Book of the Week: PORTRAITS AT THE PALACE OF CREATIVITY AND WRECKING by Han Smith
A Goldsmiths Prize finalist this year, this novel — from its unusual title to its intriguing structure and exploration of memory — is a knockout debut. Written in 77 ‘portraits’, set across an icy post-Soviet landscape, it is immersed in the manipulation and exploitations of history, both political and personal. It’s a coming-of-age story set in a town that is reckoning with its brutal past; a story of silence and speaking, of hidden desire and fragile freedom. The author explains, “Portraits is about vicious manipulations of memory, about histories that are distorted and suppressed, about people caught in the half-light of both seeing and not seeing this, but also about how art and poetry have a vital role to play in an eventual awakening.”
Experimental and daring, this is literature that pushes at the edges of the novel, illustrating fiction’s role in excavating the past, emotionally and physically.
The Goldsmith Prize judges commented: “Composed as a series of portraits, some fragmentary, all multi-faceted and allusory, Smith’s novel is a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure. At once a poignant coming of age story and an exploration of how language is shaped by ideology, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is tender and merciless in its slanting look at the history of state violence and its unacknowledged but profound effects on individuals and communities. An important reminder that the stories we tell can serve as propaganda and as powerful works of resistance, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, demonstrates how the novel can reflect and resist the double speak of our own time."