Know This Novel
Robert L. Shearer
If you've ever had a hankering to know how wonderful and true literature functions as a work of art, look no further than John Keller's Know Your Baker, for here indeed is a very tight show of literary excellence.
We begin by learning about Art Serrano, as the narrator, Omar, knew him when they were in high school together; soon we know Serrano has become a world-famous painter, respected as something of a new Picasso. In conversation, one of the puzzles a very idiosyncratic Art presents to Omar is the phrase "Know your baker." We don't learn what this means until about the middle the novel, where it is shown to be an exhortation to gain knowledge of what is behind what we take for granted in the self-justifying glaze of the everyday: globalization, for example, the replacement of small businesses by superstores, monopolistic corporations - all of which have the counterthrust of diminishing our personal relationships. This issue comes to fit perfectly into the grand architecture of the work, a solid geometry of moral concern.
But ... is Art Serrano even alive? Mr. Keller gives us a magical image of the last painting Art made, a work presenting a grand mirror of the room in which it exists; every object is there, reversed in image, except that the beholder before the mirror doesn't appear: a brilliant way of Art to announce his departure from life, in that the painting portends the artist's suicide. Is Serrano dead, then, or is the painting only a clever ruse? Finding that out becomes the quest of Omar.
Here is where one might note the author's skill in creating this immensely engaging work. Most readers will assume that Art Serrano isn't dead - although there is a funeral for him with weeping parents, and a will inadvertently delivered to Omar; that is, most of us will assume that Omar's quest cannot end negatively. But Mr. Keller takes us on extended travelogues - to El Paso, Juárez, Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris - in order to draw out our anticipation, bending a future answer into the present as a waiting. But it's not waiting; it's rather pursuing the adventure of discovery.
The author's special gift is for prose, the lyricism of which poeticizes true description. He writes:
The sun slides down the horizon, splashing tinges of
red, orange, yellow and blue upon the canvas of the sky, the clouds empurpled blotches adrift among them. In the early summer, just minutes after eight, the velvet curtain hem closes tightly around the dome of the globe, and Juárez glistens one last time.
But, again, is Art Serrano alive or truly the victim of his own hand? A contemporaneous dimension for the novel is the horrendous fact of the murder of young women in Juárez, an ongoing atrocity in which the police and high government officials may be complicit - at least by a lack of action. Accepting the situation has become the norm, albeit uneasily so.
Concern for this is the moral keel of the vessel, Know Your Baker. In our finding out whether Art Serrano is alive or dead we discover the ethical dimension in which we are ineluctably held as a sail by the wind. What would it be to do something beyond bureaucracy and police to stop the murders? Would it take abandoning who we have become, to leave the daily acceptance of the status quo, and undergo the suffering it takes radically to change things? This can be uncomfortable for the artistic temperament, where appearance is taken for its own sake, the world and its events merely canvas. True, art ennobles the world, but its price is aesthetic distance.
Whatever we discover about Art Serrano, we find an answer to the insouciancy of police and government to the continuous atrocity against the women of Juárez. It is a response worthy of Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom commitment is the only authentic moral choice. What occurs in the end of the novel puts both the authorities and the murderers, finally, on notice. And the way this is done - another coup by Mr. Keller - with the major players in the drama, suggests transcendence itself for the human condition: we must always be borne beyond ourselves to be ourselves.
Spinoza is often quoted as having said, "All things excellent as they are rare." John Keller's Know Your Baker, then, is a rare thing.
- Robert L. Shearer
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Le recensioni migliori da altri paesi
catart58
Facinating look into a activist artist life and the frind who really didn't know him all that well.
Recensito negli Stati Uniti il 28 ottobre 2013Anagram
Awesome with a side of awesome sauce
Recensito negli Stati Uniti il 13 settembre 2013