When I first saw the starting book for the August Six Degrees of Separation at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest’s page, I thought “At last! A starting book that I have actually read!” The idea of this meme is that Kate suggests a starting book, then you let your ideas bounce to six other books related (however tangentially) to the starting book.
But then, when I went back to check, I haven’t read The Museum of Modern Love at all. I got mixed up between that and my nearby art gallery, Heide, which is a Museum of Modern Art.
So my confusion gives me my starting book: The Strays by Emily Bitto (my review here), a fictional book which took its inspiration from John and Sunday’s life at Heide, which attracted modernist artists including Albert Tucker, Max Harris, Sidney Nolan, Barrett Reid, John Percival, the Boyds and Joy Hester to live communally in their farmhouse.
Although I read it long before I started this blog, I enjoyed Dear Sun, which was a collection of letters between Joy Hester and her friend and wealthy patron Sunday Reed from 1944 until Hester’s death in 1960. No fiction here: this is real life.
Speaking of artists, female artists Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith feature in Drusilla Modjeska’s book Stravinsky’s Lunch, which I also read before I started my blog.
Artists need someone to sit for them, and Alex Miller explores this in his small book The Sitters. I wrote about it in my review “ostensibly it is a slight story about an elderly painter and a younger female sitter [but] the ghosts of his childhood are sitting, too. There are multiple sitters, not just one, and he is painting them present from their absence.” (My review is here)
Or how about a book where the narrator is not the artist, but the work itself? That’s what Angela O’Keeffe rather bravely attempts in her book Night Blue, about Jackson Pollock’s painting ‘Blue Poles’ although I’m not sure that she actually succeeded. (My review here)
The painting in Cairo by Chris Womersley might not be one of the characters, but it certainly plays a role in the plot. Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’, one of the jewels of the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection, was stolen in real life in 1986, and it turns up in Womersley’s book which I just loved (as you can see in my review here).
Well, with three of these books set within 15 km of my home in Melbourne, I don’t seem to have moved very far this time!
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 
Hey, staying nearby is nothing to be sorry about! These books sound very interesting.
These all look well worth a read – I don’t know a single one. What an interesting chain!
Yes, until I read the description of The Museum of Modern Love I had not realized Melbourne also had a Museum of Modern Art, yet it is such a generic name there must be many! I realized I had fallen into the trap of typical New Yorkers that our city is the center of the universe (and I moved back to my home town in Massachusetts in 2006 but retain some NYC mentality).
Anyway, several of these books caught my interest, especially Cairo. I agree there is a special pleasure in reading books set in places one knows well – however, authors who make mistakes can really annoy a local reader. Years ago I picked up a book randomly in a bookstore called Run Jane Run. The heroine was in shock, covered in blood, amnesiac, running down Highway 30 in Boston, literally 50 yards from the house I grew up in. Except we call it Comm Ave. Or possibly Route 30 if one were a few miles farther away from the place she described. It really spoiled the whole book for me and pulled me so far away from the story that I guessed the whole plot! How can it be that hard to find a local proofreader if you set a book in a place you don’t really know?
Many thanks. I don’t know most the books, but I do know the artists discussed and the gallery at Heide. Bowen and Coddington Smith were most appealing in Stravinsky’s Lunch.
Great chain, I think the only one I’ve heard of is The Strays