| Title | : | How to Paint a Dead Man |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 057122489X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780571224890 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 |
| Publication | : | First published June 4, 2009 |
| Awards | : | Booker Prize Longlist (2009) |
How to Paint a Dead Man Reviews
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I loved this. The writing is fabulous - full of sentences that make you sit back and marvel at their ingenuity and the images that they conjure up.
The chapters of the book flip between four different viewpoints. Each is set in a different place and time stays tightly with a single character and each is very individually written with no chance of a reader muddling up the writing - the headings announcing which character was in this chapter were totally superfluous. The distinctive voices were in first, third and even second person. Second person can be really tedious to read but here it was my favourite part of the book as it seemed to be rationed out just nicely. The settings varied from 1960s to the present day and included London, Italy and Cumbria. On the whole the book was well varied but early in the story I found the changes difficult to keep track of - though it wasn't long before I was hooked.
This is definitely a literary novel and not one driven by plot devices and I enjoyed the fact that the links between the four strands of the story weren't pointed out time and time again. I liked coming across small pieces of the jigsaw in the prose and I'm sure that there were plenty of details that I missed.
The book takes in, as you'd expect from the title, death, art and dying artists. Which might make it sound pretty bleak but it's a book full of light, full of interesting snippets of life and well worth a read.
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Before picking up Sarah Hall's How to Paint a Dead Man, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2009, I was only familiar with her short stories. She is an author whom I have heard an awful lot of praise for, although I must admit that I was rather disappointed by her collection The Beautiful Indifference. I am thrilled that I received a copy of How to Paint a Dead Man as a gift, however, as it proved to be one of the most beautiful novels which I had read in a long time.
Historical fiction author Sarah Dunant calls How to Paint a Dead Man 'a stylish novel, as replete with ideas as it is technically ambitious', and the Sunday Telegraph deems it 'an intelligent page-turner which, perversely, you also want to read slowly to savour Hall's luscious way of looking at the world.'
The novel has four interconnected storylines at its heart. In Italy in the early 1960s, a dying painter 'considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and to those closest to him'. We also meet a young blind girl, who sells family-grown flowers in a busy marketplace, and tends to the painter's grave. The other threads here are set in England; that of a painter in Cumbria some years later, who 'finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous', and his daughter in present-day London, who is struggling to come to terms with the sudden death of her twin brother, and 'finds herself drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon.' How to Paint a Dead Man thus spans half a century, and is described in its blurb as 'a fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives.'
The varied perspectives which Hall has employed in the novel ensure that every single page is of interest, and the separate stories never become too similar. The second person perspective which follows the daughter living in contemporary London is particularly striking: 'You aren't feeling like yourself. You haven't been feeling like yourself for a while now, not since the accident... You're not sure what's wrong exactly; it's hard to put your finger on, hard to articulate. It isn't grief. Grief would be simple. Something internal, something integral, has shifted. You feel lost from yourself. No. Absent. You feel absent. It's like looking into a mirror and seeing no familiar reflection, no one you recognise hosted within the glass.'
How to Paint a Dead Man is highly descriptive throughout. Hall's prose is highly sensual, and very evocative of place. When introducing the painter and the limits imposed upon him by both illness and ageing in his secluded corner of Italy, Hall comments: 'To begin each day there is only the wind, asking to come in from the north before even the daylight. It is a rolling wind, excitable as it prepares to leave the continent. Some mornings I will accompany the wind to the road above the town. It helps me to unstiffen. There is sciatica in my legs and my breathing these days is somewhat impaired. Really I can do no more than amble.' Nature is ever-present, and so beautifully observed, in the novel. Hall later writes: 'It's apparent that this is the changeover season. He can feel summer's end. There's the memory of frost down in the earth's membranes. The northern rivers are carrying a message to the Solway that winter is coming.'
