What a pleasure it is to read this love letter to art and to human connection (fragile, powerful, transforming), at a time when we're masked and lonesome and can't kiss our own hand without washing it afterwards.” —Deborah Levy, New Statesman
“Diary of a Film is about how art ravages and redeems. It is about the responsibility artists bear both for their art and the world that must contain it; about the imperative to create something substantial in a world that moves too quickly to capture beauty to one's satisfaction; it is about living an ideal, committing to a principle whatever the potential cost, leaping into love and trusting that it will hold you.” —Stephen Kelman, author of Pigeon English
“A wonderful mediation on why we tell stories, and who gets to tell those stories - and the grief of your masterpiece belonging only to its audience once it's finished. Sentence by sentence, one of the most beautiful novels I've read all year.” —Nikesh Shukla
“Immersive . . . This is a wise and skillfully controlled novel that can be read in an afternoon, but which radiates in the mind for much longer.” —Financial Times
“Govinden has created a work of taut and enveloping beauty, which gets to the heart of what it is to live an artistic life caught in the never-present of the piece just made and the piece as yet uncreated.” —Andrew McMillan
“One for literary fiction fans, Niven's prose is intoxicating. —Cosmopolitan
“A beguiling exploration of artistic obsession. —Colin Grant, Observer
“A sophisticated and sensitive book about storytelling and queer kinship.” —Attitude
“Vicariously I experienced again the freedom to travel and visit a European city just to catch an exhibition, go dancing or merely escape the mundane for a weekend. Diary of a Film is about seeing the familiar in new ways, finding friends wherever we are and coming to terms with the past being the past. Set amongst the gourmet surroundings of a Northern Italian film festival, it reads like an elegy for a just-gone era.” —Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk
“I truly fell in love with this book. It gifts the reader, offering complex human relationships, beautifully-written; I felt a genuine sadness when each scene ended. Reading Diary of a Film, I was powerfully reminded of the depth of the human heart, and of the work which proceeds from it.” —Okechukwu Nzelu
Immensely talented.” —Sarah Hughes, i newspaper
“A meditation on film-making, art, grief and privacy. Constructed with the skill of a watchmaker, with a precise, consistent pitch of intensity.” —Keith Ridgeway
“Precision engineered European modernism from a master stylist. It walks us into a luminous and loving conversational drama, rich with complex erotics and interwoven private agonies. He writes exquisitely about art making, about obsession and responsibility. It's a gorgeous novel.” —Max Porter
“Niven Govinden's Diary of a Film, his sixth novel, is also his best yet. Smart, sexy and cinematic (in many senses), it is a love letter to Italy and to film.” —Alex Preston, Observer
“It is a book about the dysfunctions of grief and about what rights the artist has to take liberties with somebody else's story. Gorgeously written, Diary of a Film is a book quite ripe, fittingly, for film adaptation.” —Literary Review
“A serious, elegant and elegiac novel: an evocative tribute to the lost world of high cinematic glamour and a lament for the artists' struggle towards greatness. When the time comes again, this is the book I'll carry to read during days spent wandering around the grandeur of a city, moving from cafe to cafe, dreaming of the beautiful life.” —Preti Taneja
“A beautiful, poignant novel of love and longing . . . This tale of a director beguilingly captures the agony of making a film - and letting the public see it.” —Tim Robey, Telegraph
“Govinden's prose flows with the smooth lilt of a moving camera . . . an outstanding, luxurious novel.” —The i
“Because this is a novel of introspection - the narrator ponders his relationship to his lead actors, themselves embarking on a relationship with one another, and his life's work - its tone is one of intimacy and shared confidences that draws the listener ever further inwards.” —Financial Times
“Elegant . . . In a strong, clear tone that's unfettered by hyperbole, Govinden allows us access to the narrator's mind as he muses on love, work and who should tell whose stories.” —Monocle
“Diary of a Film is an achingly intimate novel—tender and wise like Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet through the lens of Luca Guadagnino. Govinden drops us into the fray of an Italian film festival only to reveal a secret garden of quiet and stolen moments with a director whose film is about to premiere. In hotel rooms, abandoned buildings, and in a whisper in front of the international press corps, joy blooms, ideas are born, liberties are taken. Trust holds it all afloat. A stunning meditation on the art of creation and the nature of the artist.” —Saskia Vogel
“Fall into its rhythms, and a few nights at a film festival will become an existential exploration of the creative process.” —The Skinny
★ 2022-03-30
Jangly nerves, obsessive ruminations, and a chance encounter lead a renowned film director toward unsettling developments and an unexpected epiphany.
This taut, allusive, and illuminating novel explores creativity and receptivity—the processes through which we make art and experience it. The unnamed narrator is a throwback auteur, one of the last who still shoots on film and protects the integrity of his vision against marketplace pressures and outside influence. With affection and respect, he is called “maestro” by all, including his cast and his longtime production collaborators. The novel concerns his return to an Italian film festival with his highly anticipated adaptation of William Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf. Among those joining him are actors Lorien and Tom, whom he generally calls “the boys” and whose careers will likely receive huge boosts from the reception the film is expected to receive. Yet the director is all jitters, unsure of that reception and of what he will do next. He takes refuge in an espresso bar, where he encounters a woman who recognizes him and who proceeds to tell (and show) him a story that will pervade the novel and, he eventually comes to hope, become his next film. With psychological acuity, the novel shows the subtle changes in their relationship, in his relationship with his two main actors (who have fallen in love after their roles in his movie brought them together), and in his love for and dependence on his husband and their young son, who remain at home while he is at the festival but are very much present in his mind. The result is a novel about a film, about a filmmaker who has adapted a novel, and about a piece of visual art and the tragic story behind it that the filmmaker fixates upon as his next project.
A slow fuse leads to a climactic flashpoint, putting all sorts of notions about life and art into fresh perspective.
