Frankie has decided to to retreat to her family's deserted and isolated home, vacant since the death of her grandmother, and eschew the modern, urban life that is feeding her misery. Fleeing art school she buries herself in the landscape and it's wildlife and finds herself slowly able to return to photography and reconsider the relationship between art and the world and herself.

Baume had created something really quite extraordinary. Building her novel (though novel doesn't quite cover it) around the animals that Frankie encounters and the photographs she takes of them. These episodes delve deeply into her fracturing psyche, revealing events of her life and her quest to discovery her essential self. Baume movingly examines the power of mundane belongings to spark memory and to build a sense of history and identity. It's an intensely personal and introspective work that is more of a meditation on life than a story, the plot incidental and secondary to the beautiful writing. It is quite an achievement.

I was so looking forward to read this book, but I think I will not be in the line of praising it high like other readers.
I might have looked at the whole topic in the book differently than other readers. My personal opinion and experience might have been part on the lower rating of this book.
Nevertheless, the book is wonderfully written and my 3star rating should not leave this book untouched/ unread.
It is a book you should read and experience the journey and build up your own relationship.

I’ve never suffered from depression but some people around me have. Although I’ve tried my best to understand how they’re feeling, I’ve never known the depth and darkness of that place. For 320 pages, Sara Baume’s novel, A Line Made by Walking, showed me that place.

Struggling to cope with life, 25-year-old artist, Frankie, retreats to her family’s rural house, vacant since her beloved grandmother’s death three years earlier. Surrounded by open space, Frankie slowly falls apart –

…I tried to explain that I had no explanation, that I just spent rather a lot of time trying not to cry; that trying-not-to-cry had become my normal state.

Baume uses two unique devices to tell the story. Firstly, Frankie photographs the dead animals she comes across on her countryside walks, as a way of finding her way back to art (the photos are included in the book). Secondly, focusing on random words – flowers, sky, goldfish and so on – Frankie tests herself to remember relevant seminal works of art. These ‘tests’ are dotted throughout the text and have a jarring, hyperactive feel against Frankie’s otherwise flat outlook (I looked up some of the art referenced and it adds fantastic context to the story).

Why must I test myself? Because no one else will, not any more. Now that I am no longer a student of any kind, I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head. I must slide new drawers into chests and attach new rollers to armchairs… Polish, patch, dust, buff. And, from scratch, I must build new frames and appendages; I must fill the drawers and roll along.

The photographs and ‘tests’ could seem gimmicky or pretentious but accompanied by Baume’s elegant and careful words, the result is a layered, thoughtful story.

Baume has embedded Frankie’s depression, her sadness, her despair, her exhaustion in every detail –

I ball up my lonesome sock, stick it back in my drawer of slightly bigger balls of sock. And there it lies in wait, for me to lose a leg.

It’s the thoroughness, the all-pervasiveness of Frankie’s depression that gives this story weight –

But in the end, it only lasted as long as every day lasts. Immoveable, intractable.

Through Frankie, Baume challenges the things that we expect should bring happiness and makes interesting observations about what constitutes ‘achievement’. While Frankie’s friends are discussing ‘starter salaries’ and “…jotting notes in cafes and making beautiful speeches and wearing summer scarves”, Frankie is coming to terms with the fact that her life and artistic pursuits have not gone in the direction she expected –

It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.

Now I see how this rebellion against ordinary happiness is the greatest vanity of them all.

There are wisps of happier times, particularly relating to Frankie’s mother and the memories of her grandmother –

Every year during the summer holidays, she would take my sister and me on trips to peculiar places. An old gunpowder mill, a former women’s prison, a deserted beach house gutted by a storm…some coastal outcrop which got cut off at high tide. She could never resist straying from the designated path, racing against the rising sea. In her company my sister and I always ended up briar-scratched, muddied, wading, lost. We thought my grandmother was glorious.

Isn’t that beautiful? But don’t expect a resolution or redemption – this is one of those books that will leave you thinking for some time after the final page.