So many themes suffuse this novel; at its heart are art and loss, and the many forms which both can take. There is a definite rawness to it at times, and real wisdom in what Hall considers and explores. She muses, for instance: 'To expose what was broken and re-cast in a composition is to reveal the fallibility of an artist. The spilled varnish and the misaligned hand, the lost saint and the irregular ghost pavement. All those errors and adjustments in the studies of the past. And in us - the chips and fractures and tumours, the flaws in our exceptional design. Truth has become a hunted thing, but it is eternally insubstantial. The philosophers have always known this.'
Hall is so understanding of what it means to be human, and how life can affect a cast of characters in such different ways. She is conscious of each of her characters and their troubles. Particularly poignant are the observations which she makes about Annette, the blind girl. 'If,' says Hall, she 'did not know what people looked like, if she had not ever seen them before, she would think they were fantastical compositions - part-insect, part-crockery, with wings made of gossamer or tin, with whiskers, hooves... so unlike tidy, soft-skinned creations do they sound.' Hall's prose which concerns Annette is tender and kind. She writes: 'Though her eyes were blind, inside a compartment of her head she could still see. She could imagine the room exactly as it had been before the sickness, her dresser with its beaded cloth, the washstand, and the low beams in the ceiling from which Uncle Marcello had strung the honeysuckle. She could imagine her shoes arranged neatly, side by side, their laces tucked inside the leather openings, and, on the window seat, the pot of marigolds peeking out from their green heads.'
At less than 300 pages, Hall has created a real masterpiece in How to Paint a Dead Man. Her fourth novel is searingly beautiful, and offers so much to the reader. The different characters, time periods and places are woven together with a strong sense of commonality - that of the art world, and what can be considered beautiful. Whilst reading, I felt entirely present in each of the stories, and there was not a single second in which I was not entirely convinced by what Hall had set before me.
Compelling and gorgeously pieced together, How to Paint a Dead Man is a transporting novel, which strikes a wonderful balance between the natural and manmade worlds in which its characters live. Hall's prose is textured and precise, and this novel is a real delight to sink into. Each of its stories are so alive and so resonant, and I imagine that they will stay with me for a long time yet. -
An art curator wracked with grief over the tragic death of her twin brother; an aged, dying artist of still-life bottle art; a landscape artist; and a blind florist tell their inter-connected stories in alternating chapters of this stunning, imaginative novel. Spanning several generations in Italy and the U.S. (primarily rural Florence and San Francisco), the reader is taken on a journey of ideas and transported to the inner chambers of the heart. The story contemplates the nucleus of art, the essence of beauty, and the inestimable measure of loss. Additionally, the illusive nature of reality is explored like a kaleidoscope rotating within a turbulent vortex or shifting around a vast abyss of stillness. The prose is poetic and infinitely exquisite, often stirring me to tears and evocations of wonder at its penetrating sensuality. The elliptical ending continues to contour in my mind as I am drawn to multiple readings of the final page. The epigraph preceding the novel is the recurrent theme of the story, a quote by Gaston Blanchard:
"Things are not what they are, they are what they become."
High-toned but accessible, dense but light, I visualized the sun's rays beaming and burning through layers of volcanic rock as I continued to turn the pages. Its radiance massaged my senses and literally put me in a state of grace. Even the carnal scenes were like polished ore, mined with such brutal delicacy that I recaptured my own spellbound encounters with erotic infatuation.
This book is meant to be read slowly, allowing the passages to percolate and reverberate. There is such sublime luminescence to the narrative that it put me in an elevated state of consciousness as it also burrowed in my subconscious strata. Erudite, cultivated, and masterful, this is a quietly profound literary experience. -
This was a beautifully written book. The language thrilled me, frankly, and I'm sad it's over (fortunately the author has written other books). Hall's intertwining of 4 separate stories that take place at different moments in time yet are interactive was a delight to read.
Despite the melancholic to sadness of the book, it made me want to head outside and walk in the park, in the woods, past the neighborhood school and hear the life bubbling out from the young kids gamboling there. A desire to go out and prove I'm alive and in this world had me bopping at the edge of the couch. And most times I finished a chapter, fully intending to head out and experience...something, I changed my mind and read another chapter.
To be honest I read this while sick with the flu so perhaps some of my responses can be tied in to that (delving into another chapter instead of going for a walk in the Portland rain, for example).
