Customer Reviews

The Last Summer of the World: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Thanks to Emily Mitchell for giving us one of those extraordinary novels that remain in the mind, evoking strong feelings and provoking new thoughts long after one turns the last page. Mitchell's subtle, unmannered, and decisive prose is a non-stop pleasure to read. Her story steadily gains momentum until, at the end, one feels the wind whistling past one's ears and hangs on for dear life. Most impressive, perhaps, is the refusal of this novel to play to type. TLSW is not a love story set against the "background" of war but a meditation on love and war that involves us in the interplay of spontaneous sentiments and a powerful (indeed, hyperactive) social environment. Similarly, despite the author's obvious sympathy for Clara Steichen's plight in a male-dominated culture, the book escapes categorization as either a feminist or implicitly gendered novel. Mitchell's empathetic imagination permits us to enter so deeply into the inner lives of both Edward and Clara that "taking sides" between them finally seeems reductionist and irrelevant. Glamorous, creative, confused, yearning for personal meaning and social peace, they were who they were, and Emily Mitchell has made them live again for us.

I wrote the Publishers Weekly review reprinted above, and want to add a follow-up: Few novels I've read in recent years have stayed with me as much as the Last Summer of the World. I find myself often wanting to recommend it to people, so I'll do that here as well. A beautifully written, deeply imagined book that is a pleasure to read.

This is one of the best novels I've read in a long time. I really admired the writing itself---beautiful and restrained and elegant---and how the era seemed so deeply researched but came off as authentic and lived-in. I was completely absorbed by it and look forward to whatever Mitchell writes next.

This first novel by a young author is a fascinating use of historical and biographical material, well blended with imagination, to create a novel about an important period in the life of the great photographer, Edward Steichen. I found the analysis of artistic temperament, and of emotions, extremely well done, with mature insight. I also "enjoyed" the evocation of World War I in France.

One of the most exhilarating aspects of reading literary fiction is that it can illuminate little known facts about previously unknown people and places and historical events. This is particularly the case with famed photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator, Edward Steichen (1879 -1973) who comes to life from deep within the pages of Emily Mitchell's multi-layered and achingly exquisite first novel The Last Summer of the World.

Having established himself as a fine art painter in the beginning of the 20th century, Edward Steichen assumed the pictorialist approach to photography and in 1905 helped create the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession with Alfred Stieglitz in New York.

In World War I he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces which gave him the opportunity to become dangerously involved with aerial photography. Deeply shocked by what he witnessed on the Western Front, Steichen however, ended up denouncing impressionistic photography.

Thus, in Mitchell's accomplished hands, this early period of Steichen's kaleidoscopic life gradually emerges as a tale of creative growth and emotional pain delivered in a series of moving accounts that move back and forth between Steichen's artistic beginnings in Milwaukee in 1898 to the anguished and bitter divorce from his wife Clara even as he settles in France at the end of the Great War.

We first meet Edward when he is working for the British, in Northern France as one of the observers, working with the pilots to take pictures over the various sectors of the front lines. Developed, printed and assessed, the photos would then be examined by the interpreters would examine them for the sign of smoke, and anything else that may lie behind the front lines.

One clear and beautiful morning a letter from his friend Marion Beckett comes by the first post. Edward recalls that it has been four long years since he had last seen her, the last summer before the war began. Marion tells him that his wife Clara has filed suit against her in New York, accusing Marion of having had a liaison with him before the war and if the suit does indeed come to trial, Marion will need Edward's help to counter the accusations against her and against him too.

It seems too outlandish, too unlikely even for someone with Clara's penchant for dramatics. Fuelled by a sense of self-righteous anger, Edward reckons the easiest thing is to do nothing at all as Marion's letter does not request any specific action, except to help when the time came. The most powerful impulse tells him to go and find Marion as the letter reveals to him that she is in France now and working as a nurse for the War effort.

Perhaps the family friend the cantankerous talkative Mildred Aldrich, who a second mother to Clara their neighbor in Marne, someone who might have the chance of convincing Clara to pull back from her present disastrous course. So begins Edward's odyssey as he tries to reconcile his failed marriage to Clara with his deep and un-abiding feeling for Marion while also coping with the collateral impact of the War, his friends and colleagues slaughtered, the landscape of Europe continually awash in blood and senseless death.

