The novel I avoided reading for two years
And why it may turn out to be my favorite novel of 2024
I must confess that Sarah Winman’s latest novel Still Life (2021) was a book that I avoided when it came out; there was something about the book’s cover that didn’t appeal, or maybe just confused me (a novel about a parrot? No thanks). So I’m not sure what made me pick up Still Life a couple of weeks ago. But I’m so glad I did: It’s a novel like no other I’ve ever read. And because I love Florence, I combined some of my images of Florence, where much of the novel is set, with this post.
(If this post is slow to load, click here to read.)
Still Life is a historical novel, opening in August 1944 outside Florence, Italy, as the Germans are retreating and right before the Allied advance on Florence. Sixty-something Englishwoman Evelyn Skinner is finishing a long lunch with her old friend and former lover Margaret, and remembering her first visit to Florence, forty years before. Evelyn is an art historian, in Italy to help return sequestered artworks to their homes in museums and churches.
Antsy to get to work, Evelyn catches a ride towards Florence with Private Ulysses Temper (Temps), who’s 24 and on his way to pick up Captain Darnley at the villa where he’s been doing reconnaissance work. This is the first chance encounter that will change both Temps’ and Evelyn’s life; the second encounter will come soon after this night, when Captain Darnley drops Temps off in a war-ravaged Florence to explore the city alone for one day.
What follows is a big, sweeping story that moves from Florence to London’s East End, back to Florence, London again, Florence again, over the next forty years. Florence is at the heart of the novel, and Temps’ and Evelyn’s journeys form its core stories, but it’s the many supporting characters that make this novel like none other I’ve read. Peggy Temper is Ulysses’ wife, and she loves Temps, but not nearly enough; she’s desperately in love with an American GI named Eddie. Col is the irascible owner of The Stoat and Parot (sic), the East End pub where both Temps and Peggy work; Cressy is an uneducated but highly literate and cultured barfly, and Pete plays the piano in the pub. And then there’s Alys, Peg’s daughter. How and why these people, battered by life, end up in Florence is the novel’s background subject.
Does my description make the novel sound sentimental or earnest? It’s not either of those things. Still Life is earthy, funny, and strange. It’s a novel about friendship, love, and making your own family out of the spare parts of other families, and living with old hurts but not getting destroyed by them.
Beyond that, Still Life is also about beauty and the love of beauty, and the wonder of Renaissance art. I don’t know how Sarah Winman put all these elements together, but somehow she did.
And still one more thing: The novel connects itself back to EM Forster’s turn-of-the-century novel A Room with a View. During the late lunch in Still Life’s opening scene, Evelyn recounts her first visit to Florence at age 21, and the pensione where she met her first love, and she also met EM Forster, traveling in Italy with his mother (which the real EM Forster did as a young man). A scene in Still Life lets the young Evelyn play a role in the creation of A Room with a View.
Because I was bereft after finishing Still Life, I went back to reread A Room with a View, and was struck not only by the novel’s humor and its skewering of early-20th-century British mores and strictures, by also by Forster’s feminist leanings. He gives us a marriage plot and subverts it. And I’d forgotten about his funny chapter headings. Here are the titles of chapters 15-19: Lying to George; Lying to Cecil; Lying to Mr. Beebe, Mrs. Honeychurch, Freddy and the Servants; Lying to Mr. Emerson.
Both A Room with a View and Still Life make a wonderful case for loving who you love, bursting free of mindless strictures, and making room for that new life. And, not least, for spending time in Florence…
If you’re inclined to listen to A Room with a View, an audio version narrated by British actress Juliet Stevenson (Bend it Like Beckham, Being Julia) was recently re-released, and she may be the perfect narrator. The audiobook claims to be abridged (5.5 hours) but A Room with a View is a very short novel, so I’m not sure how abridged it is.
Still Life’s audiobook is narrated by the author and she is terrific! (Two other big, saga-ish novels narrated beautifully by their authors: Abraham Vergehese’s The Covenant of Water, and Zadie Smith’s The Fraud.)
I should have noted earlier that author Sarah Winman is a midlife author: She published her first novel in her late 40s—she worked as an actor for many years, which explains her stellar audio narration. Still Life is her fourth novel.
Have you read Still Life? Are you a fan of A Room with a View or other EM Forster novels? Let me know!
I listened to Sarah Winman read her novel on Audible. I chose it because I lived in Italy for a few years in my early twenties and fell in love with it. I thought Still Life was absolutely wonderful and have recommended it to countless friends. I'm in awe of Winman's talent for characterisation. This is a brilliant review Sarah, and captures the appeal of this novel far more eloquently than I could. I'm off to find A Room With A View (thanks for the audible recommendation) and having flashbacks to the film with a very young Helena Bonham Carter.
Well you sold me on reading this book. It hadn't really entered my attention. But I am a sucker for all Forster fan fiction and am curious. I love Juliet Stevenson reading anything and I love A Room With A View. Great movie as well, with Helena Bonham Carter.