The Publisher Says: In this highly-lauded novel, a filmmaker meets a woman named Cosima at an Italian espresso bar, spinning a gorgeous tale of love and the creative process.

An auteur, together with his lead actors, is at a prestigious European festival to premiere his latest film. Alone one morning at a backstreet café, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman who takes him on a walk to uncover the city's secrets, historic and personal. As the walk unwinds, a story of love and tragedy emerges, and he begins to see the chance meeting as fate. He is entranced, wholly clear in his mind: her story must surely form the basis for his next film. This is a novel about cinema, flâneurs, and queer love — it is about the sometimes troubled, sometimes ecstatic creative process, and the toll it takes on its makers. But it is also a novel about stories, and the persistent question of who has the right to tell them.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

There was a moment in a theatre as the lights went down that you truly understood the depth of your vulnerability: that for all the good wishes and the boosting presence of family around you, the truth that you were about to be judged was inescapable. Your visual imagination and use of language, your depth and humour, as well as compassion and emotional intelligence: these were to be dissected, held aloft and appraised. I knew of no other art form that took apart a human being to the same degree of complexity.
–and–
I was jealous of the lives novelists lived but I knew that I was not a solitary creature. Novels were a different kind of cage, one where you willingly locked yourself in. {His newly discovered muse} had something of the captive in her, I thought; that same mixture of passion and restraint I’d seen in other novelists I’d worked with.

The words, musings really, of a cinema auteur of the pretentiously arty sort; all the inducement, or warning, you need about the read to come. I'm pretty sure you know right now which it is for you. I was left eager for more as I read the first sentence:

I flew to the Italian city of B. to attend the film festival in late March. Our entry into the competition, a liberal adaptation of William Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf, had been officially confirmed, and I was expected to participate in three days of interviews and panels to promote the release, with a jury screening on the second evening.

...because that novel contains one of my commonplace book's fattest sections. Maxwell's story, simple on the surface, of unrequited and unrequested love, is a tour-de-force of understatement that would be damned close to impossible to film. How does one get this:

But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey... On a turning earth, in a mechanically revolving universe, there is no place to stand still. Neither the destination nor the point of departure are important. People often find themselves midway on a journey they had no intention of taking and that began they are not exactly sure where.

...onto film? How in the hell can Lymie, the speaker, ever be really captured outside a reader's head? So we know what kind of filmmaker we're with in B., and it ain't Quentin Tarantino. Did Wallace Shawn ever direct a film? It would've been a lot like the narrator's films, I'll wager.

As he is in B. for the second time with a film almost certainly receiving an award, I was a touch surprised that Maestro (the tag that everyone uses to refer to and address the narrator, ugh) didn't have his husband and son with him. They are there in spirit, I suppose; the Maestro does refer to them. But the principal story here is about Cosima, a novelist who meets the Maestro quite by accident (or is it an accident?). Her long, intimate ramble and rambling chat with him becomes the center of the Maestro's world. He is captivated, both by Cosima and her story of a dead and gone artist lover of hers. He does what I think all truly driven artists do: He absorbs Cosima's story, Cosima's love; he appropriates them, in more modern terms. After all, he's decided with the arrogance of his sex and class that he's Going To Make This Film, the life and art of these lovers. So what that Cosima doesn't want him to? Who owns the facts?

The Maestro, then, is accustomed to taking what he wants. It's also obvious in his creepily Hitchcockesque insertion of himself into his lead actors' (from The Folded Leaf, the novel he's filmed, remember?) new off-screen romance. He's very benign about it, but it's there, and it reads badly in the twenty-first century. As it's intended to do....

The unbearably lush sensory world of Italy, its food and its lavish sensual feast of a landscape, is all I can picture after this read. The parties and events surrounding the Maestro's film release aren't very interesting to me, and luckily receded into the background as I read, but I'm attuned to the food and wine descriptions. (If I were a dog, I'd be reward-oriented in training.)

The stylistic choice to make each chapter a paragraph makes sense when one twigs to the fact this is a récit. All speech not the Maestro's is reported by him, is heard through his ears. We're always inside his head, always with his eyes doing our seeing...it's actually like we're the audience at the movie of his life. In fact, based on what he says, I'm willing to bet the Maestro's a narcissist on the ragged edge of pre-disorder-level presentation. It wouldn't take much to shove him into a full-blown clinical case.

The simple saving grace for the Maestro is, I suspect, that he's a storyteller by profession and passion.

Too much of life is given to analysis. I agree with that, I said, more than you realise. That's not to say I want to live blindly, maestro, more that you have to give yourself up to the day in order to live it. I learned a lesson from reading that novel. You're not always in control of when and how things end. What you can control is whether you embrace the moment.

You're not in control of how things end...but the author, the auteur, is. And there's no better place to be than that. The truth is the Maestro will always assume control of wherever he is, whenever he is there.

The main response I predict most people will have to the story is formal: Many are the folk who do not like absent dialogue tags and paragraphs that go on for pages. These are not the readers for Govinden's strange and lovely artwork. If you enjoyed Milkman with its men called things like Maybe-boyfriend and the neverending sentence with "the fact that" as a kind of punctuation in Lucy Elliman's Ducks, Newburyport, you'll be fine with this read. In fact it's downright simple in comparison to those two, or their French ancestors Pinget or Proust.

If those aren't happy memories for you, this isn't likely to be either. If you're willing to put in some concentration I predict this story in its very 21st century preoccupations with story, ownership, misogyny, and the Cult of the Creator, you'll like this read a lot. ( )

Superb and thoughtful novel seen through the eyes of an auteur at an Italian film festival to promote his film. Stream of consciousness style, Govinden really takes us into the creative process in the auteur's mind. Full review on my blog: https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/diary-of-a-film-by-niven-govinden ( )

A film director comes to a European city to show his new film in competition at a festival, but on arrival he meets an enigmatic woman in a café and, after striking up a conversation, she takes him on a short tour of the city, taking in some hidden murals done by her now-deceased boyfriend. Our central character becomes obsessed by Cosima's story, and meets up with her again after his film has been screened, determined that his next project should be based on the novel she had written about her boyfriend. And... that's pretty much it.

It took me a while to get into this, I'll admit. The first, and main, thing that distanced itself was the first-person narrative voice. No-one talks like this. Mind you, he likes to be called 'maestro' and calls his own films 'masterpieces', so I guess there is something of a pompous, self-important individual on show here. Not a lot happens, and there is a lot of time meditating on the nature of the creative process, on love and loss, on memory and living in the present. But there was always something a bit cold about it all, just a sense that I was observing rather than living the characters - which, I guess, is part of the debate about the nature of the artistic process.

On the whole it was OK. Not one for action fans, more for those who like a good leisurely stroll around a city, taking in the sights. ( )