Creative Wordshops Newsletter April 2022

Parallel Worlds

I have just read another Bernhard Schlink (The Reader,1995) novel, The Woman on the Stairs (2018). In a Sydney gallery far from home, an unnamed lawyer stumbles across a nude painting of Irene, a woman with whom he fell in love:

“A woman descends a staircase.  The right foot lands on the lower tread, and left grazes the upper…the woman is naked her body pale…the crown of her head gleams with light…against a grey green backdrop of blurred stairs and walls …the woman moves lightly as if floating towards the viewer. Yet her long legs ample hips and full breasts give her a sensual weight.”