Book review: Agneta Pleijel's double portrait

Double Portrait is about the portrait that Kokoschka undertook to paint of Christie for her 80th birthday, enchanted by her granddaughter and other husband, and in the novel performed in six sessions of conversations about life, art and death.

There are intricate gardens

of prejudice about Christie, the world's best-selling and best-known author, the name behind hundreds of plays, short stories and detective mysteries that are still raw materials for global television and film production.

Woman from a wealthy family who wrote for an audience in the lighter genre, always accompanied by a stamp image of an aunt with stiff curls.

Cred: low.

Agneta Pleijel has bone-hard control over her mythical and circumscribed life, but has made a superbly compressed story of a woman, a 20th century and the men she meets in war and peace of some significant details.

Oskar Kokoschka, the expressionist with the signature OK, whose art was branded degenerate by the Nazis, is an equal protagonist whose life could have been a brick, but now becomes a dialogue partner with the help of subtle lighting.

It is in the shadows that Pleijel seeks.

In the form

of the

about the beginning of a life, Pleijel has written the already classic A Winter in Stockholm and the two memoirs The Divination - A Girl's Memoirs and The Scent of a Man.

This is a small outpost that belongs to them, but executed as something resembling a settlement novel.

It describes the long perspective of two older people without much regret.

Yes, Agatha Christie has some self-deprecating inner remarks about the decay of her appearance, but above all, the conversations between the two cultural-historical fix stars are a study in attention.

Written as a reversal of his proletarian upbringing in Vienna's famine and her lonely burgundy childhood in England, but framed by a ticking present.

Six sessions, then end.

In an age of sticky rhetoric

about "our" elderly, it is invigorating to face aging as wealth, which provides an overview as a lighthouse and the opportunity and courage to see patterns.

What are the patterns?

"The art of living with a man" (do not quarrel, raise money imperceptibly, was always beautiful), to manage to survive two great wars, and fear a new one, and so the boundary between life and art.

Is the mystery of art about exposing or disappearing?

Their conflict is speculative, often self-ironic and ambivalent.

Like Christie herself in the storms of life: "calm and upset".

It is a divine rest here, densely airy performed in Pleijel's unmistakable style where slangy is deliberately placed as stumbling blocks to closeness, where her fires burn, both as image and meaning, and two hall-stamped artists' struggle for their selves, their self-esteem becomes acutely alive again .

And as the granddaughter of the puzzle deck knows: all the answers to the riddles must be hidden in the text.