4/5 Striking.

I received my copy of A Line Made by Walking from the publisher, Random House UK, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately this one wasn't for me and I didn't continue reading for any significant time therefore, do not feel justified to comment.
It may have been just bad timing but I couldn't get into the style of writing.
Although I did not finish the book and don't feel justified to give feedback or a review I will still be able to recommend it to customers visiting our bookstore.
Thankyou for approving my request to read it as I have definitely been able to take something from it for referral purposes to customers.

Frankie is an art student, now working a low- key role in a gallery. She shares the path to her breakdown, when she calls her mum to come and get her, clears out her bedsit and moves home.
She finds that home is not home, and is now in the third week of living in her dead grandmother’s cottage, which has been vacant and neglected for the last three years.
Frankie is lost. Normal, mundane life, made up of finely balanced trivia appears meaningless, but other routes are out of reach. In this remote, solitary existence, she tests herself as she muses on the things she encounters, afraid her brain will seize up from lack of use, she no longer has teachers or guides left in her life to do it for her.
This is a beautiful work, honest to a point where the reader feels almost an intruder.
Any of us who have called our own mother for rescue when life becomes too painful to bear, and been answered unconditionally, will appreciate this writing. A masterclass in how observation is a prerequisite for life and art.

This was one of the most beautiful books I have read in a long time. It felt like it should have been sadder than it was, but it was just kind of melancholy. I loved it immensely and was sorry when it was done - I immediately wanted to read it again. It's on my list to buy as a physical copy. (I loved Spill, Simmer and this was just as enjoyable.)

I was a big fan of this as a clear and resounding narration of a deep dive into depression and anxiety. The narrator, a graduate of art, is Frankie, is a mid 20s woman who returns to the rural Irish setting of her upbringing having fallen out of 'real life' in Dublin. She spends days in her parents house, then days in her deceased grandmother's house, alone and moping, consciously aware that there is something desperately wrong.

Unable to cope with a life of adulthood, including basic tasks like utilising a washing machine, the narrator takes photographs of dead animals, perhaps in an effort to drag up some sense of sympathy for them, determined to get back to the life of art she had desired and expected but which has never emerged. There are moments where she questions even her own capacity to create art.

Frankie's joyless contemplation of the world around her, the idle quiet of rural Ireland and her own, sometimes cruel manner pushes her further and further into isolation. Her mother loves and supports her, fully aware that something is desperately wrong. The depictions of a fall into depression here are incredible and the language the author uses is beautiful, inspiring and devastating all at once. That sense of desperate and impending doom is hard to read, but is richly coloured by the author with the environmental wilderness of rural Ireland. I loved this.

Quiet, yet unsettling account of a young woman struggeling with the question what it means to be alive.

Baume has the style of writing that you can't not like. The prose flows, the characters well fleshed out and a thought provoking plot.
An incredibly enjoyable and moving read.

Frankie decides to move into her deceased grandmother’s old house after having a breakdown in the city. A Line Made by Walking features a different creature in each chapter and we get to see Frankie’s observations of them as she allows us into her world. Frankie feels her small world is coming apart in stages and feels it is fitting that the creatures are also dying.

She picks out different artworks throughout the book relating to various subject matters, with the idea being to test herself now that she is not a student anymore. She wants to have things in common with artists so she feels she can be like them. The descriptions of the artworks are Frankie’s memories and interpretations of them. She is 25 and knows she is still young but ‘already so improper, so disordered’.

She is alone in her grandmother’s bungalow on ‘turbine hill’, described as this as it is close to a wind turbine, something said to be offputting for potential buyers. She believes being alone can heal her but has realised other people are afraid of being alone. Her sense of despair really comes across throughout the book, with everyday tasks proving to be a struggle and attempts to read a book see her unable to remember characters and get the story straight in her head afterwards.

