Author David Macfarlane
In Canadian author and former Globe and Mail arts columnist David Macfarlane's second novel, The Figures of Beauty (his first, Summer Gone, was nominated for the Giller prize), 20-year-old Oliver Hughson leaves behind a Tuscan summer and wild-child sculptress Anna – who is, unbeknownst to both of them, pregnant – because he believes he will encounter in life an endless supply of joy and many other loves. He is mistaken.
Anna insists that their meeting was fate (don't forget, by the way, that fate doesn't only have to do with fortune; it also carries a scythe and wears a hood), but Oliver underestimates the gravity of the situation and leaves anyway, assuming he can return when it suits him. He is mistaken again.
What happens to Oliver is what we all fear, that a path not taken can lead to a lifetime of regret. I sympathized. It's so hard to know – what if the path itself leads to regret? (And, some might argue, all paths lead to it. Most people spend their lives looking back at what they didn't do rather than celebrating what they did.) Either way, Anna refuses to grant him clemency and curses him to a life that is the opposite of what it would have been had he stayed with her in Pietrabella: ordinary, lacking in movement. She slaps him across his "unfinished" face when he says he's going. She has been attempting to extract the person he's meant to become from his core and is now an artist rendered impotent. Meanwhile, he is a person who will never really be complete. It's hard to say who is worse off.
"Stories are hidden in objects," a much older Anna later tells a room of funeral mourners. She tends to speak only in philosophical bon mots. (She also seems like a lot of work and part of me didn't blame Oliver for not being positive at first that she was The One.) This is an important clue: pay attention to the objects in The Figures of Beauty. Statues are not just statues, pails of water are not just pails of water – and nothing is ever a coincidence. Anna would probably slap you if she heard you suggest something like that.
Many fates are met in this book and every time they are, it's clear that there was no other way. Humans are powerless to stop the wheel of fortune from spinning – and so perhaps it would behoove us to be more like Anna, as frustratingly stubborn, as willfully self-focused as she seems. Maybe if we think of ourselves as special we can actually be special, instead of allowing ourselves to be bound by the conventions she so disdains, instead of doing the things we think we should be doing, the things that dull us in the end. (Then again, what kind of a world would it be then? Who would do the dishes?)
This book forces the reader to burrow and delve. It offers nothing to the reader who won't, or can't, do this. Anna would say, "It is what it is." She would want you to follow it through to its end, when Oliver proves himself wiser than she ever gave him credit for. "It is up to all of us to know what we most love," he writes to Teresa, the daughter who seeks him out when she is 40, and the narrator of the book. "Youth is no excuse for turning away from it. Nor is responsibility."
With The Figures of Beauty, Macfarlane traces a complex tale across pages that span huge tracts of time and distance. He takes away all hope, then chips purpose out of stone. Tragedy, he suggests, is never pointless. And every single person, and every single thing, has a story. It's worth going down a lot of meandering paths to find out what those stories are.