Old Man Goya

Blackburn was introduced to Goya by her mother, a painter, who kept a small paperback edition of his etchings in her bookcase. So, as her mother lay dying, Blackburn sought to bring the painter she most associated with her back to life. This book, therefore, is about two people, separated by almost 200 years. Julia Blackburn (21st-century British writer) and Francisco de Goya (early 19th-century Spanish painter) cohabit almost every page. At the age of 47, Goya went profoundly deaf, and it is from here on that Blackburn has chosen to join up with him. She details the royal paintings and many etchings he made over his last 35 years until his death in 1828. With the help of a pair of earplugs, she writes about the old painter's world as seen without sound: screaming faces with no voice emerging, barking dogs baring soundless open jaws, the silence of a frenzied crowd. She traces his footsteps through Spain and France, staying in the same villages he stayed in; watching a bullfight as he did, pretending he is sitting just in front of her; even eating the same food as she imagined he ate and letting us know how it tasted. In all of this detailed, lucid writing, she reveals not only the painter's life but her own discovery of him. Blackburn does not pretend to be objective; she only shows us Goya through her own eyes, describing incidents in his life, even his most intimate moments ('warming his cold feet between her thighs'), with the confidence of someone who knows the old man well. Many assertions are undocumented and often unsubstantiated by anything other than the author's own intuition. Yet still we believe them completely. Mere facts never give a full picture of a person's life, as this affectionate portrait shows. Review by Dea Birkett (Kirkus UK)