Scan barcode
chorleychalk's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
1dablom's review
5.0
though it strayed from reality, i highly enjoyed its poetic prose and eccentric characters
caropi's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
chocolatelady1957's review
3.0
This is a very uniquely told story of the photographer Vivian Maier, a woman who was prolific, and yet mostly unknown. My review of this novel is on my blog here https://tcl-bookreviews.com/2019/08/09/hiding-her-time/
silkm0ths's review
3.0
interesting if a bit strange but ethically questionable. as Vivian was a real person and its a bit bad to make up someone life, especially if they weren't really like the character depicted.
quadruploni's review
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I would recommend *not* seeing the excellent documentary Finding Vivian Maier until after you have read the book. Already knowing as much as I did, and having so many images in mind, somewhat ruined for me the novel's attempt to recreate the subjects life and work in words.
arirang's review
3.0
Viv:
How much of the person behind the camera can be seen in the works? Is one hidden behind them or on the contrary do they unveil you? I think they do. The narrator is the real main character
Narrator
I can only agree with you.
Viv:
Hvor meget af mennesket bag man kan se i værkerne. Er man skjult bag dem eller afslører de tværtimod én? Det tror jeg de gør. Fortælleren er den egentlige hovedperson.
Fortælleren:
Det kan jeg kun give dig ret i.
Vivian, by Christina Hesselholdt and translated by Paul Russell Garrett is a fictionalised recreation of the French-American street photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009), who worked as a nanny for a number of Chicago families. Her works were unknown and unseen (even, in their printed form, by herself) in her lifetime, with over 100,000 undeveloped negatives, placed in a storage facility. These were sold as a job lot in 2007 in an auction when she failed to keep up the rental payments (although the boxes of her possessions also included various uncashed cheques which would have more than covered the storage rental costs), and subsequently sold on in auctions to some collectors. By the time the significance of her work was first appreciated - in 2009-10 - Maier had died. Relatively little is known of her life - indeed, the only internet result when the collectors who had bought her work first tried to research her, was her brief obituary.
(the dispersal of the collection of negatives to collectors, from [b:Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife|34227425|Vivian Maier A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife|Pamela Bannos|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1500675111s/34227425.jpg|55281177])
After completing her quarter of 'Camilla' novellas, published in one volume in English as Companions (my review), Hesselholdt was considering writing a 5th when, as she explained in this interview, she watched the Oscar nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier, co-produced by John Maloof, one of the collectors who first bought her work and has since made it his life's work to champion it.
I would recommend watching the documentary, generally but also to appreciate this book and what is fictionalised and what based on her real history, as well as the 'rival' documentary produced by the BBC, Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny's Pictures (available here http://editorium.co.uk/imagine-vivian-maier-who-took-nannys-pictures/).
Hesselholdt decided that Maier, for whom a conventional biography would be difficult given the limited information particularly as to her motivations, was an ideal subject instead for a fictional treatment. She uses a similar narrative style to Companions, of a chorus of voices, speaking in brief paragraphs, the main characters being:
- the eponymous photographer - who goes (as she did in real-life) by a number of names, mainly here Viv, but also V Smith, Vivian, Vivienne, Miss Maier etc;
- one of her employers (fictional), the couple Peter and Sarah Rice and their daughter, Ellen, Vivian's charge;
- Vivian's mother Maria;
- the Narrator (male) who is a character in his own right: (It is my task to find plausible explanations, motives, reasons, it is my excuse to exist.), intruding into the text, discussing matters with Vivian, and also commenting on the difficulty of writing his book while the historic record about Vivian (both archival investigations into her family and the development of her photographs) are still in progress: This is a curious task I'm in the middle of - the material that inspires my story is in constant development.
We also here from Vivian's maternal aunt, Alma, Sarah's psychologist (fictional), Jeanne Bertrand, a portrait photographer who is known to have lived with Maria and Vivian (and who we assume is most likely to have taught Vivian Maier photography, although there is no direct evidence to substantiate this), another fictionalised employer Mr & Mrs Marsh, and Marcel Jaussaud, a relative from Maria's French home village.
