Brian - by Jeremy Cooper (Paperback)

About the Book

A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a slantwise work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.

Book Synopsis

A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a tangential work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.

Perennially on the outside, Brian has led a solitary life; he works at Camden Council, lunches every day at Il Castelletto café and then returns to his small flat on Kentish Town Road. It is an existence carefully crafted to avoid disturbance and yet Brian yearns for more. A visit one day to the BFI brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine: nightly visits to the cinema on London's South Bank. Through the works of Yasujirō Ozu, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda, Yilmaz Güney and others, Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by a curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars.

Review Quotes

'Easily the best novel I've read this decade.'

-- Olivia Laing, Guardian

'[T]he novel's celebration of ordinariness and anonymity...It's a quiet and even melancholic vision...Cooper gives us chronology without event, people without relationships, art without identification, agglomeration without purpose. And so we are forced to focus on what's left--the structure of a life story, mediated through art, but not redeemed by it.'

-- Clair Wills, New York Review of Books

'Cooper does a superb job of inhabiting this singular character's point of view, and of deftly weaving into the narrative Brian's thoughts and feelings about the films he sees. I was delighted by the book's gentle humor and lucid prose style, and I can think of no finer exploration of what can happen when a person is fully open and attentive to art, and how a shared passion for art can connect people to one another.'

-- Sigrid Nunez, New Yorker

'I don't think I've ever felt such warmth for a character, or that I've been able to see cinema through another's eyes insuch a lucid, sustained way. As Brian moves further and further into a life of moviegoing, ordering his days, and then years, around it, he finds companionship and a calm sense of wellbeing. As I read this beautifully subtle novel, I found the same.'
-- Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night

'A novel of simmering cinephilia.... Told in close third person, Brian unfolds neutrally and with little at stake, the frictionless description of the extremely circumscribed life of its protagonist often segueing to plot synopses and analyses of the scores of movies he takes in.'
-- Melissa Anderson, Bookforum

'Somewhere between a novel and a work of film criticism, Cooper's book is a celebration of the amateur enthusiast, and a reminder of why we all need art in our lives.'
-- Lucy Scholes, Prospect Books of the Year

About the Author

Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of six previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum's catalogue of artists' postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC's Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak.