A list through the looking glass of a playful writer
ÒNU·N\
Les Fugitives, £12
Reviewed by Madeleine Kingsley
YOU COULD describe the selfie as a crude phenomenon of popular culture. Peacock poses, mostly photo-shopped to iron out online imperfections, bespeak neither artistry nor refinement. But Sylvie Weil’s Selfies redefines the genre in 13 playful and plangent chapters that capture key moments in her life.
Adding depth and complexity to her oeuvre, Weil opens each chapter with a reflection on the particular self-portrait by another woman artist that inspired her own vignette. Gwen John’s Self Portrait with Letter, for example, shows John clasping a folded letter, perhaps one of the thousands of missives she wrote to Rodin with whom she was obsessed. Weil herself recalls
the enchantment of a postcard from an over-the-top American lover who declared the two of them engaged after a three day romance. He begs her to visit him in New York where, just in time, she perceives that he’s not just emotionally effusive but promiscuously so. Judith Leyster’s 17th-century “selfie” shows the artist at her easel, painting the portrait of a jolly violin player. Putting herself in the frame was Leyster’s calling card, a business and PR ploy ahead of its time. Weil is thus reminded of her own rather bleak book-signing, where she received much back-handed admiration from fans who loved her work and were certainly going to borrow the book from a friend, or pass a single copy round an entire family . Thank you, but no need to buy or request an autograph. Don’t expect a single illustration to punctuate Weil’s wry, stylish pages: the daughter of mathematician Andre, and niece of philosopher Simone, paints her self-portraits sans brush and with the finest prose precision. If her challenge to herself was to make the verbal visual, she’s met it magically.
Weil writes with a Gallic shrug, translated into English with vrai sensitivity by Ros Schwartz. You will love the handsome, but camera-shy dog Lucky, whose endearing neuroses convince Weil he must be Jewish.
Her friends, Lucky’s owners, having virtually come over on the Mayflower, don’t believe in Jewish dogs. They grow conscience–stricken over the money (better spent feeding starving children) deployed at the vets as Lucky requires repeated surgery for eating toy dinosaurs and shuttlecocks.
One plastic duck too many and Lucky’s name no longer fits. The unspoken conclusion is that he was a Jewish dog indeed.
Frida Kahlo’s Tree of Hope depicts the iconic Mexican, once with bleeding wounds from recent back surgery, and a second time dressed festively but holding an orthopaedic corset with a tear on her cheek.
Weil’s matching selfie seems to be set on a sunny beach, where perfect bodies expose pretty tattoos: bees, snakes. It becomes a poignant meditation on her cancer, on the three tattooed dots around her abdominal scar and a dialogue with her oncologist (well versed in the Mishnah), about the Jewish ethics of body art.
In a lighter memory, Weil describes taking photos of her married son on the sly, at an al fresco family lunch. She is not a happy mother-in-law. Elsewhere in the book she must confront her son’s pyschoses but, for now, she has his pictures to treasure. “These images are my spoils,” she says, “the fruits of a hard-fought campaign.”
It is a reflection that could sum up selfies altogether: the fruits are choice and very fresh.
She and her oncologist discuss the Jewish ethics of tattooing
Madeleine KIngsley is a freelance writer