Regardless, this was a beautiful book. I strongly suggest you read it. If you don't respond to it like I did, well, read it again with a fever and then you'll get it. -
Sarah Hall writes about four characters in this novel; each with her or his own section and voice. Some of them are related but their relation scarcely affects the differing narratives. The writing is lush throughout; the pace and thin plot-lines real to life; the construction a classic four-frame, one per character, with alternating narratives.
The writer's remarkably fine style fits and evokes the art of still-life painting to reveal each character's life. And their differing stories all focus on art and isolation, grief and joy, beauty, time, patience, and subjectivity.
One character's history shifts through shades of the 1960s. Another suffered through the Fascism of Italy during WWII. One's twin brother has died suddenly in a traffic accident and a young girl in a strict Catholic family, post WWII, grows increasingly blind and ends up selling the family's flowers in the town's market.
There are two men and two women and although the novel's plot hews to realistic days turning into night and the framed construction keeps their passion, loves, and suffering somewhat distant from the reader, the novel offers the reader a rich experience. -
Lots of novels these days are told in chapters that alternate between/among two or more narrator-protagonists. This one takes a different approach: four alternating protagonists with different POVs: one first person, two third person, and one second person (directed to that chapter’s protagonist). All of them work, even the second person chapters. And although the protagonists do have some relationship with the others (directly or indirectly, with one father and daughter), the relationships don’t really matter that much, and thankfully the protagonists don’t all come together at the end (nor, really, does the novel, and that doesn’t much matter either). The prose is excellent throughout, and I enjoyed the fun Hall must have had writing this (something I often feel but do not share).
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Sometimes one is privileged to read a book that is so brilliant we hope it never ends. Such is the case with 'How to Paint a Dead Man' by Sarah Hall. This is Ms. Hall's fourth book. Her second book, 'The Electric Michelangelo', was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
This is a book about art and artists, about life and grief. It is about "how we investigate our existence and make meaning and teach one another in small and large ways". The book is like a chorale woven of four parts, each part about a different artist. The composition of the book is much like a chorale in music with each artist playing a different role in the book.
There is Suzi, a curator and photographer, who is so lost in her grief for her dead twin and mentor, Danny, that she has lost herself. No matter what extremes she goes to in order to feel alive, her grief is pervasive and overriding. In fact, the emotion is so strong that she denies it is grief. "You're not sure what's wrong exactly; it's hard to put your finger on, hard to articulate. It isn't grief. Grief would be simple. Something internal, something integral, has shifted. You feel lost from yourself. No. Absent. You feel absent. It's like looking into a mirror and seeing no familiar reflection, no one you recognize hosted within the glass." Hall's descriptions of grief are the most profound and poignant I have ever read. The poignancy is reflected in the demise of the human spirit as it searches to be reborn.
Annette is a blind Italian florist, caught up in the visions in her head. Despite her mother's attempts to keep her childlike, she blooms , much like the flowers she loves. She sees beauty in others, senses colors, and is empathic. She imagines the world in all its sensory glory and has been deeply influenced by Giorgio, the artist who taught in her school when she was a child. Years after his death, she still brings flowers to his grave.
Giorgio is an elderly Italian artist of some renown. His character is based on that of the actual artist, Giorgio Morandi, known for his exquisitely shaded paintings of bottles. Giorgio lives a reclusive life but is influential in mentoring a young landscape artist named Peter.
Peter's landscape art takes him to the brink of danger, and the very landscape that he loves and is the source of his inspiration, becomes a threat to his life. He is Suzi and Danny's father and has been Suzi's mentor. He himself, an over-the-top, expressive human being has been mentored distantly by Giorgio who is one of the most disciplined of artists.
This is a book about art and artists. It examines the discipline of art - - its freedom and passion along with the sense of release that art provides. It also explores art as an entrapment. Art is both the seen and unseen, the visible and the visualized. Though the book takes place in different times and different places, through different voices, it all comes together in the unfolding relationships between artists and mentors.
