Diary of a Film

Review Diary of a Film is an achingly intimate novel--tender and wise like Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet through the lens of Luca Guadagnino. Govinden drops us into the fray of an Italian film festival only to reveal a secret garden of quiet and stolen moments with a director whose film is about to premiere. In hotel rooms, abandoned buildings, and in a whisper in front of the international press corps, joy blooms, ideas are born, liberties are taken. Trust holds it all afloat. A stunning meditation on the art of creation and the nature of the artist -- Saskia Vogel Diary of a Film is about how art ravages and redeems. It is about the responsibility artists bear both for their art and the world that must contain it; about the imperative to create something substantial in a world that moves too quickly to capture beauty to one's satisfaction; it is about living an ideal, committing to a principle whatever the potential cost, leaping into love and trusting that it will hold you -- Stephen Kelman, author of Pigeon English Vicariously I experienced again the freedom to travel and visit a European city just to catch an exhibition, go dancing or merely escape the mundane for a weekend. Diary of a Film is about seeing the familiar in new ways, finding friends wherever we are and coming to terms with the past being the past. Set amongst the gourmet surroundings of a Northern Italian film festival, it reads like an elegy for a just-gone era -- Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk A wonderful mediation on why we tell stories, and who gets to tell those stories - and the grief of your masterpiece belonging only to its audience once it's finished. Sentence by sentence, one of the most beautiful novels I've read all year -- Nikesh Shukla A meditation on film-making, art, grief and privacy. Constructed with the skill of a watchmaker, with a precise, consistent pitch of intensity -- Keith Ridgeway Precision engineered European modernism from a master stylist. It walks us into a luminous and loving conversational drama, rich with complex erotics and interwoven private agonies. He writes exquisitely about art making, about obsession and responsibility. It's a gorgeous novel -- Max Porter Govinden has created a work of taut and enveloping beauty, which gets to the heart of what it is to live an artistic life caught in the never-present of the piece just made and the piece as yet uncreated -- Andrew McMillan A serious, elegant and elegiac novel: an evocative tribute to the lost world of high cinematic glamour and a lament for the artists' struggle towards greatness. When the time comes again, this is the book I'll carry to read during days spent wandering around the grandeur of a city, moving from cafe to cafe, dreaming of the beautiful life -- Preti Taneja I truly fell in love with this book. It gifts the reader, offering complex human relationships, beautifully-written; I felt a genuine sadness when each scene ended. ReadingDiary of a Film, I was powerfully reminded of the depth of the human heart, and of the work which proceeds from it -- Okechukwu Nzelu Immensely talented -- Sarah Hughes ― i newspaper Niven Govinden's Diary of a Film, his sixth novel, is also his best yet. Smart, sexy and cinematic (in many senses), it is a love letter to Italy and to film -- Alex Preston ― Observer One for literary fiction fans, Niven's prose is intoxicating ― Cosmopolitan Immersive . . . This is a wise and skilfully controlled novel that can be read in an afternoon, but which radiates in the mind for much longer ― Financial Times Govinden's prose flows with the smooth lilt of a moving camera . . . an outstanding, luxurious novel ― The i Fall into its rhythms, and a few nights at a film festival will become an existential exploration of the creative process ― The Skinny A beautiful, poignant novel of love and longing . . . This tale of a director beguilingly captures the agony of making a film - and letting the public see it -- Tim Robey ―