Frankie gets herself into several scrapes, including an awful situation on a bus and a scene in a hairdressers where her tone would not have been generally been deemed to be socially acceptable. Your heart really goes out to her as we are given a real sense of who she is and why she is behaving the way she does.

The descriptions in the book are outstanding, with beautiful images and ideas about nature. Memory features throughout, with Frankie going right back to her troubled childhood. We learn of the ‘I want to go home’ that she has chanted in her head since as far as she can remember, chanted during bad days at school but also at times when she should’ve been content or enjoying herself. She recalls her pets and tries to remember the voice of her grandmother.
Her mother is clearly a solid figure throughout her life and there is clearly a great understanding between them. Her mother comments about Frankie’s bones and Frankie wonders where so much has gone so effortlessly. She has tried so hard to be thin in the past but now mourns the loss of time that could’ve been spent taking in knowledge and ideas rather than a body she never liked to begin with. This is the sort of interior insight we could throughout the book and Baume handles this extremely well.

A Line Made By Walking is a strikingly real book that examines life, death, nature and art. There is a strong air of sadness throughout and a real sense of the beauty and fragility of the world and its inhabitants.

A Line Made by Walking has all the elements of a great book and should sit comfortably alongside other works of literature featuring ‘outsiders’. Baume displays a natural story-telling flair and is one of the most exciting female writers to emerge from Ireland in recent years.

Read the full book review at Writerful Books

This story meanders so much with so many characters that I just could not get a proper handle on it. There were certainly some interesting observations but the structure failed to involve me and I admit that I gave up on it.

I was turned off from the start as the start of this book includes a Salinger quote. I continued on anyway and did not enjoy this. The writing was boring and the story was just a mess of various things, no coherence. Not for me.

What place does art hold in our day to day lives? That's one of the questions at the centre of Sara Baume's second novel. Frankie is a twenty-five year old woman who has left her rented apartment in Dublin after studying art and working in a gallery. Finding it impossible to integrate into a working and social life as her uni friends have and concluding that “The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed”, she retreats to her late grandmother's rural bungalow. She endeavours to create art on a daily basis and continuously quizzes herself finding thematic connections between incidents in her life and specific pieces of art. Her family come to visit and hover close by as they are concerned about her mental health. Frankie experiences depression and she becomes increasingly isolated because of her prickly demeanour. The author's debut novel “Spill Simmer Falter Wither” recounted the reclusive life of a man and his dog at the fringes of society. With this inventive and fascinating new novel Baume proves that she is the master of describing the intense poignancy of solitude within a noise-drenched world.

One of the things that makes Frankie so relatable is the way she internalizes snippets of recent news or things she sees in films. There are popular incidents from recent memory she notes such as published aerial photos of the last “uncontacted” tribe in the world and news of the Malaysia Airlines flight which disappeared. These incidents take on a special significance for her speaking to how she is disconnected from larger society. Also, she recounts watching Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World which records the filmmaker's time with scientists in Antartica. There is a poignant moment towards the end of the film where a “deranged” penguin inexplicably wanders away from his colony to the mountains, isolation and death. Frankie seems to wonder if she is like this lone individual, an aberration of her civilization destined for loneliness. This reminded me strongly of Jessie Greengrass' short stories for their similar philosophical contemplation about the meaning of solitude within an icy landscape.

Each chapter recounts and reproduces the photographs Frankie takes in the countryside. She takes photos of dead birds and small mammals she encounters to reflect “the immense poignancy of how, in the course of ordinary life, we only get to look closely at the sublime once it has dropped to the ditch, once the maggots have already arrived at work.” It's somewhat shocking as a reader to be confronted with these photos of dead animals to consider their sentiment and macabre beauty. They are things which most people would turn away from if they encountered them on a ramble through nature. But Frankie sees significance in these and many other things she comes across, considering how they might be artistic expressions of deeper ideas about the state of existence.