This is a book to savor, one that is a page-turner and also one that must be read slowly. It is one of the best books I have read this decade. I highly recommend Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Suri Hustvedt's book, What I Loved: A Novel, for those who enjoy 'How to Paint a Dead Man'. -
I had liked "Wolf Border" very much, although I agree with other readers that the plot lines were a bit false here and there. And, since I am a painter, I thought I might really like this book, which involves painting and art history and also has the good sense to have a set of wonderful locations. At a point roughly halfway through the book, I began to wonder why these four tales were interrupted and then sewn back together. Was there anything to be gained by telling four stories that, on a casino, bumped into one another? My favorite segment was "Fool on the Hill," so I stopped reading the other three and ran it to its end, which was disappointing. I have to say, Sarah Hall, that, like it or not, you are a landscape painter. Your descriptions of nature and humans in it are just wonderful. Delve into that, next, and leave off all the complex embroidery.
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A clever concept novel in linking what seems like four disparate characters together in the story that gradually unfolds through four separate narrative strands and across two eras and countries: England and Italy, the novel deals with the eternal themes of love, loss, life and art.
However, I found that I couldn't like the grief stricken and destructive main female character (whose name escapes me) but that didn't matter as the other three were warmer and had more interesting back stories.
Despite what I thought was a bit of a trite ending (I thought that the Italian artist's story was more life-affirning), I thought that it was an absorbingly inter-connected read. It's a shame that it didn't make the Booker short list, as it's more worthy, in my opinion than Sarah Water's novel. -
Ultimately just too allusive and overwritten -- a huge disappointment after Daughters of the North. The Italian scenes especially seemed trite, overly mystified, and just didn't ring true. The English characters were much stronger, but she left you wanting more ... with less writerly flourishes.
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After reading this book, I am sticking to a new reading philosophy. Read at least 100 pages of a book before I decide to drop it. Starting off, I found this one quite confusing. 4 different narrators, who don't seem to be connected at all. Some in the past, some present, different narratative techniques (third, first, etc). I just couldnt keep track and really thought this was just a book too deep for me! I'm happy to report that at about page 80, everything clicked. It is beautifully written and just so satisfying. I liked how each character was subtle connected to one another and the two different settings of post war Italy and modern day London--what could be better! I felt so full and complete after reading this book--like eating a big steak dinner or something. Hall has written a few other books, and I cannot wait to delve into them!
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Just superb; have a full review on FBC, while a minireview here:
After learning about How to Paint a Dead Man in the Booker Longlist, its cover and blurb attracted me so I bought it on publication day here in the US last week and I read it soon after, this being a novel that once you immerse in you cannot leave and read anything else, at least fiction, once it ends you are sad that it did so and want more, so you have to reread it at least once...
"How to Paint a Dead Man" is a deceptively short novel as page count goes at about 270, but it packs so much imagery, lyricism and emotion to be almost overwhelming at times and compelling many rereads of earlier paragraphs, as well as a reread of the whole when done.
The novel is divided in four viewpoints "The Mirror Crisis", "Translated from the Bottle Journals", "The Fool on the Hill" and "The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni", that follow each other with regularity seven times, while towards the end they invert a little in two more sequences, to end with "The Mirror Crisis" in a brilliant life-affirming way, with an epilogue "How to Paint a Dead Man" from an Italian manual.
........ -
This is an unusual book. Four individual stories told chapter by chapter, each chapter – not each story - following from the next. For forty pages, I thought it was unbearably pretentious but then the story within the stories began to unfold – you begin to see the tenuous threads that connect one to another. These threads are very slight, sometimes just a single word or sentence within the whole story that suddenly clues you in to why X connects to Y and informs and influences Z.
The style is very literate, not often naturalistic but it gains a rhythm over time and becomes oddly compelling and, for such a ‘wordy’ work, quite a page turner. It’s pretty dark, too. None of the stories are cheerful, only one has even a modicum of light at the end of the tunnel and even that comes with a painful sting.
