STILL LIFE WITH REMORSE by Maira Kalman — review by Stella

If you haven’t come across Maira Kalman’s work, you’re in for a treat. These seemingly ‘nice’ paintings are loaded with meanings, and double meanings, with irreverence and wit. They can also be morose or mundane, profound and sorrowful; Kalman’s wry humour keeping the darkest emotions at bay. They capture the full gamut of human life and interactions. And within all these complex emotions that Kalman’s picture and text publications provoke, there is a remarkable lightness which is exhilarating, making her books the ones you want to keep close. In Still Life With Remorse: Family Stories Kalman unpicks her own and other family histories. Here are the famous, mercilessly poked at. The Tolstoys’ disfunction, Chekov’s misery, Kafka and Mahler both bilious driven by regret (and family) to create, and here is Cicero regretting everything. But these are mere interludes, along with the musical intervals, to the stories at the heart of this collection of writings and paintings. Here are the empty chairs, the tablecloths, the people gathered, the hallway, the death bed, the flowers in vases and the fruit in bowls, all triggering a memory, all resting not so quietly. Here are the parents, the uncle, the sister. Here is the aging, the forgetting and the not forgiving. Stepping back to the Holocaust, to Tel Aviv, to those that left and to those that were erased. Here are the choices and the impossible sitting around the room still living. Walking through one door and into another place, remorse following. Despite it all, there is a way to step out of one’s shoes and walk free. Still Life With Remorse is, in spite of itself, life, that is, merriment.