George Szirtes’ poignant memoir of his mother is framed – literally and metaphorically – by a vivid metaphor of rewinding: a diver emerging feet first from a pool, the water closing itself “like a healed wound/ to plate-glass polish” as he ascends to his launch point above.

The Photographer at Sixteen: The Death and Life of a Fighter
GEORGE SZIRTES
(MACLEHOSE PRESS, 208 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

George Szirtes’ poignant memoir of his mother is framed – literally and metaphorically – by a vivid metaphor of rewinding: a diver emerging feet first from a pool, the water closing itself “like a healed wound/ to plate-glass polish” as he ascends to his launch point above. He has chosen this image from Anthony Hecht’s poem “The Venetian Vespers” to guide his journey through a damaged life, spooling backwards from his mother’s anguished death to her youth, “where all is innocence and potential”. In doing so he works, frame by frame, through a sequence of ever-older photographs, employing her own chosen medium to interrogate the mystery of her existence, and the fallibility of memory.

Magda Szirtes died after a second suicide attempt at the age of 51. Why, when she had fought her way through everything life had thrown at her – the Nazi camps, the loss of her entire family, self-imposed exile from her beloved Hungary, debilitating illness – should she have stopped fighting now? This ­compelling, once beautiful woman, talented photographer, wife to the devoted Lázsló and fiercely doting mother of two sons, had finally succumbed to the dying of the light, driven by an existential despair and fury to the end.

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