Book Review – Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton #NOVNOV24

About the Book

Once there was a street in Paris and it was called the Street of Tailors. This was years back, in the blue mists of memory.

Now it’s the 1950s and Henri is the last tailor on the street. With meticulous precision he takes the measurements of men and notes them down in his leather-bound ledger. He draws on the cloth with a blue chalk, cuts the pieces and sews them together. When the suit is done, Henri adds a finishing a blue Tekhelet thread hidden in the trousers somewhere, for luck. One day, the renowned French artist Yves Klein walks into the shop, and orders a suit. 

Format: Paperback (160 pages) Publisher: Fairlight Books
Publication date: 1st October 2021 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I purchased this slim little volume when it was longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2021. Sadly it has languished on my bookshelf ever since. Thankfully, the Novellas In November reading event hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca at Bookish Beck has given me the impetus to read it.

It has an unusual structure: 500 numbered paragraphs each including the word ‘blue’. Sometimes the word blue describes the colour of an object – a glass, a dress, a tie – or an element of nature – the sea or sky. At other times, it’s a phrase such as ‘out of the blue’ or ‘feeling blue’. Along the way, we also get historical detail about use of the colour blue such as the significance of its use in religious art.

Intertwined with this meditation on the colour blue are three interconnected stories. The first starts with the narrator’s purchase of an old blue postcard from a young woman named Michelle and goes on to describe their subsequent relationship (real or imagined). The second depicts events in the life of Yves Klein, the artist who originally created the postcard. The third is the story of Henri, a Jewish tailor, who makes a suit for Klein, a suit the latter considers lucky and associates with his increasing success in the art world.

Although Henri’s story is set in the 1950s, other events do not necessarily unfold in linear time, as the narrator himself admits. Some might not even have happened at all. Memory is a theme that runs throughout the book whether that’s the unreliability of memory, such as remembering things that never happened but you wish had happened, the pain caused by reliving certain memories or the memories evoked by an object – a sugar bowl, for example – or a place.

When it came to the story of Yves Klein, it wasn’t until I read a review of the book by another reader that I discovered he was a real person and that the seemingly outrageous works of art described in the book really existed and were not a satirical comment on the art world by the author. I’m not sure whether knowing Klein was a real person would have changed my view of the book’s inventiveness. I suspect it might have.

There’s a lot of humour in the book, in particular some of the means by which the author inserts the colour blue into certain paragraphs. Having said that, there is a degree of repetition.

I can see why Blue Postcards, with its imaginative structure, made it on to the Walter Scott Prize longlist, but I can also understand why it didn’t make the shortlist. Personally, I would have liked more of Henri’s story and why he takes the action he does in the final pages.

In three words: Imaginative, funny, poignant
Try something similar: Red Is My Heart by Antoine Laurain & Le Sonneur

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About the Author

Douglas Bruton has been published in various publications including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, Aesthetica and the Irish Literary Review. His short stories have won competitions including Fish and the Neil Gunn Prize. He has had two novels published, The Chess Piece Magician and Mrs Winchester’s Gun Club. (Photo: Publisher author page)

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