Brief, explorative and pensive, A Month In Siena by Hisham Matar is the perfect read to kick-start your holiday and keep your slumberous summer brain tentative and awake.
”Words are philosophies. We have to assume that each is purposeful about its contradictions, that each word means what is says. The English word “demonstration” had at leat two meanings: one refers to the public act of protest — to march, rally, declare or express an opinion — and the other is to do with showing, with making something manifest or apparent in order to instruct or display.”
We are invited on Matar’s journey around Siena, which he first visited twenty-five years prior while grappling with the disappearance of his father. Having built a reverence to the city from afar, this novel recounts Matar’s pilgrimage around the Sienese art scene, something which has been the subject of his dreams for years.
Never judge a book by its cover applies to the blurb, too, it seems as when I began reading this I was expecting a mystery novel of sorts, with art and paintings as a background character. However, this novel reads as an inquisitive conversation with the author, seeing his witty and apt observations which make you go “Yes!”.
Ultimately, however, this book is rather meta. It tinges on a mystery, though the mystery is left as such: preserved and uncovered. Thus, we never truly become acquainted with the true purpose of the book. As Hisham Matar is unable to give a completely faithful account of the paintings as he will never truly know the real motivations, thus perhaps implicating that he will never know the true background for the death of his father. Cliché as it may sound, this ultimately casts it as a work of art, with his different acquaintances and discoveries acquired along the way adding their brush strokes.
This short novel explores the meaning behind some of the most famous pieces of art and then reaches its intellectual climax in realising the meaning and purpose of art as a whole. This reinforces the conclusion that this novella is a “painting” as we, the readers, are invited to explore the meaning of the novel: the author attempting to become better acquainted with the memories of his father, lying parallel to the author’s idea that the observation of art was an attempt to become acquainted with what you may not have otherwise known.