Mr. Gwyn and Three Times at Dawn by Alessandro BariccoTranslated by Ann GoldsteinMcSweeney’s, 2014

This book, for me, felt right on the edge of being twee in a kind of off-putting way. But it wasn’t: it was whimsically charming. It’s really two short books, the first of which is about Jasper Gwyn, a successful author who decides that he’s going to stop writing and publishing books, and who announces this intent via an article he publishes in the Guardian, “a list of fifty-two things that Jasper Gwyn intended never to do again” (9). But as time passes, he realizes that he misses “the act of writing, and the daily care of ordering thoughts into the rectilinear form of a sentence” (17). He considers and rejects various jobs that include writing (writing travel guides, writing instruction manuals for appliances). But “in the end, the only thing that came clearly to mind was a word: copyist. He would like to be a copyist. It wasn’t a real profession, he knew, but the word had a resonance that was convincing, and inspired him to look for something precise” (ibid.). He meets an old woman who suggests he should “find something like copying people,” but time passes and he doesn’t start anything, until one day he sees a gallery show of painted portraits, and is struck by something in them, though he doesn’t like paintings, as a rule. “I don’t like paintings because they’re mute,” he tells the gallerist, and then thinks about how his own portraits will be similar, but also different (38). He rents a studio, makes preparations, chooses all the details of the environment—the textures of it, the light of it, the sounds of it. He decides he will do sittings that are about a month long, and chooses his first sitter, who is his literary agent’s assistant. The assistant, Rebecca, asks if she can bring books with her, or music: he tells her no. “I think you should simply be with yourself, that’s all. For an entirely unreasonable time,” he tells her (73). And so he does her portrait, and then she becomes his assistant, and he does other portraits, and then things shift and change and Rebecca is left to think back on everything. The second story, Three Times at Dawn, is a book mentioned in the first book, and an insight into it, & the combination of it with the preceding story is pretty satisfying.


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