Brian

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I feel like I should have liked this book more. I feel like I was the target audience for it, but it just didn't work for me. It is also interesting from a writing technique perspective. Cooper ignores the 'show don't tell' advice for the entire novel, recounting all the events without a single instance of live dialogue. And yet, it was still engaging, and I felt I could easily picture myself in the moment with Brian, and live all the episodes with him. Walking slowly home, Brian thought of his own brother, Peter, nine years his senior, with whom he was unable to remember ever laughing. They barely knew each other, had never lived in the same house. Brian stopped suddenly in the street, muttering to himself, and stamped on the pavement several times one foot after the other, furious that playing with those two nice boys had awakened images of Peter and his father and their treatment of his mother.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Goodreads Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Goodreads

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Brian can also be seen as how art reflects life. Just as Camilla Grudova’s Children of Paradise was a Dario Argento take on a group of cinephiles, Cooper uses a more elegant technique. As Brian loves Japanese films, especially the works of Ozu, the book is a mirror of that genre. Brian (the novel) moves at a leisurely pace taking in all the details from the ordinary to the extraordinary. I studied in London and graduated in 2000 often visiting the BFI, then got a job working at an independent cinema in central London where we showed loads of the films named in this book. I ended up working there for a decade and being the creative manager of that cinema, and in my years there I met and befriended hundreds of film buffs. Low-key and understated, this beautiful book ... is a civilised and melancholy document that slowly progresses towards a sense of enduring, going onwards, and even new life. It feels like a healing experience.’

Brian by Jeremy Cooper The quiet joy of a deep interest: Brian by Jeremy Cooper

I was scared to read this becuase I loved the blurb so much that I felt there was no way it could live up to my expectations - but it did. But this book just didn't work for me. It felt more like reading a never ending cinema programme than a novel. But there's no explanation about any of the films, just the briefest of nods towards them. So even though I'd seen dozens of the films in the book and could often decipher what the author was alluding to, even that didn't really help. God forbid you've not got an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema.

Brian

First and foremost, I think, Cooper’s novel is a love letter to the cinema. Much of its length is given over to Brian’s thoughts on the films he sees. Even though I haven’t seen most of them myself, I felt again the sense of openness and possibility that comes from being able to range far and wide with films. All his life, everywhere he went, Brian had shunned attention, the scars unhealed from being singled out at school in Kent as different and blamed for being so, by teachers, by other boys and by his mother. To ease this hurt he had made himself an expert at forgetting, a skill by now matured, able most of the time to erase unwelcome thoughts and happenings. It did mean that he needed to hold himself on constant alert, ready to combat the threat of being taken by surprise, a state-of-being he had managed to achieve without the tension driving him crazy. There had been costs, by now discounted and removed from memory. The increasing curvature of his spine was one, outbreaks of eczema another. Accompanying the physical reactions to Brian's taut self-discipline, the mental and emotional strains were easier, he found, to suppress, to pretend did not exist. All of which helped explain why Brian had adapted unquestioningly to nightly visits to the BFI, by which he was enabled, he felt, to escape his destiny of defeat. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? When we first meet Brian, he is about 30 years old, single, living in a small apartment, and already set in his ways. He loves films, however, and one night he decides to ride the local tram to the British Film Institute (BFI), which is showing a film he has long wanted to see. From enjoying that initial experience, Brian soon finds himself going to the BFI twice a week, and after six months or so, he decides to buy a membership in the BFI, to watch films more often. As his attendance increases, he notices a group of men—the same men every time—standing in the foyer discussing the film shown. Being Brian, he is too shy to approach the group, but loving films, he is curious about their conversation. He eventual allows himself to come within earshot of them and discovers a few enticing details: None are called by name, all have interesting things to say, and no one is trying to score points at the expensive of the others. The combined anonymity, camaraderie, and enthusiasm for film encourage Brian to approach the group and comment on a film. His comment is noted by the group and appreciated, and he soon finds himself joining in every night. The book is at its strongest in portraying the comeradeship, if not really relationship, Brian enjoys with his fellow buffs, many of them socially unconventional, and indeed Brian looks down on some of them in the same way that Beavis has contempt for Butthead.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper — solace in cinema in London - Financial Times Brian by Jeremy Cooper — solace in cinema in London - Financial

After having published his luminous Ash Before Oak, Jeremy Cooper now brings us Brian, equally a work of mysterious interiority and poetry. It confirms that however solitary life might be, art enriches both our imaginations and our realities. This is a very tender book.’Brian tends to reticence and caution in personal and social interaction, an inborn temperament only exacerbated by his parents’ bullying and debasement, intended to toughen him up during his childhood in Northern Ireland. Free of their grip—his mother’s death when he is 16 and his estrangement from his father and older brother—he moves to England, becoming a file clerk for Kentish Town, a position he holds for the entirety of his professional career. Ever shy and awkward, always fearing calamity and the inadvertent commitment of a faux pas, Brian keeps to himself, talking to co-workers only under duress. Avoiding improvisation and spur-of-the-moment decisions, Brian is keen on routines well-defined and predictable. This type of book can work on many levels: on one it’s a look at how film and the film buff have evolved: from attending cinemas to streaming, plus the availability of global culture became more accessible by the 2010’s and so a wider variety of films were being screened with the technology to clean them up as well. This novel achieves a great deal with its close insistence on the dignity of a quiet life invigorated by the most defamiliarising art form of them all.’ Brian is a middle-aged man, working in a clerical job at Camden Council, with no real friends or, until he, after exercising his characteristic caution and detailed preparation for trying anything new, he enters into the world of classical world movie, joining an informal crowd of film buffs that watch showings every day at the BFI at the Southbank. As have the two previous novels from Jeremy Cooper, Ash Before Oak and Bolt from the Blue, which contained a lot of nature and modern art respectively but which failed, unlike works from authors such as Sara Baume and the hybrid art/novel works that are a trademark of Les Fugitives, to draw this reader in and makes me want to seek out the things referenced. And Brian does the same, or rather fails to do the same, with film.