The Woman Upstairs Claire Messud
I'm a woman artist. And being one found that "The Woman Upstairs" by Claire Messud really nails what it is to be a woman artist. And portrays the art world and the people in it pretty spot on.
The inner frustrations, the dreams and aspirations, fitting into a male dominated art world and having your work taken seriously. How people view the woman artist, what they think she is, and what they think she thinks she is.
Art. It sounds so simple. Yet, it is so complicated and multifaceted. For being a woman and a mother and a teacher and an artist. Art is the most important thing yet society and the world seem to want the woman to put it last on her list of things to accomplish.
I totally got Nora. There was a lot of my time spent typing quotes and little snippets from the book to my female artist friends in Social Media sites and emails while reading this book. I had to keep sharing little gems from it with my creative lady friends. They are all looking forward to buying this book if they haven't already.
Get your The Woman Upstairs Claire Messud Now!
After reading through the reviews that have been posted before mine for "The Woman Upstairs" I find myself more compelled to tell potential readers of this book who should NOT read it, instead of who should.
BalasHapusThe extraordinary Claire Messud's book will absolutely not benefit from a plot summary. It is a book that allows it's protagonist to introduce herself to you in a completely tantalizing way. Nora Eldridge will tell you everything that you need to know in short order. She is a fascinating character drawn with the fine brush and exquisite materials of a very elegant artist. Nora fancies herself an artist, and indeed, reading "The Woman Upstairs" is very much like standing in front of a beautiful, intricate, and extremely interesting painting, in an art museum. You may even want to sit down as you spend a preternatural amount of time staring at this magnificent piece...studying how the fine paint thickens in some areas and the colors resonate. You are imagining peeling back layers and layers until you have unfurled more and more of the work to find all of the hidden meaning that the artist has intended.
If you are someone that must "like" or identify with the characters in the books that you choose...don't choose this one. Nora is one of the most finely textured and unique figures in literature that you will ever meet. You will not understand her, love her, or warmly identify with her. I can't imagine why you would need to. She is a work of fine art, with a very sharp edge.
If you are adverse to learning about different and interesting art mediums...avoid this one. If you don't like paying very close attention to painstakingly well created, multi cultural, and nuanced characters, that have histories that are centered on real international events, and historical art figures who rocked the pop culture of their days...avoid this one. If you like tidy endings that don't leave you with the sense that something even more profound probably occurred...avoid this one. Messud creates an almost interactive exercise for the reader with her ending. If you don't appreciate carefully plotted but subtle psychological drama...leave this one alone.
This is wordy, erudite, and probably the best book of the year so far. But it is not an easy read. So tread very carefully...I just can't tell you any more, because I could not live with myself if I ruined this amazingly well crafted piece for any of you that are serious readers. This is literary fiction at it's very finest. But it requires a reader who is up to the task. If you are willing, you are about to embark on one of the most mercurial and profound reading experiences of your reading life.
Messud's provocative novel begins with language that suggests the intensity of the tale within, "a great boil of rage like the sun's fire in me". Extraordinary, really, in a novel so filled with elation, curiosity and joy. But not surprising, given the extremes experienced by Nora Eldridge, an unmarried teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Long describing herself as that iconic "woman upstairs"-"reliable and organized and she doesn't cause trouble". Nora considers it her great good fortune to meet a family from Paris, the Shahid's, each of whom becomes a central figure in her life for the year they are in Cambridge. Reza, a beautiful, dark-eyed boy, is new to her class (in a post-9/11 environment); his father, Skandar, a professor of history, is more peripheral, at least at first; Sirena is an artist preparing a show for their return to Paris, a magnificent installation she hopes will establish her reputation in the arts community. The exotic family fascinates Nora and she falls in love with each of them.
BalasHapusWhen Sirena suggests they share a studio, Nora long a hopeful, albeit occasional miniaturist, Nora's nascent artistic dreams come alive, her work currently moldering in a second bedroom. As Nora's work flourishes in the shared studio, Messud examines the interior life of a lonely woman whose mother's death lies heavy on her heart, as painstaking as Nora's attention to the details of her miniature tableaus of important women's lives. Nora falls in love with possibility, with creativity and with the exotic Sirena, artist, mother, wife, a woman fearlessly following her dream, unafraid. Messud explores thought, fears, feelings in stunning prose, plumbing the essence of the artist's struggle for validation and the parameters of success: "There were two big examination questions I wanted to be sure I answer fully: the question of art and the question of love."
Like Alice through the Looking Glass, Nora falls through a year of unexpected awakenings, her heart quickened by a wild joy that opens her quiet spirit to a level she has never imagined, a condition eventually fraught with thorny vines of confusion, a surfeit of guilt, of loss and of folly. This call to a life beyond the ordinary is irresistible to the woman upstairs, if deeply unsettling and ultimately painful, a contemplation of endings, of Nora's mother, of each of the Shahids', a small world called to expand, then altered by betrayal. Messud challenges the perceptions of her protagonist, of the artistic experience and the boundaries of a love that burns too brightly. Above all, it is a call to embrace life. Luan Gaines/2013.