The Rices are a fictionalised version of various families and children that the real-life Maier worked with in the past as the Narrator explains towards the end of the novel:
Witness accounts from the many families she worked for are very similar, so I decided to only tell of (and that is to invent) her stay with one of them, namely the Rices (a name made up by me) in Wilmette, Chicago.
although I noted that many of the anecdotes are taken from the testimony of one particular ward of Maier's, Inger Raymond (whose family she lived with from 1967-1974), the only person who agreed to appear in both of the documentaries. The assertion that the witness accounts 'are very similar' is also at odds with the evidence of the two documentaries - some of the children/families regarding Maier as having a rather darker-side than the Mary Poppins like accounts of others: see this article in The Guardian).
Hesselholdt's treatment of Maier seems well done. She sticks to the relatively few known facts, at times, as the Narrator himself admits, perhaps a little too closely:
I'm not really fond of documentaries with dramatised scenes, ie a fact is related and some actors subsequently perform a scene that illuminates what the narrator has just related. In dark moments I think that I may have strayed into this horrible genre.
(this perhaps also a justified dig at the Maloof documentary which, in its early scenes, does fall into exactly this trap - we have to see Maloof pretending to bid at an auction for example)
but then adds her own fictionalised gloss on Maier's troubled family history (as the narrator concludes, is it any wonder she wanted to keep it a secret) and her motivations.
There are a number of controversies, explored in the BBC documentary but not here, around the treatment of Maier's work after death: whether someone so private would have wanted this level of posthumous fame, and the fact that the photographs have been developed, selected and edited by others, not the artist. Another surrounds the legal rights to her work (see e.g. this article): indeed the author of the definitive biography of Maier that has been written - [b:Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife|34227425|Vivian Maier A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife|Pamela Bannos|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1500675111s/34227425.jpg|55281177] - has used her research to support claims by Maier's distant family and potential heirs against the collectors who first publicised her work but now sell prints for relatively high prices (see this by said author in The Paris Review).
That, I suspect, explains the lack of reproductions of the photographs in this work, which is a shame: Hesselholdt obviously has particular photos in mind, as her Narrator imagines how they may have came to be taken, but without the photo itself, the impact is rather diminished (the one or two I recognised - such as a stunning picture of some rabbits - certainly resonated more strongly).
A less understandable decision for me was Hesselholdt including some, I think, entirely fictional detail of the lives of Mr & Mrs Rice, including giving Sarah a half-Danish background: this seemed rather irrelevant to the Vivian story and somewhat unnecessary.
Overall - a difficult book to rate. I certainly enjoyed finding out about the fascinating Vivian Maier, and her exceptional photography, but while the novel prompted me to do so, much of that discovery wasn't really through the pages of the novel. 3 stars.
How much of the person behind the camera can be seen in the works? Is one hidden behind them or on the contrary do they unveil you? I think they do. The narrator is the real main character
Narrator
I can only agree with you.
Viv:
Hvor meget af mennesket bag man kan se i værkerne. Er man skjult bag dem eller afslører de tværtimod én? Det tror jeg de gør. Fortælleren er den egentlige hovedperson.
Fortælleren:
Det kan jeg kun give dig ret i.
Vivian, by Christina Hesselholdt and translated by Paul Russell Garrett is a fictionalised recreation of the French-American street photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009), who worked as a nanny for a number of Chicago families. Her works were unknown and unseen (even, in their printed form, by herself) in her lifetime, with over 100,000 undeveloped negatives, placed in a storage facility. These were sold as a job lot in 2007 in an auction when she failed to keep up the rental payments (although the boxes of her possessions also included various uncashed cheques which would have more than covered the storage rental costs), and subsequently sold on in auctions to some collectors. By the time the significance of her work was first appreciated - in 2009-10 - Maier had died. Relatively little is known of her life - indeed, the only internet result when the collectors who had bought her work first tried to research her, was her brief obituary.
(the dispersal of the collection of negatives to collectors, from [b:Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife|34227425|Vivian Maier A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife|Pamela Bannos|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1500675111s/34227425.jpg|55281177])
After completing her quarter of 'Camilla' novellas, published in one volume in English as Companions (my review), Hesselholdt was considering writing a 5th when, as she explained in this interview, she watched the Oscar nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier, co-produced by John Maloof, one of the collectors who first bought her work and has since made it his life's work to champion it.
I would recommend watching the documentary, generally but also to appreciate this book and what is fictionalised and what based on her real history, as well as the 'rival' documentary produced by the BBC, Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny's Pictures (available here http://editorium.co.uk/imagine-vivian-maier-who-took-nannys-pictures/).
