A beautifully written novel about art, relationships and the creative process from one of the UKs most interesting authors. Plot-wise, not a lot happens, but the characterisation, prose and atmosphere make up for the meandering narrative.

I found this to be a well written and thoughtful meditation on art and creative. I know nothing about filmmaking or the filmmaking world but what was depicted here read as realistic to me. I had a pit of trouble getting into it at first - it's a bit slow (despite it being quite short it took me forever to finish), and there's a lot of subplots that I felt were distracting me from the main story with the film director, but overall it's well written, substantial, and mature.

A film maker, referred to by all as Maestro, awaits the first screening of his latest film at an Italian film festival. During this time, he muses on his approach to film making and comments on the joys and pitfalls of the burgeoning relationship between his two lead actors. He also encounters a local, Cosima, whose novel and backstory he becomes obsessed by and identifies it as his next project.

The story mulls on the relationship between story and storyteller and the callousness and single-minded vision of a director. Once a story is in the public domain, who really owns it? Is a vision which changes key details acceptable or a distortion of the author's intention. And how does the artistic vision interact with the reality of everyday life.

An enjoyable read and well written, with engaging characters. A mood piece and thought provoking, particularly for fans of stories and film and the relationship between the two.

Mainly what happens is that the main character goes walking, talking and musing about art, life, relationships etc. So from that structure you can maybe also link back to the impressions of self-indulgence and pretentiousness.
While basically all topics and issues treated in this novel are particularly interesting to me, I wasn't gripped by it. I didn't find it especially compelling, it read somewhat cumbrous in its style.
All that said, there were moments when I enjoyed reading this book, it wasn't too long to get on my nerves. But I'm convinced a different format, not insisting on turning this into a novel, might have been a better fit for me.

Diary of a film is a short novel that exquisitely examines the creativity of a visionary director. Set in an unnamed Italian city as his latest film is unveiled Luca illustrates the selfish and selfless acts that are by products of a work of great art. From the actors who have been emotional engaged in the realisation of the film to the production crew who underpin the vision of the director, all are left undeniably altered by the experience. These relationships are tenderly exposed and handcrafted with believable precision.
As he nervously births his latest film, Luca's ego and arrogant, almost bullish approach to secure his next project is handled beautifully by Govinden. The question of representation and ownership is lightly layered over the idea of how much of an individual is superimposed on their creative medium. - whose story is really being told?

The narrator of Niven Govinden’s Diary of a Film is a middle-aged filmmaker referred to only as ‘Maestro’. Visiting an unnamed Italian city to attend the premiere of his latest work, a ‘liberal adaptation’ of William Maxwell’s 1945 novel The Folded Leaf, he meets Cosima, an art critic and tour guide. They immediately establish an intense connection, with Cosima revealing that she once wrote a novel. Over the next three days, in which the festival (together with the novel) takes place, Maestro becomes resolved to use Cosima’s novel as the basis for his next film.

https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-directors-cut

An internal dialogue from a celebrated film director as he attends a film festival, we get to see the people he meets and his meanders through this city through his eyes. It was interesting to be so immersed in his world and his cinematic way of viewing the world certainly comes to the fore. The author's style of not using any paragraphs made reading this book extremely tedious. I was longing for those mini pauses of breath that paragraphs allow and frequently found myself flicking ahead to see when the next break was, in order to have some respite. It also caused me to feel distant from the characters and not really care about what was happening, worryingly, this is the second time I've had this experience with this author. If you can get past the lack of paragraphs and want to be immersed in an European auteur's narrative this book is for you.

With thanks to netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for a review.

If you love cinema and storytelling and art and are seduced by all things Italian then this book is for you. Bellissimo, bellissima.

Perhaps this just wasn't for me; I found it a little pretentious and meandering. Govinden is a talented author and there are lots of ways in which this book evokes the sort of mid 20th century literature that epitomises introspective genius, but there are other ways in which it's just a bit hard to read. It may very well be that you need more of an appreciation of cinema than me to love this one. I admired its audacity and its failure to stick to convention, as well as its structure and stream of consciousness style, but ultimately it wasn't quite what I hoped for.

Like several other reviewers, I found it hard to read this book because of the formatting of the text, with no paragraphs or speech marks. I do think this is a significant problem and it made it hard for me to engage with the book or figure out what was going on. It's well written and the story would be really intriguing for the right reader.

This was an unusual novel, but one I ended up loving. It felt true to life - both in the details of the creative process - and in the love story that was described.

Although the distinct style the book is written in was absolutely my cup of tea, I didn't really connect with the characters or get invested in the plot.

A very different story, very random in style and random in setting, it became a story that sometimes I felt went over my head. Maybe if I knew more about film and cinema I might have understood it more.

