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A review by moonpix
Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson
4.0
There are many true stories in art history that would make incredibly compelling novels, and Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s might be at the top of that list. While the form of this novel doesn't replicate the real life boundary and narrative breaking art it is inspired by, I can still appreciate it for what it is: a straightforward fictionalization of the lives of two singular artists.
In many ways it reads like an upper-class version of My Brilliant Friend. But it suffers in comparison; I couldn’t help but miss Ferrante’s detailed and nuanced prose. In contrast, Thomson’s writing is simultaneously very elegant and very inelegant, oscillating between clear, beautiful sentences and awkward name drops. The dynamics of the character’s artistic and romantic collaboration is fascinating, but it is often flattened in the telling. The narration allows art, feminism, and psychology to be expressed in such a dry manner that at times it felt like I was reading a paper written by an undergraduate. The section on their imprisonment was when these problems were least apparent, perhaps because the setting was finally as sparse and as extreme as the prose.
Those complaints aside, I still found it absorbing and memorable, and hope to find more novels like it in the future.
In many ways it reads like an upper-class version of My Brilliant Friend. But it suffers in comparison; I couldn’t help but miss Ferrante’s detailed and nuanced prose. In contrast, Thomson’s writing is simultaneously very elegant and very inelegant, oscillating between clear, beautiful sentences and awkward name drops. The dynamics of the character’s artistic and romantic collaboration is fascinating, but it is often flattened in the telling. The narration allows art, feminism, and psychology to be expressed in such a dry manner that at times it felt like I was reading a paper written by an undergraduate. The section on their imprisonment was when these problems were least apparent, perhaps because the setting was finally as sparse and as extreme as the prose.
Those complaints aside, I still found it absorbing and memorable, and hope to find more novels like it in the future.