What BBC Thinks Were Best Books of 2013
18 December 2013
Best of 2013: The top 10 books
- 10. Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
- "Do
you mind if I take your picture?" In 1936 photographer Dorothea Lange
focused her lens on the exhausted face of a migrant woman, a mother of
seven displaced by the Dust Bowl and caught in the downward spiral of
the Great Depression. In this iconic image, caught in a quicksilver
moment, using a new technology, two women - photographer and subject -
were linked forever.
That's the set-up for Silver's elegantly written third novel. She
braids together the stories of US government photographer Vera Dare (a
proxy for Lange), her subject Mary Coin - the Oklahoma-born mother she
spotted working in a California picker's camp - and Berkeley cultural
historian Walker Dodge, who finds unexpected connections to them both.
Silver unleashes a kaleidoscope of images, then slows down long
enough for us to absorb the emotional resonance of each. Most
surprising is Mary Coin's late-life recognition of what the portrait -
"frozen into an indelible past like an insult you can never take back" -
means to the world outside her own. (Blue Rider Press)
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