Book Review: The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place

Reviewed by Joelene Pynnonen

A beautifully written book that explores the soul of an artist struggling to be seen

The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place is a collection of personal essays exploring the inner life of Andrew Bertaina, a divorced father who is torn in too many directions at once. He’s simultaneously a philosopher, a writer, a university lecturer, a father, a photographer, a history buff. In this collection, he captures the struggles of trying to balance responsibilities with personal aspirations.

Part one gives the deep sense of an artist whose art is consistently being ripped away from him by life’s myriad of distractions. Part two explores the minutiae of domestic life: the experience of kissing, bathing, aging, and among other things that look at universal human experiences through a personal lens. Part three, perhaps the more pensive, is about everything: parenthood, life, death, our place in the world, and more. It looks at the outward world in a desperate attempt to understand the inner experience.

The endeavors of an artist are consistently thwarted by familial duties, social media, work, or—perhaps most relatable of all—procrastination. This is a tale that has been told countless times before and will be told at least as often again. Bertaina has a way of digging to the heart of what I assume innumerable writers, painters, and photographers must feel daily. Passages like the following cut through the excuses we tell ourselves, right to the crux of the problem:

“Oh, what a waste I make of time. I’ll sit by the window for longer than I intended, whittling down the minutes and hours of the day, dreaming of writing.”

Poignant in his self-deprecating self-awareness, Bertaina is acutely conscious of his foibles but equally unable to change them. A predicament most people could sympathize with.

A point Bertaina returns to again and again is his passion for the aesthetic. He is a connoisseur of the beauty in life. The way the light falls against a tree or the sound of birdsong. He has an eye, an ear, and a feel for the loveliness of the world around us. This very much reflects in the prose. While there are some phenomenal lines and observations in these essays, it can be hard to find a cohesive narrative in each one. They lean more toward snippets of memory, collected bits of beautiful writing, deeply personal self-reflections; but the bits collect in the slowly built-up sense that by the time the forest has grown, all you can see is the trees. 

Read this for the prose. There are fragments of writing here that shine so bright you’ll want to commit them to memory. Most of these essays explore the author’s life, emotions, and experiences through the lens of someone who is far too aware of their own shortcomings, and there’s a fractured beauty in how true to life it will feel to so many.

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