By Morris Dean
The French painter and photographer Hugues de Montalembert's second book, Invisible: A Memoir (2010), could serve as a meditation reader. It quiets you with numerous arresting insights purchased with great pain and effort by the author over the thirty years that had followed the loss of his eyesight (and his very eyes) in an attack by burglars in his New York City apartment in 1978.
It's a small book (almost 130 5"x7" pages) of many short chapters of narrative and reflection, with brief present-tense snippets thrown in and set in a distinctive sanserif typeface and printed in blue ink (to match the endpapers). I've included three scan images to show you this gentle book and let you sample its prose. [Click each to enlarge.]
De Montalembert talks about writing this book, whose title he doesn't mention, on pp. 68-69 of Invisible:
I went to Bali. Years ago I had lived there. I absolutely love the place....Perhaps the central lesson of Invisible appears in the center of the book [p. 63]:
And on top of everything, I was bankrupt, so I decided to write a book....
I wrote the book and I thought life was perfectly okay.
It's very important for me to be able to travel alone without seeing...
What matters is to not be submissive, not to be negative, not to be beaten no matter what happens, to always find inside yourself the way out.
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
| Please comment |
Morris, thank you for the review of this book. It seems greatly intriguing at many levels. The author's comments on making a comeback from his own situation seem like they could be relevant for people recovering from any major mishap. There is an old saying about jumping and building your wings on the way down, but the author's leap to Indonesia was bravery far beyond the norm.
ReplyDeletePaul, your own comeback—from the nearly fatal allergic reaction to a medication—of course has its exactly similar relevance for people who need to recover.
DeleteWhile I have never thought of myself as having undergone a "major mishap," I suppose that I actually have...and perhaps more than one: The fall into "chronic fatigue syndrome" that was heralded by my going to sleep driving at speed on an interstate highway in 1990...my literal, hard fall onto my butt on an icy step in January 1996, shaking a hidden brain tumor into hemorrhage...perhaps even my realization that the God I had stalked for decades wasn't there....
And, come to that, what about my dropping out of graduate school at the end of 1965? Until that moment, I thought I was headed towards a life of scholarship and teaching. Dropping out was a fairly big "mishap" in my life's unfolding. And maybe my consequent lurch into "corporate life" at IBM was an even bigger mishap....
All of which brings me back to my sense that de Montalembert's book could be relevant to almost everyone. We're all recovering from the mishap of having been born and needing to come to grips with our situation—and the many challenging situations we encounter....
By the way, your reference to de Montalembert's "leap to Indonesia" reminded me that there's a passage in Invisible about writing his earlier book, and I have now added an excerpt from that passage to the review.