Don’t be tempted – as I was at first, when I admit I was being bored rigid – to read the stories as wholes, skipping the intervening tales. To do this is to miss out the subtle links that bind the whole and make this rather grim book so readable. -
There are four disparate strands to this muscular rope of a book, apart at the beginning but ultimately woven together to create a story that promotes the importance of art in life. Each strand is set in a different time, written in a different style, the author challenging the reader to make the connections and draw their own conclusions. There is Suze's story, told in the second person, which is the most compelling, seemingly the centerpiece of the narrative. The story of her father, Peter, is told through his reflections while he is caught, trapped, overnight on the fells. Both Suze and Peter are artists, active in the art world, and it is Peter's connection to Georgio, an Italian artist, that sets in motion the other two narratives. This book was long listed for the Man Booker award, but didn't make the final cut to the short list. As I haven't been able to read the five that did, I can't make a comparison except to say they must be quite remarkable to have beaten out this seductively readable, highly original work.
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Something about this just didn’t land with me. I didn’t quite connect with the characters or the prose. I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading this, and I’ll read more Sarah Hall, but for whatever reason, this just didn’t do it for me.
Technically, I think this was well done. The four voices with their interconnected stories are distinct, and written in first, second and third person. Second person can be tiresome, but here I thought it was just right for a grieving twin, slowly ripping apart. I also loved the young blind woman. Hall made me feel her world through some descriptive prose that was never heavy.
Anyway, maybe I wanted a little more plot? More resolution? I often really enjoy character driven novels, but this one just didn’t quite land with me. -
As good as I remember from my first reading and in parts much much better. I don't think it's a perfect book, but I feel as though Sarah Hall has the capacity to produce a more perfect book and will some day. There are moments of such visionary beauty in her prose; I was transfixed and cried at the end for the second time. I can't wait to discuss it with my book group. They dislike this at their peril. We shall be discussing surrounded by the still life paintings of nineteenth century York artist William Etty who, like the bottle painter of this novel, spent all his life returning to the same subjects.
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I tried to hate this book. It started out slowly; the plot lines were confusing. By the end, I loved it. It's a strange book. But it infused itself into me. I noticed this especially throughout Annette's story. By the end of her sections, I was seeing the world with her disrupted and dying eyesight. This book is so well-written. Needs to be read again. The connections between characters take time, but are perfectly rendered.
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This book was so sharply sad that I had to read it in little bursts for fear it might overwhelm me. Like having a stitch, and not quite being able to breathe deeply for the pain. Flawless prose, with a haunting understanding of the human heart.
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Hall is bold and brave in her storytelling. It seems nothing is off-limits. Some moments might make you squirm in your seat with as raw emotions, feelings and actions are explored and acted upon.
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This book is more difficult for me to rate than usual. The book tells four stories in parallel, about four characters who are directly or indirectly connected. All the stories have much to do with art, artists and the creating process, a subject which I usually find interesting.
The book starts very slowly. So much so, that after the first few chapters I was not sure I was going to finish the book. As I read onward, the book grew on me a little more, when the connections between the four narratives become a little clearer, and the characters a little more substantial, but even to the end I can't say that I fully got what the author was trying to do. Perhaps it was too subtle and yet too deep for me to understand. Perhaps the Hebrew translation missed the lyrical part. Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood.
Overall, I was left with a feeling that I should have been deeply moved, yet I wasn't. Three stars out of five. -
Ik ben afgehaakt, ik kon mijn aandacht er niet meer bijhouden. De vier verhaallijnen raakten elkaar amper en de opeenvolgende, gekunstelde volzinnen begreep ik vaak niet. Een zin klonk vaak reuze-interessant maar wat er nou eigenlijk stond? Heb het Peter-verhaal via hoofdstukken skippen nog uitgelezen, maar dat had ik ook niet moeten doen.
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beautiful. ending(s) a little bit too neat for my taste, but otherwise a wonderful read.
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Did not enjoy this book at all
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I participated in a roundtable on this book at Return of the Relucntant:
http://www.edrants.com/sarah-hall-rou...
Here was my take in the conversation:
I waited until this morning, until I turned the final page in How to Paint a Dead Man, to take in your perspectives on the novel. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on it, especially because in many ways they seem to differ from mine. For example, I seem to be unusual in that I very much enjoyed Sarah Hall’s book, without qualification.