As a young and idealistic photographer, Edward arrives in Paris determined to ask his hero the famed sculptor Auguste Rodin if he can take his portrait. It would be part of a series of photographic portraits of great men of the time. It is here, at Rodin's home in Meudon that Edward is greeted warmly by the older man and gradually comes alive to Rodin's energies and to the creative process, and his own capacities as an artist.

Steadily groomed and cultivated, Rodin tells Edward of the restrictions that he places upon himself by marrying a personality like Clara because he often has to pull himself back to the conventional life, the bourgeois life, "the wonderful energy choked off by a concern for morality." To his own detriment though, Edward never loses his weakness for a pretty woman and his liaisons with artist and sculptress Kathleen Bruce and the actress Isadora Duncan ultimately prove to be his undoing,

As the artistically frustrated Clara aches to be free of Edward and his photographs, Edward's emotional tug-of-war between his wife and Marion increases and he finds himself caught off guard by a gesture of Marion, thinking how exquisite she is. Meanwhile, Marion's dispassionate attitude towards life is contrasted with Clara's emotional volatility. Certainly Edward loved Clara and he had an overwhelming feeling of tenderness, of wanting to protect her from the world and from the worst parts of himself. Yet he felt at times a certain parochial rigidity to her opinions and ideas: "I suspected her of not really being very freethinking at all."

An offhand comment or a casual action by Edward opens a trapdoor in Clara and she suddenly turns on him. Only with Marion can Edward elude temporarily at least, the shadows that fall across their lives that are characterized by the threat of Clara's court case and the war and its losses. In this respect, Mitchell delves deep into Steichen's personality and his development as a photographer and his steadily growing ideas about art and how the loveliest art is made by "free instinct."

This far-reaching and exquisite novel is all about the sufferings of a handsome iconoclast and innovator who was intent to forge a balance between the struggles of past and the mysteries of the future. Of course the real world is far messier and more confusing than photographs sometimes betray; it's where dreams are denied as fulfilled, where many loves fail to endure, and where war is inevitably seen as brutal and blood-soaked.

In the end, The Last Summer of the World is an absolutely beautiful and quite profound literary testament to Edward Steichen who ultimately showed how it was possible for a photograph to be more than just surfaces, indeed a photographer can actually be an artist who makes a difference and can tell the truth about war and love and passion and also about all of the other myriad facets of life. Mike Leonard November 07.

Emily Mitchell writes beautifully and in this historical novel, she has chosen a fascinating subject: Edward Steichen's life and art, set against the background of a world war and the collapse of his marriage. I didn't know much about Steichen before reading this book and I found his life (at least in the fictionalized version) to be very interesting. Yet for most of "The Last Summer of the World" I felt as if we were seeing him, and people who surround him, from a distance, instead of getting into the skin of any of the characters. It's a shame, because it made emotionally connecting with the story, and with the people in it, difficult, if not impossible. The exception is the end, which is moving and very powerful (and the reason I'm giving this novel four stars). I wish the rest of the book had been too.

A tremendous debut. I found this novel touching and thoughtful. Read for yourself. Great for readers who are interested in photography, relationships, war and beautiful prose...

Nearly everything about this book is just right. It is one of those books that only come along every now and then that you absolutely live in while you are reading it.

A factual note: the publisher's info. in incorrect as listed. The hardcover is 390 pages, not 352.

Emily Mitchell's first novel is luminous, touching, and engrossing. She has the particulars of Edward Steichen's life during World War I well in hand and examines the tensions between art and life with an insightful eye. I hope we will have many more books from this young woman.

Emily Mitchell creates a wide angle photograph of Edward Steichen and his circle of family/friends circa WW1, but with considerable attention to detail.

"At St. Omer, he'd learned that when a road was used, it wore away. The boots of marching infantry, the wheels of the field guns and supply wagons, the horses' hooves - all these stripped away the dry surface, revealing rock and soil beneath. Compare two prints of the front taken on different days. If the road had turned in the second from pale gray to near black, an army had moved along it." p.44

Or,

"But when he told her about it, Clara stopped playing and looked at him with an expression of disbelief. Then she put her head down on the keys of the piano, so that a chromatic mass of notes rose out of the instrument, and engulfed her, filling the room with dissonance." p. 195


A compelling meditation on the arc of one artist's life...