Tulips. Longitude. Spices. A fashion in book-making
has come upon us. You take a hitherto
little considered, even on the face of it banal,
subject and you narrate, analyse, historically
contextualise, morally parse and culturally locate
the hell out of it. No resonance goes untested.
-REVIEW
: of The Mirror: A History. By Sabine Melchior-Bonnet (Godfrey
Fitzsimons, Irish Times)
Rogers: It is also about this one particular church.
What was the thinking behind this project?
Visser: Well, just more of the same. What I do is
take a concrete thing. It all began with the radio
because you couldn't see people in radio. Take
something that people know something about, an
orange or a potato, a thing that everybody
recognizes. And then you go into that thing. It's
much more interesting to concentrate on that thing,
ask questions about it.
So, instead of a meal, I look at a building. Like a
meal, a church has a plot, a beginning, a middle and
an end. And it enabled me to hold it all together,
limit the subject matter.
In the last book, if someone said, "Why didn't you focus on the tomato?"
I could say, "It wasn't on the menu."
In this book, if someone asks, "Why didn't you focus on Thomas
Aquinas?" I can say, "Well, he's not in the church."
Rogers: The church, St. Agnes outside the Walls...
Visser: Yes, I picked this one because it's small, and it's in Rome. But,
it
represents all churches.
I want people to feel free to do with their church what I did with this
one, if you have time. It took me four years of work.
-Interview
with Margaret Visser, This Morning (CBC Radio)
One of the more popular modern writing crazes is to take an object from everyday life and to dissect it : the materials used to make it; its history; its uses; etc.. Margaret Visser's Geometry of Love is a fairly representative example of this genre, better than some, no worse than most. In it she concentrates her attention upon the Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura Church near Rome. By the time you finish the book you know everything you could possibly want to know about this church, which most of us have never heard of and will never see, except for one thing : why are churches in general, or this one in particular, unique ?
Much of the book is interesting, some sections are even fascinating,
but, perhaps because of the nature of the task she's set herself, describing
the church as a physical structure, it never comes alive as a house of
God. Admittedly, as a Baptist, I've always considered church buildings
themselves to be secondary to the function they serve, as a gathering place
for like-minded worshippers. But I found the book to be something
like the parable of the three blind men describing an elephant, and Visser
to have failed to make the church anything more than the sum of its parts.
In his marvelous study, Mont
Saint Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams observed two of the great
churches of Christendom and perceived not merely their unity, but the unity
of the culture that produced them. Margaret Visser looks at Saint
Agnes and sees the particular features of the building. The difference
in perception seems significant.
(Reviewed:13-May-01)
Grade: (C)
