|
Monday, August 21, 2006 Zzzzz The Mirror: A History by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet. I really wanted to like this book--there's a lot of potential for the subject of mirrors to be really interesting. Instead, it nearly put me to sleep. I don't know how the writing style in the original French is like, but the translator's style is just a zonker. The book is divided into three parts: how the mirror was invented and spread in society, how the mirror was portrayed in the arts, and the psychological significance of the mirror. I will say that I was interested in the first part of the book--the technological advancements made with the mirror. Making reflective glass just so is no easy matter and mirrors remained fairly expensive until the late 18th and 19th centuries when a series of innovations made mirrors cheaply produced at the factory. My favorite part was at the beginning of Chapter 2 when Melchior-Bonnet recounts a tale of espionage and murder at the Royal Glass and Mirror Company in 17th century France. At the time, Venice had the monopoly on fine quality mirrors yet every other country wanted a part of the market share. So there was plenty of double-dealing, political maneuverings, mayhem, and underhandedness to satisfy thriller-geeks. But after that, it was all downhill. The basic question the latter two-thirds of the book wanted to answer was, "What is the meaning of the mirror?" Artists and painters and writers all had different ideas--for some, it was humanity's narcissism. For others it was morality. And yet others, mortality. I think one can always wring meaning out of a reflection, but when the author tacks on the subtitle A History to a text, she should not go haring off to the po-mo hinterlands trying to explicate every painting in the Louvre that has a mirror. I will admit, however, that I'm not really the intended audience for this book. I like to find out how things work--this is probably why I liked the first third of the book which was a bit more technically oriented. But when it comes to explaining the symbolism of things--oh, boy--do I shake my head. To me, explaining art is mostly BS. It's making things up (with citations to other people making things up to make it look legitimate)--and what means one thing to one person may mean something completely different to another. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 8:30 PM : ]
Comments:
This reminds me of a wonderful fiction book that I read years ago, The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser. In fact, I read it several times; it really resonated with me.
That's an interesting recommendation--I usually try to stay away from time travel and body switching, two plot devices that are a little too weird, even for me.
Well, I read the Finnish translation and that was pretty awful as well. The first part was good, but the rest of it... blech.
Post a Comment
Links to this post: |
