Customer Comments

Here's a book, a big fat one, that took me back to Dorris Lessings' The Golden Notebook. Both are feminist tragedies, with strong minded protagonists reacting to a world in which women and other social outliers are to walk the narrow channels, do just the allowed work, speak only the appropriate words. The artist Harriet Burden instead wants to burst through the restrictions and blaze. But her great intelligence does her a disservice. She decides to create work under the names of three living male artists. These men are to temporarily take credit, receive lauds, and then turn over the spotlight to the true creator. It is a revenge act of a political and sad personal nature. But it is not to be. nb: compare to Alenna, The Art Forger, and Hild…all artist stories of a sort.

After reading this book, I feel differently about Barnes, a favorite writer of mine, valued for his humor and quirkiness. As nonfiction with elements of autobiography and fictionalized history, Levels of Life combines a scattershot account of balloon flight and the affairs of balloon aficionados, some history and philosophy of photography, and Barnes' own grief, anger and sense of loss upon his wife's death to cancer in 2008. While I can relate to his anguish, the violence of his expressions of disgust at friends' awkward condolences turned me away. The writer is a hard hard person, but one who loved deeply and well, and feels a permanent, eternal loss. Perhaps it represents a cautionary tale in the literary world of grief and grieving, as it serves as a manual for behavior to avoid!