It may sound like this novel is too ponderous or fixated on the grim facts of life, but there are also touches of dark humour that relieve it from being too bogged in seriousness. Frankie's perspective can turn surprisingly funny especially when she thinks about religion. At one time she recalls a priest she knew who seemed so “priestly” it was impossible to imagine him as human under his cassock and instead being like a Russian doll of clerical clothing. In another scene she gets her hair cut and reflects how the experience de-personalizes us: “Here in the hairdresser’s, we are all ill-defined, inchoate. We are all but ankles and shoes, wet necks and wet foreheads.” The usual conversational chatter the hairdresser tries to make is quickly rebuffed by Frankie. Her refusal to engage in social pleasantries often has a humorous effect for her brutal honesty when “people don’t like it when you say real things”, but it's also unsettling for how cruel she can be to a doctor at a mental health centre or to her own mother calling to wish her happy birthday.

There is something refreshingly inventive about Baume's writing which resists using traditional metaphors or descriptions. A pet peeve of mine is reading overused creative writing tricks that imbue objects with sensory feelings like calling a sponge “lemon yellow.” However, Baume describes a Christian leaflet that Frankie is given as “stomach-bile yellow” and a rising sun as a “a prickly auburn mound.” These meaningfully reflect her character's state of mind as well as showing a humorous contempt for trying to invoke pleasant imagery. Frankie also forthrightly declares herself outside the narrative of a novel or film stating “The weather doesn’t match my mood; the script never supplies itself, nor is the score composed to instruct my feelings, and there isn’t an audience.” This goes against the prevailing feeling of our age that we live our lives as if we're the stars of our own reality shows or that we're in a book or film where the sky is imbued with poetic descriptions and music accompanies the emotion of our encounters. Of course, ironically, Frankie can't escape the fact that she is a character in a novel: there are emotive descriptions of the sky and Frankie listens to Bjork on high volume while she's travelling.

Frankie's actions are extreme as she's experiencing a severe form of depression, but her thought process and inclinations are highly relatable. The decision to engage with or remove yourself from society is something many people wrestle with on a daily basis and we can shelter our inner being in a multitude of ways. The question of whether isolation is a more honest form of living or a surefire way to descend into madness is meaningfully explored in this novel and the recent novel “Beast” by Paul Kingsnorth. What's overwhelmingly touching about Frankie's view is her steadfast belief in the redeeming influence of art over any institutionalized belief system like psychiatry or religion. She feels “art remains the closest I have ever come to witnessing magic.” So she clings to this belief in the power of art to connect her to humanity and raise her out of the mire of existence no matter how deeply alone she becomes.

I really enjoyed this exploration of a young woman's breakdown after city life becomes too much for her and she retreats to her dead grandmother's vacant property to try to regain her balance. Frankie’s voice is so compelling as we share her thoughts and feelings and I found the book a profound and moving meditation on depression, family, art and nature. Reading this beautifully written and original book is an immersive experience, one that will long stay with me. Sara Baume has a sure touch when it comes to writing of such difficult issues, as well as a keen ear and eye for the world around her. Much as I enjoyed her first novel, this one is possibly even better as the narrative voice is so authentic. Highly recommended.

A Line Made By Walking is about Frankie, a twenty five year old artist who moves from Dublin into her grandmother’s old bungalow in the countryside near her parents’ house, and what she does in this retreat from the world. Written in a relatable, immediate style, Baume’s novel is about loss, of self, of how you thought the world was, and of the grandmother whose home she stays in and the dead animals that she finds and photographs. It is about being in your twenties and feeling lost.

Frankie’s photographing of dead animals and her attempts to test her art knowledge through finding works that fit the theme of whatever she is thinking about strike a chord for anyone whose creativity or knowledge seem to be unable to find an outlet or are languishing away whilst their owner is unsure of life. The book is full of knowledge, about artwork, nature, and other things, and how knowing things cannot help against difficulties of life, loneliness, and depression. Details in the book, from Frankie’s description of getting caught obsessively smelling her old carpet to a reference to The Land Before Time to describe a leaf, help to make it a vivid and moving account of a relatable subject, feeling lost and alone in the world.

