arm round so I could see it for myself. I asked her if she had heard anything about the palaeontologists who had been working along this stretch of the coast and the discovery that humans were living here eight hundred thousand years ago. She said no, she'd heard nothing about anything like that, but a young man who was also standing at the desk and whose arms were also alive with tattoos said he'd been told there were some First World War pillboxes somewhere nearby. The pixie dust woman said, 'Well, I have learnt a lot today, haven't I?' "

Het is pas enkele jaren geleden dat ik kennis maakte met de notie Doggerland, het nu verdronken land onder de Noordzee. Ik denk dat het in het werk van Robert Macfarlane (The Old Ways) was. Onder vissers was het blijkbaar al langer geweten dat onder de zee waar ze actief waren een uitgestrekt land lag met bijzondere begroeiing en sporen van bossen en rivieren. Pas in de jaren 1990 werd er serieus wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar verricht, en intussen is het duidelijk dat tot 10.000 jaar geleden op zijn minst enkele delen van het land nog boven de zee uitstaken en bewoond werden. Uiteraard spreekt zoiets tot de verbeelding.
Ik wist dat dit geen echt wetenschappelijk werk zou zijn over Doggerland. Julia Blackburn pretendeert dat ook niet. Het is eerder een romantiserende evocatie van de evolutie van dat land, in de afgelopen 100.000 jaar, vertrekkend van de vele vondsten die nog regelmatig aanspoelen aan de Engelse kust. Blackburn gebruikt een lichtjes Sebaldiaanse sfeerschepping, wellicht met opzet, onder meer door de lange passages waarin ze rondwandelt, de natuur bekijkt, fossielen en stenen opraapt en mijmert over wat daar ooit is geweest. Sebald zelf leefde en wandelde trouwens ook in dat gebied.
Twee dingen vallen op aan dit boek. In de eerste plaats een aantal toch wel fundamentele chronologische fouten; zo dateert ze de ouderdom van de aarde op 45 miljard jaar (!), en verbindt ze de uitbarsting van de Laacher vulkaan in de Duitse Eifel, met de plotse klimaatafkoeling van het jonge Dryas, terwijl de effecten van die uitbarsting maar heel lokaal waren. Ook op andere plaatsen is Blackburn erg onzorgvuldig. Maar nog eens: het is niet wetenschappelijke correctheid die voor haar voorop staat.
Wat voor mij ronduit shockerend was, is de voortdurende opsomming van dingen die ze vindt op het strand of elders (vuurstenen werktuigen, mammoetbotten), en gewoon meeneemt. Blijkbaar krioelt het aan de oostelijke kust van Engeland van de fossielenverzamelaars die er uitgebreide collecties op nahouden. Ze citeert ook een Nederlandse visser die maar liefst 150.000 kilo aan mammoetbotten en andere fossielen heeft opgevist. Akkoord dat je historisch onderzoek niet alleen aan professionele academici kunt overlaten, maar hoeveel waardevol materiaal is op deze manier verloren gegaan?
Tweede vaststelling is dat Blackburn er ook een aantal dingen bij haalt die helemaal niks met Doggerland te maken hebben. Zo beschrijft ze uitgebreid een bezoek aan de Man van Tollund, een Deens veenlijk van amper 2.000 jaar oud, toen Doggerland al lang verdwenen was. En ze eindigt haar boek met een bezoek aan grotten in Gibraltar waar Neanderthalers hebben gewoond. Met andere woorden, Blackburn heeft van dit boek meer een bespiegeling gemaakt over het mysterieuze wezen van de tijd, en de fascinatie die we allemaal hebben over de vaststelling dat voor ons tal van mensen hebben geleefd waar we ons nu amper nog een voorstelling van kunnen maken. Ze verbindt dat met een animistische filosofie dat leven en dood eigenlijk tot hetzelfde domein behoren, alle wezens en dingen verbonden en gescheiden door de tijd. De mooiste fragmenten in dit boek zijn waar ze dit heel persoonlijk verbindt met de dood van haar man, enkele jaren tevoren, van wie ze voelt dat die op één of andere manier toch nog voortleeft, als een uitgestrekt land dat zich nu onder water bevindt. Meer dan wat ook geeft dit aan dat dit mijmerende boek over heel wat meer dan alleen Doggerland gaat.½

