The heroine of [Look at Me] … catalogues images in a medical library—images of melancholy, of madness, of nightmare, of disease and affliction. Pictures by Géricault, El Greco, Durer, Goya, a gallery of morbid visions, pass through her hands daily ("our collection is rather naturally weighted towards the incalculable or the undiagnosed"). Her function in the world, as she defines it, is to maintain her files: to nod, to smile politely, to fetch and carry, to observe, to record, to be one of the "watchers at the feast."
Not a very promising heroine. But Look at Me is a nearly impossible achievement, a novel about emptiness and vacancy, about the shambling tread of the aged and the emotionally rigid, about the sort of apparently dull person whose idea of chic is "a pale grey dress with a white puritan collar and a black bow at the neck." Brookner makes that person riveting in her ragged self-knowledge, her ability to look in a mirror, see precisely what others see, and know the image to be false….
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