A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female When photographer Coda Gray befriends a family with a special interest in a young boy, the motivation behind his special attention is difficult to grasp, "like water slipping through our fingers." Can a man innocently love a boy who is not his own? Using fiction to reveal the truths about families, communities, art objects, love, and mourning, Like a Lake tells the story of ten-year-old Nico, who lives with his father (an Italian- American architect) and his mother (a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II). Set in the 1960s, this is a story of aesthetic perfection waiting to be broken. Nico's midcentury modern house, with its Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglass reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. Clam consomme with kombu, giant kelp, yuzu rind, and a little fennel-in each bowl, two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Nico's boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Coda's "Floating Zendo"- the darkroom boat that he keeps on Lake Tahoe. The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California's postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Author Carol Mavor addresses the sensuality and complexity of a son's love for his mother and that mother's own erotic response to it. The relationship between the mother and son is paralleled by what it means for a boy to be a model for a male photographer and to be his muse. Just as water can freeze into snow and ice, melt back into water, and steam, love takes on new forms with shifts of atmosphere. Like a Lake's haunting images and sensations stay with the reader.
Carol Mavor is a writer who lives in Manchester England. Her most recent books are Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale; Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour; and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetee, Sans Soleil and Hiroshima mon amour.
Millions of Years Ago 1 My Nico 2 Unfolding a Flood 4 Turning the Key 5 The Memory of Lake Tahoe 16 My Mother's Eyes 17 My Mother 18 Coda 21 By Chance 25 When Bamboo Shoots Poke Their Heads out of the Earth 29 Blue Rambler 30 Tender Buttons 47 Waiting 49 Refusing to be Plucked 55 We Want Roses 56 She Sleeps with Him Every Night 59 She-Wolf Made of Rock 61 Blue Ticket 65 Learning to Swim 66 Floating Studio, Floating Zendo 67 Fannette Island 76 Floating Zendos and Mentorgartens 79 I Learned about Snowflakes 82 I Learned about the Birds of Lake Tahoe 84 Summer Snow Cake 86 Love or Affection 88 Mary's Dream 89 Each Other's Pockets 90 Black Cloth 91 Brown Kimono 94 Something Broke 96 The Voice of the Lake 101 Moon Writing 102 Artichoke 104 No Name for Him 107 What's in a Name? 108 Like Piles of Laundry? 109 Frozen Pond 111 Coda's Dream 113 Like Mother and Son 114 Fifteen Good Prints 115 Glass Moon 117 Tsukimi Udon (Moon Noodles) 118 Soaring 121 Walking Underwater 123 Open My Heart 125 Like Rice on Chopsticks 126 Like a Sequence of Poems 127 Waiting, Still 128 Morpheus 129 Blue Marble 131 Something Like Love 132 Afterword (Afterward): Like the Navel of My Dream of Nico 133 Acknowledgments 139 Illustrations 141 Notes 143
A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female
"Like a Lake is like a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It's a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book." - Max Porter "Like a Lake is a story of where art comes from, the love and grief held in forms - a house, a cup, a photograph, a stone. The experience of reading this novel is lake-like - a beautiful surface opens, and opens, and opens and ripples with grief." - Jennifer Doyle, author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art "Like A Lake is... like a lake. A famous one, Lake Tahoe, situated on the California/Nevada border, features plot-wise and thematically in the book, almost flowing it together... an adventurous, even pioneering, book..." - Source Magazine