Comparisons to Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City feel inevitable, with art and loneliness deeply intertwined in both, but in Baume’s novel art does not seem to offer the same comparison or comfort that loneliness is not new, but rather a frame of reference for Frankie to try and cling to and use to create order. A Line Made By Walking is full of quotable lines about being in your twenties, being sad, and finding the world an overwhelming place, and it is a book to be savoured whether you are experiencing that right now or have done so in the past.

A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume

Sara Baume’s second novel centres on a summer in the life of a disaffected, depression twenty-five old year, Frankie. Living in the city, Dublin, working at an art gallery and living in a grimy bedsit where her ambitions have withered, has left her frayed and hopeless.

Ennui and sadness combine, and she moves back home, where her parents are loving and kind, but kindness only goes so far. She asks to stay in her dead grandmother’s cottage, a home which has been left empty and waiting to be sold for the three years since her grandmother’s death.

Frankie’s days are punctuated by listening to the radio, the long, endless afternoons, TV programmes, memories of her time in the city and observations on artworks. Possessing a fascination with the dead animals she comes across in the country – a fox, a hare killed by a car, perhaps - she takes photographs of the dead creatures and the novel carries these photos in black and white. These images are unsettling; Frankie’s interest in them equally so, and I found myself grimacing reading of them and looking at the photos. But this links directly, perhaps, with Frankie’s interest in art, images, the physical representation of the world. It is why she is an artist, it is why she found work in a gallery.

In between she interacts with Jink, an elderly neighbour who brings her a ducks’ eggs and helps her with repair work. The days are bleak, and the tenor of this novel weaves between bleakness and despair. Frankie too weaves in and out of view and we never get a sense of her physicality until, towards the end of the novel, she reveals her skinniness, her clothes hanging off her, her mother commenting, “I can feel your bones.” Frankie herself weaves in and out of endearment, at times you feel sorry for her, at other times you wish she would lift from the gloom. Details are minutely rendered – the damp home in the country, the small lanes, the quaintness of the small country village near her grandmother’s house.

But throughout, Frankie’s observations and views of the world remain interesting, and mostly keep the reader engaged. Here’s some:

“The Navajo Indians believe hair is memory. When a member of the tribe dies, the mourning family cut off their hair and move away to a different settlement.” And: “Because they are extremely small and transparent, dust-mites aren’t visible to the human eye. They are everywhere, yet they are nothing.”

As absorbing are Frankie’s observations on artworks which pepper the text: “Works about Time, I test myself: Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010. A 24-hour film, a collage of extracts from several thousand other films, the complete history of cinema. Each extract represents a minute of the day. Mostly, though not exclusively, by means of a clock face. Wherever the film is screened, it is played in sync with actual time. But I have never seen it for real. Right the way through from beginning to end. I don’t imagine many people have. Nevertheless, I love this piece. I love the idea. I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn’t matter whether I’ve seen the artwork for real or not.”

“Works about Birds, again, I test myself: Wheatfield with Crows, 1890. Popularly believed to be the last painting Vincent van Gogh completed. An angry, churning sky, tall yellow stalks, a grass-green and mud-brown path cutting through the stalks, tapering into the distance; a line made by walking. And a murder of crows between the stalks and sky as though they are departing or arriving or have just been disturbed.”

But Frankie is in the end, a disturbed heroine, one who has always felt distant from her age mates, and her interactions with them are awkward and sad. She too has to negotiate the minefield of adulthood, and you suspect this is at the heart of her depression. In the end, she learns, via her aunt that compromise is the only way forward, the only salvation possible: “She meant: it’s time to postpone– if not entirely abandon– my burden of unrealistic ambition. To start churning the intellect I have left into simply feeling better; to make this my highest goal. It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.”

Frankie may be twenty-five, but her acceptance of adulthood’s compromises and acknowledgement of our own limitations also cast this novel as a type of coming of age story.