Fairlight Books

Blue Postcards – Douglas Bruton (2021) 151 pages

Earlier in the month I read With or Without Angels and I’d thought I might save Blue Postcards by the same author until the end of May, but in the end I couldn’t wait 😊Especially as Simon read this as part of his #BookADayInMay and loved it. You can read his review here.

Having now read three of Douglas Bruton’s books the word that comes up for me is tender. His writing is so gentle and subtle, entirely without sentiment but so careful in its construction and treatment of his characters. His tenderness is not a way to turn away from difficult feelings or events, but rather a way to look at them clearly and compassionately.

Blue Postcards is made up of 500 numbered paragraphs/postcards, split into five sections of 100. Almost all of them contain the word ‘blue’ (I recognised one which didn’t, there may be more). If this sounds overly contrived, it really isn’t. As you read, it flows easily and the various story threads are woven together seamlessly.

The contemporary thread involves a man who buys a blue postcard from a stall near the Eiffel Tower. The postcard is by Yves Klein, the French artist who created International Klein Blue. It is addressed to his tailor Henri, and they form the threads in the 1950s.

The narrator of the contemporary thread describes himself as ‘old’. He is aware that as he ages, his eyes perceive yellow and blue differently:

“31. Sometimes I wonder if going back to Nice I would find the sky so blue or if the blue that I found there back in 1981 had something to do with being young or something to do with memory.”

He begins a tentative relationship with Michelle, who sold him the card. Or perhaps not; he is an unreliable narrator and a theme of the book is truth, lies, fiction, and the fallibility of memory.

Henri the tailor sews blue Tekhelet threads secretly into all his suits, to bring his patrons luck.

“109. […] When I am talking about Henri I hope it is understood that we are in his time and not really in our time. If this was a film we might see Henri through a blue filter to show that his time is different.”

Yves Klein is building international success and needs a suit to look the part:

“184. Henri stands in front of the mirror next to Yves Klein in his tacked and pinned-together new suit. ‘You have to imagine it finished and pressed as sharp as knives and not a loose thread anywhere to be seen.’ Henri holds onto the sleeve of the jacket and his blue dream is briefly real.”

The postcards move back and for the between the timelines but this is never confusing or disorienting. There is a reflective, almost melancholic (blue?) tone running through both. They explore the transitory; how our experiences are constantly shifting as we rewrite the past from a changing present and our changing understanding.

The tone is lightened by the Yves Klein strand; his self-promotion and blatant lies therein are audacious, and even breathtaking with his Leap Into the Void.

There is also tragedy that we know exists in Henri’s past. A Jewish man in 1950s France is going to have unspeakable recent memories. The theme of grief runs across the timelines, both for those who have died and for what can never be regained.

I’ve not done any justice to this novella at all. It is so rich in themes and style, and yet so approachable and readable. I can only urge you to read it for yourself!

“267. I do not think a stone can be said to belong to a person. I tell her about the stone and how I picked it up out of a river and it was blue until it dried and then it was only blue in possibility. I tell her that I like that most especially, that blue can be something that adheres in a thing and at the same time can be something hidden. I do not tell her that I think love is something the same.”

To end, the author reading from his work:

With or Without Angels – Douglas Bruton (2023) 107 pages

Having loved Hope Never Knew Horizon by Douglas Bruton when I read it in February for #ReadIndies, I was keen to try more by him. With or Without Angels is an intriguing novella, attempting to capture the process of creating art at the end of life.

Written in the third person but mainly from the point of view of “the old artist”, Bruton portrays Alan Smith’s memories and thoughts as he works on his final piece, The New World, which was a response to Giandomenico Tieplo’s Il Mondo Nuovo. (In the Afterword Bruton explains that Alan’s widow had read the novella and she encouraged publication, with permission for the art to be reproduced.)

The New World is a series of images and they are reproduced in the book, after the fictional prose passages which evoke the creation of them. So for the first one, a photograph taken on a trip to Tate Modern:

“Out on the street the air was wet and chill and shifting. It smelled of bus exhausts and damp wool and faintly of cigarettes. And his wife it smelled of, too. Something with flowers in her perfume. Patchouli maybe – a shrub of the mint family – something of wet soil or apples that are past ripe, the smell of a cork pulled from a bottle of strong red wine. It’s the last of the senses to go, smell. He had heard that somewhere and was comforted that when all else failed he would know his wife was at his side by her smell.”

The smell of patchouli is something that is returned to at different sections along with other recurring motifs. This was so clever; it evoked the layering of memory and movement back and forth in time as someone contemplates the past from a present where they know their future is limited. (Also, a special thank you to the woman who stood next to me on the tube and was wearing patchouli as I read this 😊)

Time collapses in on itself at various points for the artist, disorienting but without him losing sight of his work.

“Some things are so familiar that you expect them to be there even when they are not and cannot be. The blue hat had been eaten into holes by moths. But he is sure that he has seen it hanging on the last hook in the hall as recently as a week ago.”

Bruton never attempts to interpret the work or lay claim to an absolute meaning in The New World. He is too subtle for that, and part of what With or Without Angels explores is that there are no final answers to be gleaned from a work of art.

“It’s not that he fears the questions. He wants them to be asked. That’s part of the point. It’s the answers that he frets over. He has come to a time in his life where the answers are like Brighton’s running pebbles under his feet.”

There’s also no sentimentality in the artist nearing the end of his life. Instead it is a gentle, tender, compassionate portrait.

“The thing she did with her hair […] and how he felt when he saw her do that, somehow there was meaning and hope and love in that. The old artist does not tell anyone this, not even his wife, but maybe she knows.”

With or Without Angels captures so much in so few pages. It is a remarkable work which manages to explore enormous themes with such a light touch, without ever seeming superficial.

The New World link at the start of this post will take you to Alan Smith talking about the work.