Published in 1991, I found this copy at a free English-language book exchange shelf in a tiny ice cream parlor in Arles, France. It seemed an appropriate place to read about the Emperor Napoleon. Somehow, I had the mistaken idea that he had been exiled to Elba (due to the palindrome, "Able was I, ere I saw Elba") rather than to St. Helena, which is 1800 miles from Brazil, 1200 miles from Africa, and 700 miles from its nearest neighbor! Julia Blackburn does a magnificent job of telling the history of the island, how it was "discovered" time and again, exploited, nearly ruined, barely revived. And how it became the prison for the remaining bombastic, regal, and pitiful years of Napoleon's life. She writes beautifully, as when she describes her own trip to the Island during a storm: "You wake up out of a restless dream to a tremendous hubbub of noise and movement and your body is so busy with its own private battle that you can't ask anything of it. There is only passivity, the passivity of waiting for something to change, and you lie there throughout a long day, watching the reflection the waves outside throw on the ceiling of the cabin: a fleeting patterns of light and thin shadows that rushes with a relentless flickering energy like the shadow of smoke in a wind."

More Englishness and class.

A story of a dysfunctional family, but one with money and no need to work. Pure indulgence on a scale not imaginable in these woke days of instant morality and outrage.

Surprisingly readable and almost incomprehensible as to how Julia Blackburn managed to get through it all.

We must be of similar ages because I could place myself at some of the times of events she records in her life.

While she was going off to Spain to live with her painter lover, I was going to work in all weathers while living in just one of many cultural vacuums that make up most of English working class life.

While she was having a meltdown in her own time and place I was faced with the mundanities of earning a living or being broke.

Doors were shut to me simply because of where I was born and the family I was born into. Inferiority was driven into us by middle class teachers in almost every working class school across the country. By comparison they had privilege and entitlement driven into them by their own kind.

Isn't it like that everywhere?

In a lot of ways England is many countries and cultures layered one over the other.

The novel, The City and The City by China Miéville is the closest I have ever come to finding an accurate description of the phenomena of different cultures occupying the same space.

I come from a completely different country to Julia Blackburn. While her father had 18 years of Freudian therapy, paid for by an aunt, my father barely survived war wounds and an industrial accident, yet still managed to provide for us.

There is no jealousy or bitterness in me around this anymore, there used to be years ago when I was young and incensed about the injustice and the inequality and realising that the only solution was to GTFO as quickly as possible, something I did and still count as the the only possible way I could have survived in this life.

Thank you Julia Blackburn

De vrouw die van Picasso bleef houden. Door Julia Blackburn.

Blackburn blijft in mijn leven maar voorbijkomen, aangeprezen door schrijvers die ik, op mijn beurt graag lees.

Deze poëziebundel haalde me over de schreef. Voornamelijk omdat het boek me doet denken aan De man met de dansende ogen van Sophie Dahl. Beide boeken hebben op het eerste zicht een speelsheid en kinderlijkheid over zich, aangewakkerd door de prachtige, eenvoudige illustraties (in het geval van Julia door Jeffrey Fisher) maar raken je tot in het diepst van je ziel. Door hun schoonheid, puurheid en het achterliggende verdriet.

De vrouw die van Picasso bleef houden is Marie-Thérèse Walter, die zeventien is als ze de zesenveertig jarige, gehuwde, Picasso ontmoet. Ze wordt al snel zijn muze én minnares. En hij zal haar leven lang belangrijk blijven voor haar. In tweeënveertig gedichten laat Julia Marie-Thérèse haar verhaal aan ons vertellen. Soms ontroerend, dan weer wat grappig, soms heel seksueel, maar ook vaak weemoedig van toon.

