A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar (2019)

 This is a meditative book, of a time when the author was between another book and this one, and took some time out after an incredibly confronting period trying to discover what had happened to his dissident father in the Libya of Qaddafi. It was apparently a fruitless search, and must have been a horrifying and dislocating time. I haven't read the book which covers it, and perhaps should. Because this one feels very thin, and in places mistaken, and I'm sure that it doesn't show the author at his best. 'Holiday' pieces can be very re-fecundating for an author, and as well enriching for the reader - here is our premise. He has had a long-term fascination for the city of Siena, and the special expression in artistic terms to which it lends its name. So it is with a feeling of the possibility of healing that he decides finally to go to Siena and experience it for real. And to sit in front of some of the key works of the Sienese school in the galleries of the city. He says that he has done this before, where these works are owned in other galleries around the world, whenever he can get the opportunity. And he says what turns out to be an odd thing: that he sits in front of them for inordinate amounts of time, coming back day after day and contemplating stilly for hours. The part of this book that feels as though it's at its best is where he wanders Siena, and allows it to sink into his consciousness, meets a few people, starts a course to learn Italian properly, rather than family-inherited Italian-colonial Libyan usage. The specialness of the city comes out, seems to come naturally. Walks in lots of directions, eventually finding the walls, and the strict demarcation with the surrounding countryside. A cemetery, which brings up thoughts that link back to his father, and a visit to fellow Muslims of a welcoming family. This material is coolly brought out, and finds its mark, the gong of recognition sounding, if fairly mutedly. But the other main strain of this book is the analysis of the art, and here we meet trouble. The issue is with accuracy - exactly how supportable do one's assertions about what an artwork means have to be? Is it a matter of 'this is what it means to me' and that's it? If, in so doing, you assert that something looks like something, gives an impression of something, do you need to be able to show what in the artwork achieves that? I'd guess there are a few modes of thought about this, including one which says that anyone contesting in the way I am is requiring exactitude where it can't be. And a slightly more relaxed opposition, Neil-voiced and hippie-ish, consisting of objections of 'bringing imaginative freedom down'. The first concerns come in early on, when he talks about various characters in Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good Government, and what their facial expressions mean. When most of these have, very much in the style of their times, extremely similar and not especially lively facial expressions, because their purpose sat at a long distance from that aim, this raises a qualm, which then reverberates as he looks at other works. But the apogee of invention comes with a discussion near the end of the book of another Lorenzetti (it's by no means reserved for this painter), Madonna del latte. He calls it outrageous and unsettling - those are not the first words which come to mind, to put it mildly. Her face is quite impassive - he calls it cunning and questioning. He calls her roped veil restricting and therefore tension-creating - it's just coiled to keep its end out of the way. A hand cradling the child's buttock is firmly splayed to support the weight of the child - he calls it doubtful. The artist's representation of the (this time) evenly splayed fingers of the other hand cradling the child are likened to the bars of an iron cage. The picturing of the boy's eyebrow is called sardonic, when it is simply curved. The child's ear being half hidden by the surrounding blanket becomes an invitation to think about certain things being hidden from the child by the mother. We are asked to think about the child "wondering what it is exactly that he is earning from us: admiration or envy" - a question which pretty well could not come up without the extraordinary coinage of the author's 'exposition'. This suppositiousness leads to the following astounding sentence: "Like any child caught in public with his mother, he is concerned about his image". Something needs outlining here - that it isn't just "this is what it means to me" and that's it. If claims are made about an artwork, they need at least to have a sense of viability, and particularly not to lead to further inaccurate thinking on the part of others, if they are made public. Think what you like privately, in response to the vagaries of your own inner world - Madonna del latte is actually about flying elephants, and the extraordinary pink-and-yellow-stripedness of the sea, if you want, just for you. But, in the meantime, in the real world, the real painting is there on a wall, not being that, to all extents and purposes. Recognizing this is not a restriction - it's a means to a freedom. And the more subtle and viable your responses, if you are sensitive and write about them, the more they may help to illuminate the work for others. It is this claim of sensitivity which ultimately disturbs me most: he sits in front of these paintings for hours. Is it that he needs to, because analysing these pieces is hard work for him? They don't come naturally? Or is it that he is unusually sensitive, to the extent that he looks "too much", and begins to enthusiastically invent things that aren't there? You would wish him wariness, and self-examining moderation, if so. And if the former, you would want him to give it up as a bad job - it's not his forte.