Dana Grigorcea and Simone Meier: on the trail of art through writing
Published: Monday, Feb 26th 2024, 11:10
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The two Zurich-based authors Dana Grigorcea and Simone Meier have each written their new books about the biographer of Constantin Brancusi and the posthumous manager of Vincent van Gogh. Their approaches are similar, but the results are very different.
"The Weight of a Bird in Flight" is a title that already hints at Dana Grigorcea's style on the cover of her new novel: mysterious, poetic and precise at the same time. The book, which will be published this Wednesday, tells the story of a young sculptor who leaves France for New York in 1926, where his gallery owner wants him to make it big.
This Constantin is modeled on the Romanian-French sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whereby Dana Grigorcea, who also comes from Romania, turns him into a fictional character by giving him the surname Avis (Latin for bird).
A legal dispute that lasted several years broke out in the USA in 1926 over a highly abstracted bird from Brancusi's work. The American customs authorities defined the sculpture "Bird in space" to be imported as a manufactured product subject to duty, while Brancusi insisted that it was a work of art. As such, it did not have to be taxed. The court hearings repeatedly revolved around the question of what was art and what was not.
"The question of what art is made of and what it does to us runs through all my books," Dana Grigorcea told the Keystone-SDA news agency when asked how she came up with the subject of her new book. "But here I have succeeded in showing that art transcends times and places and genders. That was very important to me in a time of attributions."
The second main character in the novel is Dora Marcu, a contemporary author who is writing Constantin Avis' biography in a hotel on the Ligurian coast and is increasingly merging with him. Her son Loris and the nanny Macedonia, who keeps Dora free to write, have traveled to Italy with her.
Autofictional novel
Dana Grigorcea delves deeper into the subject of motherhood for female artists in the framing narrative of her new novel. She, who has two children of her own, can probably well understand the writer Dora's guilty conscience in the face of her son being cared for by others. "Is Dora a bad mother?" asks Grigorcea. "I'm looking forward to the answers from my empathetic readers."
In Simone Meier's recently published novel "Die Entflammten" (The Inflamed), a posthumous woman - the student Gina - also identifies with a historical figure she is supposed to write about. It is Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who made her brother-in-law Vincent van Gogh famous after his suicide. Just as Dora is traveling with Constatin in the New York of the Golden Twenties, Gina immerses herself with Jo in the Parisian art world around 1900. Gina doesn't have a son to stop her from writing, but she does have a father who once published an award-winning book and thus inhibits her own writing.
Both books thus have a second, more or less explicit level within the framework: the self-reflection of the writing artists Grigorcea and Meier. Overall, this results in an interesting but also complicated construct. In the case of the one, it holds in a miraculous, almost weightless way, while in the case of the other it collapses again and again.
Voice flight and crash
What bad luck! The gallery owner who wanted to bring Constantin Avis to the public died shortly before his arrival. This story, which brings the artist into existential hardship and turns him into a commissioned craftsman, is surprisingly light-hearted, as is so often the case with Dana Grigorcea's texts. The language of the Zurich-based cosmopolitan has a dance-like quality, and what, if not flying, can dance be compared to? The motif of dance also crops up again and again prominently in the plot and in the story of Avis.
Simone Meier's text, on the other hand, is rather ponderous. Although the art historian underpins the plot of her novel "Die Entflammten" with a great deal of expertise, she repeatedly sabotages herself with linguistic lapses that break from the casual present day into the historical milieu. For example, when Gina imagines herself to be Jo, who has to climb up to Montmartre in Paris in the midsummer heat in a tightly laced corset with groceries, to the apartment where "blowflies and fruit gnats pounce on me to greet me, on this steaming, increasingly strong-smelling pile of flesh." Or when, in the evening, "the sun dripping into the sea causes carnage on both sides of the horizon." This is gimmickry and takes away any desire to follow the abrupt jumps in time from one main character to another.*
*This text by Tina Uhlmann, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation
©Keystone/SDA
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