Het is een ode aan de liefde, in woord én beeld. Deze bundel is een pareltje om te koesteren. Van 1.Vogel tot 41.Vogel, over 8.Water en 40.Gewicht (mijn favoriete gedichten) tot elke tekening toe, alles is koesterenswaardig.

De keuze van Blackburn om Walter via gedichten tot ons te laten spreken, vanuit haar eigen stem, is een geniale zet. Een soort van biografie door middel van poëzie. Een boek dat je op je huid wilt dragen.

Despite the recent shenanigans about our relationship with Europe, if you were to go back about 7000 years ago, you'd find that we were physically connected to the continent. This connection point was where the North Sea is now. We know that there were people and animals there because of the number of bones and other artefacts that keep being bought to the surface by trawlers. This land has a name too now, Doggerland.

For lots of people, the past has a lot of allure, there are stories to be told from the things that we find and tales from bumps in a field. Julia Blackburn is one of those who seeks out objects that can speak to her across the bridge of time. She has amassed more and more things but didn't really feel that she knew much about this land just below the sea. Her curiosity would take her back and forth across this shallow sea and far back in time to the people that inhabited this landscape. She gets to see footprints from humans that had been fossilised in mud and silt, hold flint arrowheads that were last used a millennia ago, discover the traces of plants that must have come across on the land bridge and even get to see those that have been preserved in the acid waters of the bogs that surround the North Sea.

This fascination, or almost borderline obsession with the past, stemmed from Blackburn's desire to collect and hold objects from history. The paths she takes as she walks back in time are sometimes walked alone and sometimes with others there to guide her to the wider view or the minutia of the items she is looking at. Entwined with the history and archaeology is her very personal journey as she reminisces about her late husband, the artist Herman Makkink. This the second of Blackburn's book that I have read now, the other was Thin Paths which I really enjoyed. She is such an evocative and beautiful writer and this has an intensity that makes you think of elements of it long after you have set it aside. I loved the art that was included from Enrique Brinkman, but personally wasn't that keen on the Time Songs. However, they added a pause to the intensity of the writing. Can highly recommend this.

I've read more than my fair share of midlife memoirs written by authors with troubled childhoods: they're a guilty pleasure of mine. Most of them should be subtitled "Here's Why Not Everyone Should Raise Kids." Having said that, I don't know if I've ever read any account of parental behavior that was so literally beastial as what's described in Julia Blackburn's "The Three of Us." To say that they didn't have much regard for social niceties doesn't just understate the case, it misses the tenor of their behavior by a couple of miles. At one point, Blackburn's father gets so high on barbiturates that he barks at his family from under a table. Her mother's sexual advances are so blatant that she makes animals that actually have mating dances seem subtle by comparison. In other scenes she comes off as pathologically self-centered and unfeeling. The fact that all of this plays out against the backdrop of gray, more-or-less respectable middle class life in the the grey nineteen fifties makes this story seem even more bizarre. I hope, for your sake, you've never had dinner party guests that were anything like the Blackburns.

What's also odd about this one is how straightforward it is: Julia Blackburn's written more than her share of books, but her narrative style is curiously blank. Curiously, but maybe not surprisingly. Faced with a domestic situation that would drive most kids insane, she seems to have become rather emotionally vacant. While she often comes off as observant and has a genuine fondness for animals, ranging from insects on up, we hear a psychoanalyst describe her, at nineteen, as not having formed a personality. It's not all that hard to believe. Throughout the book, she seems curiously aimless and receptive of her parents' misbehavior, of drugs, of sex, and of life in general. It was, perhaps a coping mechanism, and certainly preferable to active self-harm. But it doesn't always make for compelling reading. as always, it's wonderful to see that she made it through, and that she can construct any narrative at all of her wildly unstable childhood and teen years.

