PositiveBookforumThe apartment is a metonym for her mind: the claustrophobia of her thoughts, the suffocating sameness of her psyche ... The cruelty played out in The Stepdaughter is familiar territory. The stepmother, always heartless, self-interested, is a reliable stock figure.
Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. by Michael Hofmann
PositiveBookforumErpenbeck climbs in between the reality of things, mapping the subterranean affect of the GDR through its humor, speech, customs, gestures ... Hans and Katharina are symbolically overweighted characters, but I forgive Erpenbeck her ciphers. Her heavy-handedness makes clear distinct experiences in the GDR ... The novel’s most beautiful passages occur in the direct shifts between the lovers.
Celia Paul
PositiveBookforumSelf-Portrait , Celia Paul’s memoir and account of her decade-long entanglement with Lucian Freud, is both the story of a life and an argument for her own legacy. To be known as Freud’s companion might be fine, for a time; to be canonized as such would be unbearable. His death in 2011, and her subsequent subordination as Freud’s lover and muse, made it seem unlikely that she would ever be known simply as “the painter Celia Paul.” But Paul’s memoir is more than an attempt to balance the scales. Self-Portrait is the work of someone who has learned how to see herself ... Were Celia Paul and Lucian Freud not great artists, the story of their affair might read as a cliché. Young girl from the backwoods with an outward naïveté that belies an iron will meets an older, theatrically unattractive, cultured man. The girl, who doesn’t distinguish between love and subjugation, falls for him. He needs adoration; she conceals her own needs. Years of emotional torment follow. Gradually, she begins to assert her ambition. Maybe she leaves him; maybe she becomes the subject of her own life. This might be called a success, but Paul doesn’t insist on our seeing it that way: in Self-Portrait no one is that innocent, and no one escapes unscarred.
