War and Turpentine
A novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017
A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year
The life of Urbain Martien—artist, soldier, survivor of World War I—lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died in 1981. In War and Turpentine, his grandson, a writer, retells his grandfather’s story, the notebooks providing a key to the locked chambers of Urbain’s memory.
With vivid detail, the grandson recounts a whole life: Urbain as the child of a lowly church painter, retouching his father’s work;dodging death in a foundry; fighting in the war that altered the course of history; marrying the sister of the woman he truly loved; being haunted by an ever-present reminder of the artist he had hoped to be and the soldier he was forced to become. Wrestling with this tale, the grandson straddles past and present, searching for a way to understand his own part in both. As artfully rendered as a Renaissance fresco, War and Turpentine paints an extraordinary portrait of one man’s life and reveals how that life echoed down through the generations.
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this autobiographical novel, Flemish essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright Hertmans draws on his extensive fine arts background in a stirring remembrance of his grandfather Urbain Martien World War I hero and devoted painter to create a masterly treatise on the interconnections of life, art, memory, and heartbreaking love. Shortly before his grandfather's death in 1981, the narrator inherits the notebooks that Martien wrote in the last two decades of his life. "I wasted precious years diligently working on countless other projects and keeping a safe distance from his notebooks: those silent, patient witnesses that enclosed his painstaking, graceful pre-war handwriting like a humble shrine," Hertmans writes of his reticence to retell his grandfather's extraordinary life. But the notebooks provide insight into Martien's many facets, not least his childhood as the son of Franciscus, a talented but poor church painter, his heroism, and a lifetime paying obeisance to the capricious gods of art. In the two bookend sections, Hertmans demonstrates a painter's eye for the smallest detail, gracefully melding art criticism and philosophy. The book's middle section focuses on the war. Variously chaotic, horrifying, and hauntingly beautiful, Martien's war experience ends with his declaration of love for Maria Emilia, a woman from the neighborhood he watched from his bedroom while he convalesced, physically and mentally, from the war that shattered his life. Hertmans's prose, with a deft translation from McKay, works with the same full palette as Urbain Martien's paintings: vivid, passionate and in the end, life-affirming.
