At the heart of Niven Govinden’s short novel is the romantic off-screen love affair between two actors, the leading men in the narrator’s latest film. The narrator, known only as Maestro, originally from some East European country and now in his mid-fifties, is a successful film director attending a film festival in Italy for the screening of his latest release, The Folded Leaf, liberally adapted from William Maxwell’s homoerotic novel published in 1945.
The novel covers the weekend of the festival. Despite being there to discuss and promote his latest movie, Maestro’s focus is always on the now, or on the ways in which that now can be captured, articulated, turned into his next artwork.
What we are given is his vision, his view of the world, his take on the reality unfurling around him. One of those realities is the two young men falling madly in love in front of his eyes as they play-acted falling in love in front of his camera; another is the new friendship of a middle-aged local, an Italian writer called Cosima who he meets by chance in a bar and who introduces him to the work of a street artist she dated in the 80s and who committed suicide.
Since his death, she’s been devoted to keeping his name alive and speaks of her difficulty in writing truthfully and accurately about his art. She sits for hours in front of the mural on the side of a derelict building that she shows maestro. He becomes equally enraptured by the mural and tries to share it with the two actors later after all three have been drinking and he fails to remember its location.
Enchanted by his new friend and curious about some fiction she published as a young woman just after her graffiti artist boyfriend’s suicide, Maestro gets his assistant to track the books down and upon reading them decides that the novel about a young woman’s grief is perfect for his next film.
What I found most interesting was the forensic representation of the creative mind. Whilst cinema is the art form or medium Govinden has chosen to dissect and examine here, it’s really, more broadly, about looking, about paying attention to the life around you and finding in it something to capture and preserve; settling on the telling detail, the rich moment in which life teems.
Diary of a Film is published by Dialogue Books
Niven Govinden (born 1973) is an English novelist. He was born in East Sussex and then educated at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he studied film. To date, he has written five novels and a number of short stories.
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2021, book review, Jonathan Kemp, Niven Govinden
