Suddenly it's summer
Things on my radar these days:
Not another lean, fragmentary memoir by a Parisian woman, surely?, I thought when I read Katie Roiphe’s rave recommendation of Colombe Schneck’s Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories (La tendresse du crawl in the original; English translation by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer). How many do we need? But then I started reading this triptych—three novellas published as one book—and it transported me immediately. It is different from all the other lean fragmentary memoirs out of Paris, trust me. First novella is about the unwanted pregnancy and the abortion that the super-protected, comfortable and spoiled Schneck had to face at the age of seventeen, a major event that echoed in her life for decades. (Annie Ernaux is very present in the text.) Second is about Schneck’s life-long friendship with a woman who in her early fifties, at her happiest and most fulfilled, receives a stage-four cancer diagnosis. The third is about the most important romantic relationship in Schneck’s life (not the father of her children) which introduced swimming into her life and ended after nine blissful months. To reduce the book to the bare essentials like this is to not do it justice: the book positively floats, like a gentle crawl, through extraordinary life events, the all too early death of parents, the family history flashbacks to the much less fortunate grandparents, the husbands who have affairs, the wives who have them in turn, the difficulties of a precarious career, the breakups and the abandonments, but it’s all told in this melancholy, wise voice of someone fully reconciled with her life and fully in it.
2024 International Ceramics Art Fair
ICAF ‘24 is very different from last year’s: there are many bowls on display, possibly way too many—and vases, and other similar containers. When you walk into the ICAF gallery on the third floor of Gardiner Museum, it’s like you wandered into a tableware sales conference. There are some items that stand out: Laurent Craste’s shape-shifting, Dali-like pottery, for example, or Nakashima Harumi’s edge-less, blob-like entities.
Natalia Arbalaez’s creatures resonate with Gardiner’s Meso-American galleries downstairs and the grinning demons/animals/spirits, whatever they were.
Most of the rest is polite, or too cute, or very quiet, or a Shary Boyle tribute but respectable, or comes with political messaging. (Closing Sunday night so this is the last call.)
The manly men of Canadian visual arts
Edward Burtynsky at the Metivier on Richmond East until June 8.
Jean-Paul Riopelle retrospective at the Corkin in the Distillery District until June 30.
Looking forward to
Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton recital (for some reason at Walter Hall and not Koerner Hall, grumble) on July 16 and Purcell’s The Fairy Queen with the legendary HIP band Orchestre des Arts Florissants (Bill Christie himself promised on the podium) - at Koerner Hall, July 11 opening night. Rest of the Toronto Summer Music festival program here.
Last time I was reminded that I could use more Purcell in my life was when Kristian Bezuidenhout and Tafelmusik musicians got everyone dancing in their seats to this Curtain tune at a concert at Trinity-St Paul earlier in May:
Speaking of Tafel: Amanda Forsythe in town and singing gorgeous duos from Handel oratorios with tenor Thomas Hobbs and the Tafelmusik chamber choir. Last performance on Sunday, 3 pm. I don’t know why Handel put his sexiest duets in his Old Testament-themed oratorios, but there you have it.
And later this summer:
Candida at the Shaw Fest (July 13-Oct 11)
London Assurance (Stratford Festival, August 7-Oct 25)
Thanks for the Schneck review, sounds right up my alley.