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June 06, 2006
Maddalena and Rudy Rucker's As Above, So Below
A while ago, I promised to tell how Maddalena was born. For my Princeton doctoral dissertation, I chose to write on northerners in sixteenth-century Rome, artists enlightened by the caput mundi. In the process, I became drawn to--no hopelessly engaged by--the graphic art of one Fleming, Hans Speckaert, a little-known artist born in Brussels ca. 1540. Two documents, one stating that he didn't pay his dues to the painter’s guild of St. Luke in Rome and the other recording his paralysis, and a bunch of prints bearing his name were my lonely guide on a frustrating journey.
It seemed hopeless trying to recapture Speckaert's artistic personality. My first attempt to impress the graduate committee's members with a workable topic simply failed. In fact, Professor David Coffin, one member, pointedly reminded me that the Farnese archives in Naples perished during the war. Yet, by navigating uncharted waters and using pioneering methods, I came to refine the artistic personality of a talented, but forgotten, Flemish artist. In the course, I also learned about other northerners. The Secret Life of Bartholomaeus Spranger, the first working title for Maddalena, was to have been a fictional tale, an academic's adventurous vent.
Recently, I came across an amazing book of Peter Breugel’s life by the talented, and prolific, writer of science fiction and non-fiction books, Rudy Rucker. His As Above, So Below reminds me so much of how the original manuscript of The Secret Life looked like, a colorfully drawn scenario of sixteenth-century life in Italy, central Europe, and the Low Countries, with details so sharp and vivid that you’d swear the author had witnessed it. People drawn to history savor fictional tales that don’t necessarily have a strong, exciting plot line or powerful characters.
When I began looking for a literary agent Alan Nevins, I found one in Lisa Hamilton, then an assistant to at Artists Management Group.
Too long. Not exciting enough. Make it like Girl with A Pearl Earring was the frank advice.
Out came numerous chapters and sections, for various editors had rejected the plot for its languid pace, with descriptions of, for example, a pastoral play, seen as a “defunct form of Renaissance theater,” the editor demanding a descriptive style of a dramatic, compelling story.
Well, to start with, there was no marriage of Jesus and Magdalene in my plot to catch a big publisher. And, one critic voiced: “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’m sorry to say it didn’t knock me out. There’s so much philosophical and ethical speculation that it tends to bog down the pace of the novel, overloading it with abstaract [sic] pontificating and perhaps overlong trains of thought. While I think Ms. Siroka is a talented writer, I’m afraid this one’s not for me.”
A double sigh. Does the reader have to be knocked out? Rucker’s historical novel, so similar in scope to my Maddalena, has dramatic points, for example a scene in which the young Breugel runs for his life, pursued by the hated Rode Rockx, the paid mercenaries of the pious, foppish Philip II Habsburg, the lord and tyrant of the Low Countries--a scene of pregnant suspense, to be smothered by fascinating, but static images of sixteenth-century life. Pastoral views, paintings, drawings, artistic tools and techniques, costumes, food, lechery--all described with a gusto to be relished--mark this vivid tale.
I am proud to tell my tale with equal appeal.
Posted by Eva Siroka at June 6, 2006 02:43 PM