Blackburn brings more in the way of documentary evidence to her narrative than do most midlife memoirists: she draws on years of diaries and letters and includes numerous photographs of herself and her parents. This first-hand documentary material adds a lot to the story, as well providing some temporal structure to what might have been a rather confusing account. The author mentions that she's unable to recall certain meetings or dramas that are nonetheless described in these documents. But she also includes an account of her mother's mercifully peaceful last month, during which they reached a reconciliation of sorts, and faxes she sent during this period to a once and future romantic partner who also appears in the story. These faxes -- which already seem dated by the passage of time! -- contain the book's most artful writing, but these aren't necessarily the most interesting parts of "The Three of Us", though they do, I suppose wrap up the author's own account nicely and prove that she's grown into an admirably stable adulthood. Maybe I should just admit that I, like most readers, don't pick these sorts of books up to hear about the good times.

"The Three of Us" is a solid, and, at times, admirably brave account, but it also seems emotionally detached. Recommended to fans of the genre and, as a sort of public service message, to people unsure about whether they should have kids. If you've ever gotten so out of your head that you've imitated the family pet while on all fours, the answer is probably, "no."

This is a difficult book to review - indeed it could be said that it is difficult to read. It is not a typical biography - in part because the sources were so few and so difficult for the author to bring together. It is certainly not the type of biography that is dense with facts. This is mirrored in the sub-title. Julia Blackburn uses the term 'delicate life' in my opinion to suggest that since she doesn't or isn't writing a biography packed with facts - the biographical aspects are very suggestive. As well of course John Craske's life was dogged by illness and his health was delicate.

In addition this book is semi-autobiographical telling us a lot about her own life particularly her relationship with her husband Herman. There is an underlying theme or strand of couples: John Craske and Laura, the author and her husband Herman, Herman's friend Hans, whose husband Denis died during the writing of the biography. Apart from their individual relationships, work is the thing that each couple seems to have in common as they cope with their loss.

To other readers I recommend that before you dive into this book, explore it thoroughly. Note for example that the illustrations are listed at the back of the book not under each illustration. I did find this rather frustrating although there may have been economic reasons for this. It does have an index which is great but when I wanted to go back and check who Jacynth was - she is not in the index.

Julia Blackburn has a fascination with Einstein who had indeed been in the area where John Craske and his wife Laura lived in Norfolk. I failed to see the importance of this link when we are never told about the current condition of the Craske's major embroidered work 'The Evacuation of Dunkirk'. Can the man in the street see the embroidery? or is it locked away and only to be seen by appointment? What condition is it in now?

There is a section Chapter 39 entitled 'Embroidering Men' which is very interesting and focuses on the use of embroidery by men in prisons. It is here that Jacynth features - she is in fact Lady Jacynth Fitzalan Howard. In her acknowledgements the author thanks Ronald Blythe with whom she has talked about men embroidering after WW I.

Chapter 4 gives the reader a good idea of the thinness of the sources and the way in which various threads are present but come to nothing. I thought that Chapter 32 entitled Uncatalogued Boxes was a pivotal point - it is here that the 'story' seems to take a turn with the location of more material in archives.

A very interesting subject and book. It was a serendipitous find at the Library and I am so pleased I found it.½

3.5 Doggland, a land mass that once connected Great Britain to the rest of Europe, traces of which the author searches. This is not a straightforward book, but it is beautifully written. The prose is elegant, the tone almost dreamlike, the search one that is informative and interesting. As she searches for the traces of the past, she takes the reader on a journey to visit a variety of people. Historians, collectors, museum curators, archivists, all share their stories, their collections connecting the past to the present. Part historical, part travelogue, part poetry, as the poems called Time Songs interposed throughout reflect on what went before. Her own life story and experiences add another more personal dimension to the story. In a roundaboit way it circles back to Doggerland by books end. The past always leave traces, is never completely gone, it just takes the curious and knowledgeable to continue searching and piecing it together.

"Everything speaks of what it has been: the leg bone of a wading bird holds the image of that bird standing on the mud of a shoreline, poised on its own mirror reflection."