Here’s why.
For me, the uncommon structure of the novel worked not simply because it assumes a gallery-like experience of peering into one frame after another, but because it is the short sections, the different forms of narrations, the four leading characters that we follow, all this serves the movement of the novel. The instability I felt as a reader in the first pages, unclear on what Hall was up to, transformed into suspense: what was Hall up to? Where is this going? In a novel that, as was mentioned, borrows from the artistic forms of landscape and still-life, the intervals we spend with each character before spinning off into another universe serves to maintain the novel’s profluence, its forward-motion.
While much has been made of Hall’s really fantastic language — she clearly is in love with words, which, frankly, is not a given among contemporary authors — some of you aren’t enamored with the fact that Hall’s language is consistent, even as she moves among her characters and her landscapes. (Though, to be sure, she does vary her vantage points among first, second, and third-person perspectives). This seems to me to be a wise choice: in a novel where so much is unsettled and atypical, using a more or less consistent language gives the reader something to hold onto as she moves through the text. It keeps the novel from veering into unhelpful fragmentation and absurdity. What’s more, the consistent language makes the textual rhymes more apparant; I found myself finishing one section where the images linger on, say, eyes and sight, and I know that that the next section will move to Annette and the stories of her pending blindness. What’s more, Hall’s language is so good, so striking, that it is an argument for itself. I’m happy to meet it, section after section.
Speaking of seeing the rhymes among the characters’ lives–you all have made plain that Girogio teaches Annette and receives letters from Peter; that Peter is Susan’s father. But there are other connections that emerged through the novel–revelations that happened not in the traditional ways of plot, but in the the authorial (painterly?) techniques that Hall embraces here: juxtaposition, association, composition.
I realized late in the novel, for example, that Tom, who Susan is having an affair with, is Annette’s littlest brother (Tommaso). It’s apparent that the bottle Annette leaves on Girogio’s grave–returning a gift he’d given to her–is the bottle that Peter steals when he’s in Italy and later gives to Susan for her exhibition of artist’s relics (though Susan never believes that it’s anything but a tall tale). Connections like these are never pushed on the reader, but emerge in the text, like delicate spices in a well-made meal, like the glimmers of movement that we see when we gaze long enough at a nature morte painting.
The novel carries its share of active tension: Peter’s horrific accident; Annette haunted by the Bestia, by her bizarre family, and the final incident at Girogio’s graveside; Susan’s secrets. But it’s no secret that this novel rides primarily on its stylistic verve. Suspense doesn’t take the usual trappings in How to Paint a Dead Man. But it’s there, in surprising costumes, and I thrilled to it.
One further point: it’s been mentioned that it seemed strange that we learn so few details about what the art made by these characters actually looks like. Such a lack of details comes in context of a novel that is emphatically a visual one. The characters spend an enormous amount of time looking at things; visual images are thick in Hall’s pages. It seems to me that the lack of narration describing Peter’s paintings, say, or Susan’s photographs is again an appropriate choice. No character is compelled to describe their own art to themselves in excruciating details, though we readers get enough information about their canvases to extrapolate; being visually-oriented, the intersections between the characters’ work and their world emerges (for example, through Peter’s life in the north country of Cumbria).
How to Paint a Dead Man is a risky novel, and it is carried by Hall’s sheer confidence and nerve. Even as it simmers under the prominence of the language and structure, this is a physical, muscular work of fiction–one that dwells on bodies, violence, sex, drugs, drunkenenss, blindness, cancer, pregnancy, movement–and so it is perhaps no surprise that it hits viscerally. -
I had a hard time getting into the 4 different perspectives here since we don't spend a lot of pages with any of them in the beginning, at least, and I didn't really feel connected to anyone's "voice" but Peter's.
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I struggled with the last two books I read, so I really needed a book that would absorb me. Scanning the shelf of "waiting to be read" books I saw this. The author's name looked familiar and when I realised she had written The Electric Michaelangelo I thought this was a good bet.
I was completely absorbed, read it over the Bank Holiday weekend and it has left me with lots to think about.
