Jane Urquhart’s latest novel continues her a kind of fictional biographer in the manner of Giorgio Vasari. A Map of Glass is fiercely intellectual and romantic, suffused with melancholy and the driving obsessions of artists and those trying either to shape the world or to understand the shapes made by others.
Urquhart quotes the American artist Robert Smithson, who said the following: “A ‘logical picture’ [in other words, a map] differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for.” Maps, in other words, are approximations of the real world at best, as are novels.
Robert Smithson (1938–1971) was interested in language, entropy and human intervention in natural landscape. Urquhart’s novel is an homage to Smithson, and a literary equivalent of this plastic artist’s obsessions, as the novel’s title is taken from one of his works that consisted of shards of mirrors heaped up in a landscape. (Those interested...
Antanas Sileika’s 2004 novel, Woman in Bronze (Random House), was set in jazz-era Paris. His most recent novel, Underground, was released by Thomas Allen in 2011. He is the director of the Humber School for Writers.
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