Hesselholdt decided that Maier, for whom a conventional biography would be difficult given the limited information particularly as to her motivations, was an ideal subject instead for a fictional treatment. She uses a similar narrative style to Companions, of a chorus of voices, speaking in brief paragraphs, the main characters being:
- the eponymous photographer - who goes (as she did in real-life) by a number of names, mainly here Viv, but also V Smith, Vivian, Vivienne, Miss Maier etc;
- one of her employers (fictional), the couple Peter and Sarah Rice and their daughter, Ellen, Vivian's charge;
- Vivian's mother Maria;
- the Narrator (male) who is a character in his own right: (It is my task to find plausible explanations, motives, reasons, it is my excuse to exist.), intruding into the text, discussing matters with Vivian, and also commenting on the difficulty of writing his book while the historic record about Vivian (both archival investigations into her family and the development of her photographs) are still in progress: This is a curious task I'm in the middle of - the material that inspires my story is in constant development.
We also here from Vivian's maternal aunt, Alma, Sarah's psychologist (fictional), Jeanne Bertrand, a portrait photographer who is known to have lived with Maria and Vivian (and who we assume is most likely to have taught Vivian Maier photography, although there is no direct evidence to substantiate this), another fictionalised employer Mr & Mrs Marsh, and Marcel Jaussaud, a relative from Maria's French home village.
The Rices are a fictionalised version of various families and children that the real-life Maier worked with in the past as the Narrator explains towards the end of the novel:
Witness accounts from the many families she worked for are very similar, so I decided to only tell of (and that is to invent) her stay with one of them, namely the Rices (a name made up by me) in Wilmette, Chicago.
although I noted that many of the anecdotes are taken from the testimony of one particular ward of Maier's, Inger Raymond (whose family she lived with from 1967-1974), the only person who agreed to appear in both of the documentaries. The assertion that the witness accounts 'are very similar' is also at odds with the evidence of the two documentaries - some of the children/families regarding Maier as having a rather darker-side than the Mary Poppins like accounts of others: see this article in The Guardian).
Hesselholdt's treatment of Maier seems well done. She sticks to the relatively few known facts, at times, as the Narrator himself admits, perhaps a little too closely:
I'm not really fond of documentaries with dramatised scenes, ie a fact is related and some actors subsequently perform a scene that illuminates what the narrator has just related. In dark moments I think that I may have strayed into this horrible genre.
(this perhaps also a justified dig at the Maloof documentary which, in its early scenes, does fall into exactly this trap - we have to see Maloof pretending to bid at an auction for example)
but then adds her own fictionalised gloss on Maier's troubled family history (as the narrator concludes, is it any wonder she wanted to keep it a secret) and her motivations.
There are a number of controversies, explored in the BBC documentary but not here, around the treatment of Maier's work after death: whether someone so private would have wanted this level of posthumous fame, and the fact that the photographs have been developed, selected and edited by others, not the artist. Another surrounds the legal rights to her work (see e.g. this article): indeed the author of the definitive biography of Maier that has been written - [b:Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife|34227425|Vivian Maier A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife|Pamela Bannos|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1500675111s/34227425.jpg|55281177] - has used her research to support claims by Maier's distant family and potential heirs against the collectors who first publicised her work but now sell prints for relatively high prices (see this by said author in The Paris Review).
That, I suspect, explains the lack of reproductions of the photographs in this work, which is a shame: Hesselholdt obviously has particular photos in mind, as her Narrator imagines how they may have came to be taken, but without the photo itself, the impact is rather diminished (the one or two I recognised - such as a stunning picture of some rabbits - certainly resonated more strongly).
A less understandable decision for me was Hesselholdt including some, I think, entirely fictional detail of the lives of Mr & Mrs Rice, including giving Sarah a half-Danish background: this seemed rather irrelevant to the Vivian story and somewhat unnecessary.
Overall - a difficult book to rate. I certainly enjoyed finding out about the fascinating Vivian Maier, and her exceptional photography, but while the novel prompted me to do so, much of that discovery wasn't really through the pages of the novel. 3 stars.
leda's review
4.0
In this intriguing and inventive novel, Christina Hesselholdt reimagines the life of the eccentric photographer Vivian Maier. A multi-layered narrative in which a plurality of voices emerges to create a polyphonic whole.
More...