ARC from Edelweiss½

An unusual and interesting mix of history/archaeology and personal stories of the author about meeting people and visiting places to obtain the knowledge to put together the book, a search for Doggerland. Doggerland is the name given for the flooded area between England and mainland Europe that existed for thousands of years, before being flooded after the most recent Ice Age about 5,000 BC. There are some excellent maps that illustrate the extent of Doggerland from about 16,000BC to 5,000 BC.
The "time songs" are sections of blank verse used to usually impart scientific details, but also other stories.
I enjoyed the book and the structure worked very well for me, but this is not a "straight" non-fiction book.

The author has a wonderful self depreciatory style:
I found something I thought recognised as coprolite, a piece of fossilised poo, probably from a hyena, but when I proudly showed it to one of our leaders, he gave me a rather pitying look and told me it was just a pebble. I suddenly felt like a six year old on a school trip and I pottered off in a vague huff and sat on the sand to watch sand fleas and to look towards the coast of England, out of sight but not so very far away.½

Julia Blackburn became fascinated by Daisy Bates quite by accident. In the beginning of her book Blackburn imagines Ms. Bates's feelings and memories but by the middle of the book there is an odd shift in perspective and suddenly Blackburn assumes the role of Bates, talking in the first person as if she IS Daisy Bates. It was a little unsettling until I settled into the narrative...and then she switches back.
Through Blackburn's words Daisy Bates became this larger than life figure; a woman trying to save the natives of Australia. At times it was difficult for me to understand her motives or her successes, but I learned to understand her passions. She truly cared for the people of the desert.

Substance: A biography of a woman who chose to live among the Australian aborigines, styling herself their protector, with funding from the government. Although evidence indicates that she was an inveterate embellisher of her biography and life with her companions, whom she always claimed as friends, she seems sincere in her appreciation of their culture and love for them as persons. She did compile material for published articles and some books (some written by others), although not a trained researcher or anthropologist or linguist.
Style: Blackburn uses the unusual device of beginning and ending her book with a standard biographical narrative, based on Bates' journals and recollections of other people, but the center is written as if by Bates herself, and (if it truly captures her spirit) presents a moving portrait of a complex and interesting woman.

E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, doesn't see why the novelist has to wrap up everything at the end. Why can't the novelist just stop, he says, or something to that effect. I have often wondered so myself given the painfully elongated summings-up so many novelists, even present-day novelists, impose upon their readers. Now, however, I think I understand why such advice might not always be applicable. Take Julia Blackburn’s short novel, The Book of Color. This novel is for the most part enjoyable. One gets 165 wonderfully modulated pages, pages in which the novelist’s art is masterfully on display. One glides along them with such ease, such delight. Then—splat!—you’re in a gutter and the cold water is washing over your splayed and alarmed form. I understand that part of the charm of Ms. Blackburn’s book is in what it does not address, its elisions. She’s very good at leaving things out, as good as Ernest Hemingway ever was in that respect. There are wonderful uses of elision here, but with regard to narrator motivation, more, I think, must be provided. In such a case it does not seem right to simply stop, which is what the abrupt ending here feels like. The narrator is obviously compelled to this oneiric study of her family’s past, but why? Some sense of the significance it holds for her must be given. But we get nothing, nothing. The omission of the narrator’s rationale seems to me a terrible mistake. As a reader I was utterly lost without it. Let me take this opportunity then to recommend other works by Ms Blackburn, including The Emperor's Last Island and Old Man Goya. Both are nonfiction works that blend biography and memoir. Quite wonderful, I think.

I love when a book is beautiful and poetic, I love when it tells a good story, and I love when an author finds a creative way to put everything together. This book blended all of those things into one experience that was somewhat over the top on all, but is also very hard to explain. This is a story about a family history, but it is not told in the typical way, but through memories of a life lived between grandfather, son, and child. There were moments when I found myself completely wrapped up in the story, however they were contrasted with times when I felt I wasn't really certain where things were going. It was worth sticking through the short chapters, because in the end I was touched by something powerful, even if I wasn't quite sure what it was.

