The Sitter

When I was younger I loved big fat novels that I could lose myself inside for days, but these days I've become a fan of the slim novel. Angela O'Keeffe's The Sitter fits the bill, in fact it's so slim that when I was looking for it on the library shelf, I overlooked it at first and had to go back and search more carefully. But sometimes slender books can pack a hefty punch (eg Cold Enough For Snow, The Gate of Angels) and The Sitter beautifully weaves together big themes in relatively few pages.

The story is partly told by Hortense, the wife of Paul Cezanne, who sat for 29 portraits, and the subject of a novel being written by an Australian writer, currently stuck in Paris in 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic. We see the unnamed writer (she later calls herself 'Georgia') in her hotel room; writing about Hortense, who is watching her; writing an email to her daughter in Sydney. All these narratives intertwine to build layers of reflection about art and story, points of view, love and sacrifice, men and women, distance and closeness, darting between France and Australia.

These very short novels can behave almost like poetry, each line carrying more weight than it might in a longer narrative. The Sitter is an accomplished, graceful work, easy to read but hauntingly sad.