Name: Bold Ventures
Rating: 1.5 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9781635424089

Charlotte Van Den Broek

Bold Ventures

Charlotte Van den Broeck

A spellbinding new talent explores the dark side of creativity through the stories of thirteen tragic architects 'Bold Ventures resembles a pop version of Iain Sinclair's psychogeography or Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's anti-biography of DH Lawrence' Olivia Laing, Guardian In thirteen chapters, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects - architects who either killed themselves or are rumoured to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire built in seventeenth-century France to a theatre that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC., and an eerily sinking swimming pool in her hometown of Turnhout. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Charles Darwin to art history, stories from her own life and popular culture, patterns gradually come into focus, as Van den Broeck asks: what is that strange life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? Threaded through each story, and in prose of great essayistic subtlety, Van den Broeck meditates on the question of suicide - what Albert Camus called the 'one truly serious philosophical problem' - in relation to creativity and public disgrace. The result is a profoundly idiosyncratic book, breaking new ground in literary non-fiction, as well as providing solace and consolation - and a note of caution - to anyone who has ever risked their hand at a creative act. 'What a sensible, intelligent and beautiful book' Stefan Hertmans, author of War and Turpentine

Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy

Not to sound insensitive (I am about to be - very) but I was really hoping to hear about architecture. Not so much tragedy as a nearly anatomical examination of what could have potentially gone wrong at the instance of these architectural "failures", their historial and social context and the significance of each.

Instead, the reader was treated to the author's own musings on life and death and suicide, the relationship of the artist and their art (and especially the art object). God, millennials are never beating the navel-gazing allegations.

Even this would have worked if the novel actually cared about architecture. Not having such background (or at least having done actual research into it), really holds back Van den Broeck from fulfilling either one of the above potentals of the book. Even if we talk about the relationship between art and the artist, it is clear that the author is just an observer, seeking for meaning in order to explain their own relationship with their own form of art (Van den Broeck is a poet, I believe).

As a result, the book lacks tension; often feels like it lacks purpose and convinction, too. I am not even going to start on how light it is on detail. And for the love of god, I cannot be subjected to another book about design that relies on describing art to the reader rather than showing it. In gloss preferably, to add depth to the images.

Not to sound insensitive (I am about to be - very) but I was really hoping to hear about architecture. Not so much tragedy as a nearly anatomical examination of what could have potentially gone wrong at the instance of these architectural "failures", their historial and social context and the significance of each.

Instead, the reader was treated to the author's own musings on life and death and suicide, the relationship of the artist and their art (and especially the art object). God, millennials are never beating the navel-gazing allegations.

Even this would have worked if the novel actually cared about architecture. Not having such background (or at least having done actual research into it), really holds back Van den Broeck from fulfilling either one of the above potentals of the book. Even if we talk about the relationship between art and the artist, it is clear that the author is just an observer, seeking for meaning in order to explain their own relationship with their own form of art (Van den Broeck is a poet, I believe).

As a result, the book lacks tension; often feels like it lacks purpose and convinction, too. I am not even going to start on how light it is on detail. And for the love of god, I cannot be subjected to another book about design that relies on describing art to the reader rather than showing it. In gloss preferably, to add depth to the images.

Bold Ventures

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