Rating: 5/5
Review:
Excellent
I thought this was an excellent book – readable, gripping,
extremely well written and very perceptive. I was persuaded by the good reviews, but I
wasn't keen from the description – the life of a fictitious, oddly-behaved
filmmaker told through the personal stories of a variety of different people
who knew her has the potential to be pretentious nonsense if done badly, but
this is done brilliantly and works excellently.
The story itself is pretty simple and contained within the
title: a slightly odd, geeky girl goes from making strange but compelling
home-made shorts to becoming a cult director before dying young. Two aspects of this make it special, I
think. The first is the character study
of Sophie herself: a character who sees people remarkably clearly, listens
intently and elicits the truth of their stories in a way few others can. However, has little idea of how to actually
relate to anyone and who has no compunction about putting what she has learned
into her films with no regard for the pain and damage it may cause. It's a beautifully painted, subtle character
study which I found quite riveting.
The second aspect is the narrative voices, which are quite
exceptionally well done. I found them
all completely convincing in their different ways. Anna North has the ability to capture things
in a neat, brilliant sentence. As
examples, a teenage boy says of a girl, "She had a sad edge to her voice
which made me like her hair even more," which is a great evocation of what
goes on in an adolescent's head. Or
later, another character says, "And when people ask me why I married her
that September, even though I'd only known her for three months and knew it
wouldn't last, I tell them that life is a heavy burden and imagine if someone
just carried it for you for a while, just picked it up and carried
it." I made a note of lots of these
gems as I was reading, of which these are just a couple. It's like a brilliant artist who can capture
a subject perfectly with just a few strokes of a pencil or brush and I found
the whole thing a pleasure to read. (And
the brief writings of the maturing film critic as they develop, interpolated
throughout the book, are also terrifically well done.)
If you want a strong plot, or even thoroughly likeable
characters then you probably won't find this to your liking. These are engaging, human and flawed people,
struggling with life's difficulties like the rest of us – and they're
beautifully portrayed. Personally, though,
I thought this was utterly gripping and exceptionally good. I can recommend it
very warmly.
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