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<p>You’ll probably find after reading through this thread that most of us agree with you. We can only speculate as to why Barbery wrote Paloma the way she did.</p>
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<p>Renee tries to explain this on p. 204: “This still life,” she writes, ”speaks to our desire, but was given birth by someone else’s desire…still life incarnates the quintessence of Art, the certainty of timelessness. In the scene before our eyes—silent, without life or motion—a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed—pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will. For art is emotion without desire.” </p>
<p>That’s a tough passage, but to me, it says that the intense desire that brings art into being comes from the artist, who then distills that desire into something else. For the viewer, looking at a masterful still life takes you briefly “out of time,” away from a world in which you are constantly beset by desires to a place where there is nothing to achieve, nothing to yearn for—a place of perfect beauty where, for a moment, you want for nothing. </p>
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<p>Amen to that! :)</p>
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<p>Renee is a walking contradiction. On the one hand, she has a very poor self-image, describing herself as, “ugly,” “insignificant” and “decrepit.” On the other hand, she is a snob. She knows that she is more intelligent and better read than most of the people around her, and I think in a perverse way she enjoys the subterfuge.</p>
<p><a href=“If%20she%20is%20in%20her%20mid-fifties%20at%20present,%20the%20images%20of%20her%20childhood%20far%20from%20the%20city%20of%20automobiles,%20her%20sister%20having%20the%20baby%20at%20home,%20etc%20seemed%20from%20a%20much%20earlier%20time.”>quote</a> Did it seem that way to anyone else?
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<p>I noticed that, too. I assumed Renee grew up in a very rural area of France without many modern conveniences (sort of like a French Appalachia?) Renee says on p. 286, “When I think back on all that, I take the measure of how destitute we really were. We were only thirty-five miles or so from town, and there was a market town scarcely ten miles away, but we lived as people did during feudal times, without amenities or hope, so entrenched was our belief that we would always be backward peasants.”</p>