Notes on Falling by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

I recently read Notes on Falling by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, published in August this year by Penguin Random House. In their press release, the publishers conclude that the novel is essentially about the hope that art will challenge perceptions and orthodoxy so that the world can be reinvented through new forms. For me, it was about the experience of seeing life through a lens and attempting to reconcile the wide angles of history with the focused snapshots of individual lives.

The protagonist, Thalia, is a young student in Grahamstown in the nineties who wins a scholarship to study photography in New York. Lonely and poor, Thalia finds it tough going in the Big Apple, and though she is determined to develop her photography skills, she is here for another reason too… She’s also searching for her long-lost mother Paige who, many years prior, had abandoned Thalia in pursuit of a ballet dancer career, leaving her in the care of her father in South Africa.

New York certainly helps Thalia find her way as an artist, but it never quite provides the other answers she is after.

We first meet her a few years later in 1995 in Johannesburg, where she is exhibiting her art and photographing the newly built Gautrain. This is also when Thalia starts making sense of who she is and finding meaning in her work.

The reader is then introduced to Robert, a photographer in New York in the 1970s, desperate to capture memorable images in a time of spectacular experimentation in dance, music and theatre. He intuits the importance of what he is photographing but finds it almost impossible to transcend the troubles of his own life and achieve something great through his work.

Unbeknownst to any of them, Thalia, Robert and Paige share a story that links them to one another, to the turbulent worlds of New York in the 1970s and South Africa in the 1990s and, finally, to the photographs that hold the secrets of their lives.