Music critic Tim Page, who shared many an inspired late-night phone call with reclusive pianist Glenn Gould, describes a curious reaction to watching the Canadian–made film 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. Though he enjoyed the film and its celebration of Gould’s life and work, Page “found everything so solemn and reverential that it was impossible to escape an occasional flashing memory of Gould’s gleeful, childlike, self-deprecating laughter – the laughter with which I suspect he would have greeted all latter-day attempts to portray him as ‘Saint Glenn.’”

Any work about Gould is bound to come up against the image of the prototypical musical genius who sacrificed human relationships, health, and – many believe – sanity to achieve a rare level of artistic purity. The beautifully designed Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures ($50 cloth 0-385-65903-2, 192 pp., Doubleday Canada) offers a more balanced portrait of the man. There are odd flashes of Saint Glenn in the text and photos, but as Page acknowledges in his introduction, Gould was a canny manipulator of his own image and was happy to play the role of the brooding genius when it suited him. The sheer variety of photographs here – many of them released by the Glenn Gould Estate for the first time – prevent a single reading of Gould, reminding us that he lived a full, if admittedly eccentric, life.