Julia Blackburn has written a biography or a memoir if you will about the paternal side of her family that goes back as far as her great grandfather. But this is not a conventional, genealogically straight-forward biography. The author swoops in and out of her father and grand-father’s lives through dreams and nightmares, mentally visiting rooms within a large ethereal house each connected by long white corridors. In each room she encounters a place in time inhabited by her ancestors. The author becomes a part of her ancestor’s lives as if by some form of bilocation. While in this fantastical state of bilocation she interacts most often with her grandfather (whose name we are never privy to), the dark-skinned son of a white missionary and his son, Eliel, the author’s father. On the island of Praslin, one of the smaller islands of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, the white missionary is busy trying to stamp out copulation while simultaneously trying to deny the colour of his own act of copulation. The Missionary’s dark-skinned wife is cursed by a witchdoctor and she and her son flee to the island of Mauritius to try and hide or outrun the witchdoctor’s curse. Julia Blackburn’s father arrives In England aged eighteen having been trained as an Anglican Priest on Mauritius but the curse appears to have followed him over the ocean.
The book is not an easy read. The subject matter is unsettling; racism, self loathing and mental illness, and the writing style has a surreal texture to it. However, if you want an easy read there are plenty of celebrity biographies out there to satiate your appetite.
The book is laid out in a series of short chapters with an average of five pages per chapter. It is said that we have an average of six dreams per night within an eight hour sleep. The short chapters reflect that dream state. They allow the reader to end the dream or nightmare with the close of a chapter. The short chapters allow you reflect and cogitate what you have just read before moving on to the next chapter/dream.
As with any surreal style of art, symbolism features rather heavily. There is a lot of looking out of windows, standing at windows, looking at one’s reflection in windows. There is a barely a chapter that doesn’t mention the act of shaking; the Grandfather shakes, the grandfather’s friend shakes uncontrollably, the author’s father shakes and trembles at various times through the book, Uncle Julius the missionary’s brother shakes Eliel by the shoulders when greeting him and zombies shake themselves free from the ground.
This prevalent image of shaking is not simply a symbol of the fear that the every character in the book feels quite palpably but is symbolic of one of the thematic motifs that run through the book, a curse. The grandfather states that curses are “very hard to shake off”. The curse placed on the author’s grandmother appears to follow the family down through the generations culminating in the Eliel’s mental illness in his fifties.
Here is Ms Blackburn’s strength. Her ability through her rich, layered unpretentious writing has the twenty first century reader believing in witchdoctor curses by the end of the book. Like the curse, racist attitudes rear their ugly head throughout the book. But thankfully the author never lectures or gives an opinion on said racist attitudes. She simply lays out the truth of the matter and allows the reader to find their own feelings regarding this issue. This is rendered in a beautifully, understated passage that has Eliel being handed a book by his new teacher Mr Swann. In the book are the names of local families that are black but like to be thought of as white.
This is the first book review and I have been lucky in finding such a wonderful book to kick off my blog.
Julia Blackburn’s seemingly effortless style is at times beguiling and thought provoking. In the wrong hands The Book of Colour could have quite easily have became polemical and sentimental. The author has allowed the reader a peek into her ancestor’s lives and I believe it is just that, a peek. One can assume that there is so much more behind Julia Blackburn’s biographical curtains pertaining to her family. My only criticism is that the reader is left wondering what became of some of the people within the book; Eliel’s mother who suffered because of mental illness, Evalina Larose, relative or servant, and most importantly Eliel’s father who stayed behind on the island of Praslin. I have so many questions but so few answers. However, it may well be that the author does not have all the answers. It is a small criticism over-shadowed by my admiration and recommendation.

If Julia Blackburn has committed a bad word to print then I haven't read it. This is a beautiful memoir of ordinary lives in a series of mountain villages in northern Italy - that really could be a microcosm of village life anywhere. This has a lot in common with the work of John Berger, and his "Into Their Labours" series. You are struck by how little has actually happened - each life defined by one or two key events, rather than a modern swirl of activity. But these are long, happy and fulfilled lives and Blackburn's writing is wonderfully evocative of a much slower tempo of life.

So why only 4 stars? Its the photos. Black and white doesn't do them justice. It makes everything seem gray, monotone and depressing - which is not I think what the author intended. But otherwise wonderful