Vivian by Christina Hesselholdt
I was really exciting about the subject of this book. I like novels based on the lives of real people and this novel is based on the life of the eccentric American photographer Vivian Maier. I also love photography; when I first saw Maier’s black and white street photographs I was struck by the intimacy and the originality of her work. One of the incredible things about Vivian Maier (besides her beautiful images) is her story. She lived an impoverished and lonely life working as a nanny. Her photographs (around150,0000, most of them with Rolleiflex cameras) were discovered by chance after her death.
“What I produce is so good that if I start showing it to professionals, I’ll never get any peace again.”
During her life, she never tried to get them exhibited or get them published, she just took them and stuck them in boxes, hundreds of boxes. After Maier died, one of her storage lockers which contained a huge collection of rolls of undeveloped film, was auctioned off due to delinquent payments at a thrift auction house in Chicago and John Maloof, a Chicago historic preservationist and later photographer, bought them. From there, it would impact the world over and change the life of the man who discovered, explored and promoted the brilliance of her work. Vivian Maier is now acknowledged as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
"Taking a picture,' she says, 'is always an act of violence. But I can live with it, its not all that bad, it it?"
In this wonderful novel, Christina Hesselholdt reimagines the life and the story of this enigmatic and complex woman from different points of view. Vivian is a multi-layered narrative in which a plurality of voices emerges to create a polyphonic whole. Each voice has something to say, sometimes complement each other, other times contradict or correct one another. The result is an intriguing and inventive novel.
Vivian is translated by Paul Russell Garrett and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.