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Nine great reasons to buy from Midnight Oil Books. |
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Tom Hubbard Marie B. : a Biographical Novel
‘Le Meeting’ received an award – but not the medal which it deserved, and
which, as it turned out, the public demanded for it. Still, it was fêted
with remarkable volubility by the stuffy professors, those generals in the
army of art who condescend to the ranks. I bowed, was terribly shy … then
enthusiasm turned to what appeared to be outrage … a woman, dammit, we’ve
awarded the prize to a woman.
[Chapter 17]
It was the tragic eyes in a young artist’s self-portrait, encountered
during a 1993 visit to an art gallery in Nice, that drew the author into
this project. Sixteen years later, the result appears, with that same
portrait reproduced on the cover of the hardback edition.
Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884) was a painter, diarist, and
semi-clandestine feminist. The daughter of an émigré Ukrainian family, she
grew up in the south of France, a spoiled and sheltered child and
adolescent. At eighteen, however, she returned to her native Ukraine and
experienced a kind of epiphany, resolving thereafter to address herself
seriously to the study of painting. Back in France, she enrolled at one
of the few Parisian art schools open to women. The novel charts her
struggles with her art and with her own personality – and with time, for
her health went sharply into decline. After gaining a prize at the Salon,
she met her mentor, the famous Jules Bastien-Lepage, ten years her senior
but also mortally ill; their relationship became equally comic and
poignant.
In the last years of her short life, Marie Bashkirtseff’s art became
increasingly innovative. Had she lived, she might well have established
credentials as a 20th-century modernist. How far, though, was she a
deluded egotist or a martyr to her creativity – or both?
Tom Hubbard’s new novel seeks the essence of Marie B., as she pursued her
obsessions during the troubled times of late nineteenth-century France
and Tsarist Russia. This is a cosmopolitan tale … with an occasionally
Scottish accent, not least when Robert Louis Stevenson makes a cameo
appearance in the company of two Russian ladies.
Tom Hubbard currently works at the National University of Ireland
Maynooth, and was a Visiting Professor in Scottish Literature and Culture
at ELTE University of Budapest. He has produced many books as single
author, editor or co-editor, but this is his first novel. He lives in
Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and in Leixlip, Ireland.
Reviews:
"Our tat-crammed bookshelves are so depressing [but] two small Scots publishers redeem matters. Thanks to Ravenscraig Press for Tom Hubbard's Marie B. [...] recapturing the young Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff and the world of French realism, often rendered in a braid Scots which seems absolutely right, for she could have been a "Glasgow Girl" alongside Crawhall and Levery. [...] All three [of the books under review] could be from the Resistance in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, defending the classics against an anti-culture of commercialised drivel. Salve!"
Christopher Harvie in his 'round-up' of 2009, Sunday Herald (Glasgow) (29th November 2009), The Arts, p. 13
"The author has created an innovative, highly personal account of Marie's life, which does not seek to define it, but rather hints at tentative conclusions." Sam Sherry, The Scotland-Russia Forum Review
"Playfully, Hubbard posits the possibilities of Marie's influence on the movement of surrealism with the penultimate scene set in Buttes-Chaumont Park, which would later be a favourite haunt of the surrealists." Shane Creevey, Markings
"[I] had to confess myself enchanted by it, and by Marie. [...] That the whole is so magical has a great deal to do with Marie herself, or at least the writer's fascination with her, but also with his ability as a poet to encapsulate complex ideas within deceptively simple prose forms. I loved this book..." Catherine Czerkawska, Edinburgh Review
On Scottish Faust, Poems and Ballads of Eldritch Lore (2004):
"There's depth here." Robert R. Calder, Lallans
On Seeking Mr Hyde, Studies in Robert Louis Stevenson (2001):
"...a slim volume of considerable depth and insight..." Hazel Hynd, The Scottish Literary Journal
Author: Tom Hubbard (1950-)
Imprint: The Ravenscraig Press
Format: pp. [viii], 99, [blank], [viii], 8vo.
Hardback ISBN: 0955655919
Price: £12.95 / EUR 16.95 / DKR 125 / US $24
Release date: 3rd January 2009
For a list of links to works mentioned in the novel, click here.
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