Audacious and genre-defying,
Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavors exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the books heart are one book and three films—Roland Barthess
Camera Lucida, Chris Markers
La Jetée and
Sans soleil, and Marguerite Durass and Alain Resnaiss
Hiroshima mon amour—postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement.
Personal recollections punctuate Mavors dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Prousts "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavors mother lost her memory to Alzheimers, and Black and Blue is framed by the authors memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.
