Painting Mona Lisa

[khiemtran]

There's a book in the department stores at the moment called Painting Mona Lisa. It has a picture of an alluring dark haired woman, not unlike the subject of the famous painting, on the cover, and is a fictionalised account of her life.

The interesting thing is, having read the blurb and the first few pages, I want to know what happens to her. If the book had been about a character in a completely fictional fantasy world, who gets involved with various intrigues involving a great artist and scientist, I wouldn't have cared. I probably wouldn't even have got past the blurb. And all this without me even knowing or caring how accurate a depiction the story really is, or how reliable the author's insights into the world or the people. It could be set in a fantasy world for all I'd know, only with just the names and faces from our world reused.

There's something interesting here in the way that this happens, particularly as I tend to write stories set entirely in fictional universes, where I deliberately set out to avoid any connection with our own.

Comments

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

IMHO, links to reality add unearned emotional charge.

For example, you could opena novel with the Nazis moving into a small French town. Gripping. Substitute "Warriors of Twang" and "A town on the border of F'Restia" and it falls flat.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Yes, as zornhau says, you get lots of resonance for free and you do have to work harder to set up an entirely fictitious situation.

I probably wouldn't actually be tempted by the Mona Lisa book. It doesn't sound like my kind of thing, but as you say, I certainly wouldn't be tempted by the purely fictitious one.

Unless it was comic. Or had magic in it. I did enjoy Lois McMaster-Bujold's Paladin of Souls for example.

For me one of the strengths of SF or fantasy is that you can write about difficult things yet be free of the real world resonances. You can explore situations like the Middle East for example, without actually writing about the Middle East.

If you write about real events, whether current or historical, you often end up with knee-jerk reactions on the part of the reader as they rush into defending their pre-existing opinions about a hot topic. Shifting the situation into a totally fictitious world takes the heat off rather.

So it's either a plus or a minus, depending on how you look at it. *g*