Three for three, bravo. Three very different and profoundly excellent books from an immensely talented author and I love each one more. This one is a biography, of sorts. A life told through the perspectives of others, a singularly interesting life of a movie director, who seems to have made movies in a desperate bid to understand life itself.
First off, it takes guts to rest an entire novel on a protagonist as complicated and emotionally distant as Sophie Stark. And even more so, to rest an entire novel on a protagonist who is only presented through the perspectives of others. North does this, because she can and does it spectacularly well. You may not like Sophie Stark, you may actively dislike her even, but you’ll be completely drawn into this retrospective of her life, done by people who loved her as much as they were able to and knew her as much as it was possible. Stark is something of an unknowable character, some of it deliberately so, some of it simply because she doesn’t know herself all that much. In fact, her passion for moviemaking is born out of the very desire to understand, relate, fit in. To paraphrase one of her movie’s reviews, Stark is like an alien who has made it her life’s work to figure out this strange planet and its inhabitants. There’s a distance between her and the rest of the world and her efforts to span it are informed by a certain deliberate manipulative calculation that often finds Sophie exploiting people around her for stories. It would seem almost evil had it not been so sincerely motivated. It ends up immoral by conventional standards, but then again Sophie Stark operates on an entirely different morality plane. To this extent, she uses men and women in her life, who end up loving her and, maybe, in a way using her too…the nature of relationships being a symbiotic mess that it is. Whatever talent she possesses springs from her flawed personality, she needs a personal connection to bring the stories to life, she’s sort of like an emotional vampire that way, something that serves her so well for a while and in the end lets her down so drastically. Sophie can be odd, off putting, brutal, charming, loving, kind…she is a walking talking paradox of a person, though, tragically, one thoroughly unsuitable to this place of existence. Which is why in the end, for all her faults, her death still devastates. Although the manner in which she leaves the world is poetically perfect and all too apt. Not the easier protagonist to love or even know, not the easiest novel to love, maybe, but such a gorgeous poignant meditation on the nature of social connections and love and emotional responsibility that…how can you not love it. There’s a line a movie produces feeds a starlet in the novel, something about how she brought a two dimensional role to 3D. Well, North goes further, she brings her characters to life, as much of a life as characters can have in readers’ minds, so that a novel about movies can play like a movie at the drive in of your brainpan. It’s a thing of beauty. Which is a longwinded way of telling you just how much I love her writing. Not one of her three books I’ve read so far were alike in any way aside from terrific writing and great female protagonists. There’s much to be said for that level of quality consistency. And this was an absolutely awesome book, like its cactus of a protagonist…memorable, fascinating, mesmerizing. And this isn’t merely my love of movies and moviemaking talking, this is the real deal. Read this book, it’ll take you away. Recommended.
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