Sadly feels like an almost empty artificial late period Bret Easton Ellis writing an unfinished Fellini script

A little pretentious and self-loving journey Calvino style that'll have MUBI bois lining up to read this so audience is there at least

a Fantasy for the Wanderer

The transcendental quality of walking

This is a lost Romantic novel reclaimed for the 2020s

the loose narrative style is too quick for its own good

introduce some white space please because for some the brick building works, Hubert Selby, Samuel Beckett, but not here, needed a little more structure to match narrative but I appreciate the effort, thanks

Like some other reviewers, it took me well over halfway to get a grip on this novel. The use of deliberately lengthy paragraphs, perhaps in reflection of the self-assuredness/self-indulgence (take your pick) of the central film director ("maestro"), is part of this difficulty but the predominant focus on the genius director and his two beautiful, but irritating leading men often lost my attention. The book came to life for me when it focused on Cosima, the (former) writer who the director befriends and then alienates through his behaviour and desire to film her books, which left the book seeming rather uneven, although there is some lovely writing. The maestro says at one point that his husband "always knew how to depressurise my invisible weight". I could have done with his help reading this.

"If you are a flâneur, maestro, then I’m a flâneuse, she replied. Walking is what gives me life, and what stimulates my ideas."

Diary of a Film is narrated by an acclaimed film director, his origins "from a country built on collectivism and potatoes", whom leaving his husband, an author, and their young son behind in their home city, travels to a film festival, one where he has twice previously won the jury prize:

"I flew to the Italian city of B. to attend the film festival in late March. Our entry into the competition, a liberal adaptation of William Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf, had been officially confirmed, and I was expected to participate in three days of interviews and panels to promote the release, with a jury screening on the second evening"

On arrival in B. he ducks out of immediately arriving at the hotel, and getting dragged into the rounds of publicity, and instead walks around the city ("in walking I felt a purpose regained"), setting the tone for the rest of the novel.

On his first walk, in a bar, he meets Cosima, a writer, and admirer of his films. She is now writes art history and criticism, but, many years earlier, in her twenties, was a novelist. The two talk and walk, exchanging stories and views on art, and she shows him a spectacular mural by her ex-lover, one that makes a deep impression on him as does, when he later reads it, her autobiographical novel based on the suicide of the same artist.

Later he takes his two young lead actors on a similar wander, although one that ends up heading in the direction of the same mural:

"Does anyone know where we’re going? asked Lorien, saying what he thought needed to be said, but with enough nonchalance in his tone to suggest his readiness to wander. We have the GPS on our phones and a collective memory, I said. That’s more than enough to cobble a route together. But no route was planned. We walked and carried on walking. I took comfort in the trio of shadows falling behind us, a unit whose allegiance was unquestioned. During the making of the film I had taken them on similar walks, a habit fostered in the preproduction weeks before shooting began, and then sporadically when the photography allowed. I wanted them to feel the fabric of their location through their footsteps; how in walking through a town at night, you learned of its true nature, its rhythms and idiosyncrasies. It was more than the passing voyeurism as people dressed or undressed through windows yet to be drawn, or in the silence of the main thoroughfares, with its occasional disturbance of passing cars. The warmth of the silence enveloping you as you walked, aware of your breath and those of your companions; how your steps would fall into line at times, each of us consciously making it so, both jokingly and to physically demonstrate that we were attuned."

The novel is told over those 2-3 days at the festival, and the narrator muses on, and discusses with his walking companions, his own life, creativity in general. And, as the novel progresses, others question him on the right of someone to tell someone else’s story or, as he has done with the Maxwell novel and hopes to do with Cosmima’s, to adapt their work for one’s one artistic ends.

The style of the novel has a very European sensibility - it’s an odd comparison in many respects but I was reminded in this sense of the novel’s of Tim Parks.

For me, as a fan of literature but not particularly of cinema, the director’s musings came across as a little pretentious, which I suspect was not the authorial intention (and I couldn’t help agree when one character comments “you become a different person when you talk about books”):

"There was a moment in a theatre as the lights went down that you truly understood the depth of your vulnerability: that for all the good wishes and the boosting presence of family around you, the truth that you were about to be judged was inescapable. Your visual imagination and use of language, your depth and humour, as well as compassion and emotional intelligence: these were to be dissected, held aloft and appraised. I knew of no other art form that took apart a human being to the same degree of complexity."

