A Life in Frames

 A LIFE IN FRAMES

by Leonora Ross

reviewed by Ruth Latta

    Halfway through A Life in Frames, the central character, Lejf Busher, meets a physician who shows him around his orchard in a village near Mount Sinai. As they get to know each other, the doctor suggests that Lejf is searching for something, but that his camera allows him to keep a distance from what he wants yet fears.  When Lejf confides his pain over two unsatisfactory relationships, the doctor says, “Suppose what you are giving them is not what they need from you. Maybe they need something else.”

    A Life in Frames, Leonora Ross’s third novel (www.leonoraross.com, 2025, ISBN 9781-0690828-00) is a portrait of an artist as a young man, a spiritual and geographic journey to unique parts of the world.  When the story begins, ten year old Lejf  is sleeping under the African night sky in his back yard in Otijwarongo, Namibia.  Earlier his father, Lawrence Busher, a wildlife veterinarian, took all five of his sons on a game hunt for food, Along for the first time, Lejf loves seeing the animals in the wild. He shoots and kills a spring bok ram, but the look of its “innocent brown eyes” makes him vow never to kill an animal again. His father is not best pleased, but his mother understands.

Signe, Lejf’s mother, came as a tourist to Namibia from her native Sweden, and has grown to love her adopted country.  While Lawrence is primarily concerned with his sons’ education, worldly success and manhood, Signe is more interest in their emotional growth. She has written her sons a sex manual which emphasizes a woman’s physiology and needs. The book circulates underground in their conservative community, and her sons’ classmates often seek her out as a confidante.

    At fourteen, through one of his elder brothers, Lejf meets eighteen year old  Laia, who also lives in Otijwarongo. She is the daughter of a homemaker mother and a cardiologist father who seems to lack a heart when it comes to human warmth and understanding of his family.  Laia admires Signe and is attracted to the energy and friendliness of the Busher household.  She looks at the pictures Lejf has taken with his mother’s Fujifilm camera and predicts that he will become a famous photographer someday.  Lejf adores her, but supposes that she considers him just a kid, a pal, and misses her when she leaves for university in Karlsruhe, Germany.

    Encouraged by her praise for his work, Lejf continues taking photographs which he enters in contests and sells to the local paper.  Eventually he saves enough money for a Nikon camera. He lives for Laia’s return on holidays, and when she is home to celebrate her twenty-first birthday, she and seventeen year old Lejf make love, his first time.

    Lejf eventually gets up the courage to tell his parents that he doesn’t plan on university and a science career like his brothers’, but wants to study photography. His father is angry at his plan to start a precarious occupation, but his mother, who has always worried about Lejf internalizing his feelings, is supportive.

    Back in Oti for a holiday, Laia goes camping with Lejf, and blows off steam about her father, saying that after she graduates, she’ll never again be beholden to a man for financial support. She goes back to Karlsruhe to finish her degree while Lejf, age twenty, goes to Cape Town to pursue his dream.

    With no financial help from his father, Lejf works at several dead-end jobs and takes an online photography course.  After Laia graduates, the two of them have two idyllic weeks together. He hopes she will stay in Cape Town, but she decides to find a job in Germany.

    Throughout the novel, the author keeps the reader well-oriented time-wise as she traces Lejf s ups and downs as he moves  into the 21st century.  He wins awards, grows in fame and fortune, but is often set back by injuries and accidents that lead to “I told you so’s” from his father.  Laia, based in Germany, often accompanies Lejf on foreign assignments, but as these become increasingly dangerous, he tells her not to come along.

    These dangerous places teach him much about cultures endangered by international capitalism.  In Republic of Congo, for instance, the cobalt mines employ children as well as adults and pay starvation wages in an enterprise where the damage to the environment overshadows, to him, the worth to technology or humanity.

    In his thirties, Lejf begins a project to photograph marginal peoples in desert settings, and travels back to Africa, to Egypt’s Sinai Desert and to Australia. The people he meets and photographs draw strength from the natural environment and are at odds with the capitalist culture of the rest of the world.  Though they inspire Lejf, he is also depressed about their plight, and eventually enters a desert of the heart.  Undisclosed feelings and misunderstandings send him on a downward path.

    Eventually, he reaches outside the frame for what he wants and expresses himself  in words as well as pictures.  By  listening to the women in his life, including Signe; the women of the “Red People” in the Namil Desert and the “aunties,” indigenous elders in Australia, he gains wisdom and courage.

    Author Leonora Ross writes lucidly and  presents her complex story chronologically.  She excels at evoking landscape and emotion.  Born in Africa, she studied law, later moving to Toronto, Canada where she studied art. Then the Rocky Mountains attracted her to Canmore, Alberta.  An environmentalist, writer and photographer, she has written two earlier novels, Tess Has A Broken Heart, and The Suncatchers.  Her love and respect for African places and peoples shine through in A Life in Frames.

    Ruth Latta lives in Ottawa Canada and writes historical novels centering on Canadian women. Currently she is writing a “marriage plot” novel, which be titled either, Forty Mermaids, or Beaux; Arts. This review appeared earlier in 2025 in the online magazine, Compulsive Reader