Simon Wortham
EARLY MASS, 2021
EARLY MASS, 2021
At last, Elizabeth realised her own idea. Through these women’s discomfiting entanglement, because of the estranging way they echo one another—discordantly rather than harmoniously—Segantini’s feminine couples do not epitomise the dichotomy so much as they protest it. They antagonise as much as encapsulate it. Neither fallen nor elevated, they float in between, and drift disconcertingly towards us.
A young art historian, Elizabeth Howe, develops a fascination with a picture by the late nineteenth-century Italian symbolist painter Giovanni Segantini, A messa prima (Early Mass), thought to be painted over another image censored by the Church, that of a sinner girl. Elizabeth’s study of Segantini’s painting leads her to dispute the standard psychoanalytic interpretation of his art by Karl Abraham, who argued it conveys a long-held wish to punish women. Instead, for Elizabeth, Segantini’s extraordinary images of floating female bodies register silent protest against masculine desire. Weaving together the life and art of Giovanni Segantini, the writings and correspondence of Abraham and his mentor Sigmund Freud, and the journey from Milan into the High Alps that leads Elizabeth Howe from breakdown to recovery, Early Mass is a ghost story, an art-historical detective fiction, and an account of redemption. Early Mass is the second book of a trilogy published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE: the first, The small, appeared in 2020, and the third, Berlin W, or, mésalliance, was published in December 2022.
‘What is it to write on art? In a writing that refuses any clear distinction between fiction and criticism, Simon Wortham engages this question. That engagement opens beyond art, allowing the question to figure in a story linked as much to discovery as it is to loss. Lingering continually at a threshold, this is a work of incomparable beauty.’
–> Andrew Benjamin
‘An overpainting of Wortham’s first novel and even a protest against it, Early Mass sees the fictional author emerge from the intricately spun cocoon of The small’s essayistic barbs, spreading colourful wings to float around an expansive, searching imagination. One never quite knows whose, and that is the delight of a writing that can by turns make the reader’s skin creep with scorn and their wings soar on the vertigo of thought.’
–> Naomi Waltham-Smith
Simon Wortham is Professor of Critical Humanities at Kingston University. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The Poetics of Sleep (Bloomsbury, 2013), Modern Thought in Pain (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Resistance and Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and Hope (Bloomsbury, 2019).
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A young art historian, Elizabeth Howe, develops a fascination with a picture by the late nineteenth-century Italian symbolist painter Giovanni Segantini, A messa prima (Early Mass), thought to be painted over another image censored by the Church, that of a sinner girl. Elizabeth’s study of Segantini’s painting leads her to dispute the standard psychoanalytic interpretation of his art by Karl Abraham, who argued it conveys a long-held wish to punish women. Instead, for Elizabeth, Segantini’s extraordinary images of floating female bodies register silent protest against masculine desire. Weaving together the life and art of Giovanni Segantini, the writings and correspondence of Abraham and his mentor Sigmund Freud, and the journey from Milan into the High Alps that leads Elizabeth Howe from breakdown to recovery, Early Mass is a ghost story, an art-historical detective fiction, and an account of redemption. Early Mass is the second book of a trilogy published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE: the first, The small, appeared in 2020, and the third, Berlin W, or, mésalliance, was published in December 2022.
‘What is it to write on art? In a writing that refuses any clear distinction between fiction and criticism, Simon Wortham engages this question. That engagement opens beyond art, allowing the question to figure in a story linked as much to discovery as it is to loss. Lingering continually at a threshold, this is a work of incomparable beauty.’
–> Andrew Benjamin
‘An overpainting of Wortham’s first novel and even a protest against it, Early Mass sees the fictional author emerge from the intricately spun cocoon of The small’s essayistic barbs, spreading colourful wings to float around an expansive, searching imagination. One never quite knows whose, and that is the delight of a writing that can by turns make the reader’s skin creep with scorn and their wings soar on the vertigo of thought.’
–> Naomi Waltham-Smith
Simon Wortham is Professor of Critical Humanities at Kingston University. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The Poetics of Sleep (Bloomsbury, 2013), Modern Thought in Pain (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Resistance and Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and Hope (Bloomsbury, 2019).
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120 pages
120 mm x 190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-910055-89-2
£10.00
Next Book ->
120 mm x 190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-910055-89-2
£10.00
Next Book ->