Although the contrast drawn between the life of a director and that of an author was an interesting one:

"I’d been a visiting professor at a film school in Madrid for a number of years, and this is one of the first things I’d say to the students there. Find your people! Open yourself up until you find those you can trust, who believe in your talents and will both complement and challenge them. Be generous enough to do the same with others. Work on the films of those you love as well as projects of your own. Use everything you’ve internalised but don’t let that limit you. You cannot make films if you’re unable to speak or to accept the presence of other human beings. Without those things you’re simply creating art installations, important in themselves, but they are not cinema, and that is what I’m here to teach you.

I was jealous of the lives novelists lived but I knew that I was not a solitary creature. Novels were a different kind of cage, one where you willingly locked yourself in. Cosima had something of the captive in her, I thought; that same mixture of passion and restraint I’d seen in other novelists I’d worked with."

Overall, a quietly impressive novel. 4 stars.

Review to be published on Goodreads when less than 2 weeks to publication date.

A film director comes to a European city to show his new film in competition at a festival, but on arrival he meets an enigmatic woman in a café and, after striking up a conversation, she takes him on a short tour of the city, taking in some hidden murals done by her now-deceased boyfriend. Our central character becomes obsessed by Cosima's story, and meets up with her again after his film has been screened, determined that his next project should be based on the novel she had written about her boyfriend. And... that's pretty much it.

It took me a while to get into this, I'll admit. The first, and main, thing that distanced itself was the first-person narrative voice. No-one talks like this. Mind you, he likes to be called 'maestro' and calls his own films 'masterpieces', so I guess there is something of a pompous, self-important individual on show here. Not a lot happens, and there is a lot of time meditating on the nature of the creative process, on love and loss, on memory and living in the present. But there was always something a bit cold about it all, just a sense that I was observing rather than living the characters - which, I guess, is part of the debate about the nature of the artistic process.

On the whole it was OK. Not one for action fans, more for those who like a good leisurely stroll around a city, taking in the sights.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

The format of this book where dialogue is passed off without quotation marks and with no paragraphs to discern one moment from the next made it tough to get through. It made the book read like an absolute and dense block of text (which is what all books are, but in other words, it would feel like a solid cube that is hard to budge from the spot it firmly settles at).

Even so, if we push this aside, Diary of a Film is a quiet, still sort of book. Of course, events and situations happen, but this book pushes and encourages us to look inwards towards the action that happens inside. It pushes us to consider the thoughts and the ideas one could have without detracting from the outward events. The relationships between people, the relationships between creation and self... these ideas and experiences from the narrator implores us to take these points and spot them in ourselves and in the world around us.

The slow pace and format can be extremely off-putting. I didn't particularly enjoy it, and it isn't a book for everyone as it can be difficult to focus on the actual content of this book, especially if you have a mind that wanders as easily as mine does.

There was a lot that I liked about this novel, the first of Govinden’s that I’ve read, but there was a lot I struggled with too. I’m not particularly interested in films or the film industry, so the premise of following a filmmaker the weekend of a premier, with all of his worries and hopes, didn’t immediately capture my attention. I did enjoy his musings on visual art, literature, and on his emotional responses to art of all kinds though. The protagonist - “maestro” - is followed very closely in first person, but with an air of detachment as he focuses more on the art around him rather than his life, about which we are given few details. It’s also a very dense text, with few line breaks and with intense description of setting, meaning you have to really concentrate to follow the plot. There is also no punctuation used to mark direct speech, something I usually enjoy in experimental literature, but more indications might have been needed here - more “he said, she said” - to make it a little less confusing. I’m glad that I read Diary of a Film, and I’ll be interested to explore other writing by Govinden, but I have to say that I was happy to have made it through the novel.

Diary of a Film is a novel about the creative process, set at a European film festival. It follows a well-known filmmaker as he visits a city for the premiere of his latest film, along with the two lead actors and others in his production team, and meets a local woman with a story of art, love, and tragedy with whom he strikes up a friendship. Away from his husband and child, he is consumed by his work and by his need to turn this woman's story into his next film.

The book is written in a distinctively direct style, following the protagonist around for only a few days but getting an insight into his creative process and how he finds inspiration. I found the style easy to read without taking things in, which made it hard at times to remember what was happening, and the book can wash over you without feeling like you've picked up much. The concept of how he discovers her story and whether he can tell it is an interesting one, as is the subplot around how the lead actors are seen and treated by the media, and it feels like the sort of novel that raises some interesting points, perhaps especially if you're into filmmaking and how people navigate the creative process. However, I found myself quite disconnected from the narrative, perhaps because the book was more arty than I'm used to, feeling a bit like an arthouse film itself.

A novel that raises questions about art, Diary of a Film is the kind of book that some people will probably find beautiful and profound, and others won't quite get it. I'm probably more in the latter category, as I enjoyed the atmosphere of the book but didn't quite connect with it.