It brings together four different stories over a period of about 40 years, all involving artists in one way of another. I know that not everyone likes books which have linked and intertwined narratives, and move from one to another in each chapter; I do like them generally and this one is quite straightforward, it is about 4 different people's views on art, on life and on loss and the links are quite straightforward, there are no clever-clever links or devices.
As you read about an Italian artist, discredited by the Communists, a 1960s hippy UK artist, the UK artist's photographer daughter and the blind teenage pupil of the Italian artist, you get a sense of how art can be created, how many different approaches to it there can be. You also see how the will to live and the urge to create ate very closely linked.
I found the end of Annette's story slightly unsatisfying but that didn't spoil it for me.
It would make a great book group book. If anyone else out there can tell me who Annette's attacker was (I know she recognised him but I couldn't work out who it was), or if anyone has views on why Peter didn't tell Lydia about Raymie, and what Dr Dixon was doing to Suzie, then please, let's get a discussion going. -
This novel bummed me out. Having recently read Hall's amazing new story collection and hearing great things from friends about her longer works, I was prepared to find another treasure in How to Paint a Dead Man. Where her sweeping, uniform passages work well in short form, I began to really find them daunting about midway through Dead Man. The novel offers first, second, and close third perspectives on four interconnected characters' lives. Though Hall's fantastic facility with naturalism and knack for inciting sympathy with her worlds still remain, dramatic sentiments and emotional responses often become redundant.
I grew tired of hearing about Annette's mother's disapproval, just as I bored of Susan's melodramatic repetition. By two-thirds through, I didn't need another iteration of Peter and Danny's free spiritedness, nor did I find it intriguing when Giorgio's glass bottles finally made their way into the Caldicutt narrative.
Plenty of reviews I read before picking up Dead Man mentioned its slow burn. I, too, savored the pace for maybe a hundred pages, but after that, it took exponentially more steam to stay engaged each time. It's infrequent that I drop something relatively close to the end, but I realized around page 215 that I simply didn't care to know how the characters' conflicts would end. Partially, this has to do with Hall's disparate timelines which, *SPOILER ALERT,* guarantee that plights like Peter's will end with him, um, at the very least not dying. Threads of supposed tension are often left limp.
I don't think I'll be picking up another of Hall's novels, but if she assembles another set of stories, I'm 100% in. -
I read this because it's about art and was highly recommended by Nina Sankovitch
http://www.readallday.org/
Four characters whose lives interconnect relate their stories in four separate voices. An elderly artist in Italy, a young blind girl, also in Italy, a landscape artist in England, and an art curator in England who is mourning the death of her twin brother. The stories are very moving and there is some majestic prose.
But the novel lost power for me in the scattershot jumping around between voices. Sometimes that approach can work, but in this one, the lives and stories take place at very different times, and are told in different styles. The mourning art curator's story is told in the rarely-used second person narrative, which was kind of interesting. Another is told in first-person, the other two in third person. Anyway... I thought the connective tissue between them got lost. The stories would have held far more power, I think, had each been told in full without all the jumping around. I mean, after cycling through the other three stories, by the time I would come back to the blind girl in Italy, I'd forget, who was Thommaso? Mauri? Sandro?
A book that handled this sort of thing with much more success was The House on Fortune Street. And it did it by telling its four, interconnected stories as full stories unto themselves. -
I really enjoyed ... or is that appreciated ... this book. The interweaving of the lives of four people associated with painting over two countries and several decades is achieved very cleverly with some wonderful description. I especially loved the part where Susan discovered her twin brother had been killed: the evocation of grief has rarely been done better. I also liked the chapters about Annette whose coming to terms with blindness was also described vividly and convincingly [though I was less convinced by the whole "Bestia" thing - have I missed something here?] Peter Caldicutt, too, is very well drawn [sorry for the pun] as the ex-hippie painter who kept to his old principles in middle age.
As with all Sarah Hall's books, this is unusual with a new take on the world and for that should be applauded. It's not the one I've enjoyed most [Haweswater] or found most fascinating [Electric Michaelangelo] but yet again it made me look forward to her next offering.
