War and Turpentine
Published on 30. June 2016
304 pages
978-1-4735-1169-9 (ISBN)
Description
WINNER OF THE VONDEL PRIZE 2017
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 in the New York Times
Shortly before his death, Stefan Hertmans' grandfather Urbain Martien gave his grandson a set of notebooks containing the detailed memories of his life. He grew up in poverty around 1900, the son of a struggling church painter who died young, and went to work in an iron foundry at only 13. Afternoons spent with his father at work on a church fresco were Urbain's heaven; the iron foundry an inferno.
During the First World War, Urbain was on the front line confronting the invading Germans, and ever after he is haunted by events he can never forget. The war ends and he marries his great love, Maria Emelia, but she dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic. Urbain mourns her bitterly for the rest of his life but, like the obedient soldier he is, he marries her sister at her parents' bidding. The rest is not quite silence, but a marriage with a sad secret at its heart, and the consolations found in art and painting. War and Turpentine is the imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century; a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 in the New York Times
Shortly before his death, Stefan Hertmans' grandfather Urbain Martien gave his grandson a set of notebooks containing the detailed memories of his life. He grew up in poverty around 1900, the son of a struggling church painter who died young, and went to work in an iron foundry at only 13. Afternoons spent with his father at work on a church fresco were Urbain's heaven; the iron foundry an inferno.
During the First World War, Urbain was on the front line confronting the invading Germans, and ever after he is haunted by events he can never forget. The war ends and he marries his great love, Maria Emelia, but she dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic. Urbain mourns her bitterly for the rest of his life but, like the obedient soldier he is, he marries her sister at her parents' bidding. The rest is not quite silence, but a marriage with a sad secret at its heart, and the consolations found in art and painting. War and Turpentine is the imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century; a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war.
Reviews / Votes
War and Turpentine is the astonishing result of Hertmans' reckoning with his grandfather's diaries. It is a book that lies at the crossroads of novel, biography, autobiography and history... It seems aching to be called 'Sebaldian', and earns the epithet glowingly... In McKay's lyrical translation, every detail has the heightened luminosity of poetry... War and Turpentine has all the marking of a future classic. -- Neel Mukherjee * Guardian * Staggering richness of language; brutal, deep, haunting. Mesmerising from page one... If you think you've had enough of the muddy gore of Flanders Fields, believe me you haven't, not until you've read this book. -- Simon Schama Masterpiece, an accolade often casually bestowed, really does describe this magnificent book... A haunting blend of fact and fiction... Page after page holds you rapt with admiration for both Hertmans' writing and his hero. -- Peter Kemp * Sunday Times, Book of the Year * Hertmans writes with an eloquence reminiscent of W.G. Sebald... a masterly book about memory, art, love and war. * New York Times 10 Best Books of 2016 * A lovingly reimagined life of an ordinary man whose life was for ever marked by the First World War. Fine prose. * The Economist, Book of the Year * Wonderful, full of astonishingly vivid moments of powerful imagery... Hertmans's book is something else again: it has a quietly resonant personal epic quality that dwarfs all around it. -- David Mills * Sunday Times * Skilful and lyrical reconstruction of a life transformed by war, love and art... It is not often a book succeeds on many levels, but War and Turpentine manages to be a mesmerising portrait of an artist as a young man, a significant contribution to First World War literature and a brilliant evocation of a vanished world. -- Malcolm Forbes * Herald * Hertmans follows in his grandfather's footsteps in this brilliant and moving imagined reconstruction, his imagination beautifully filling the gaps as he describes "the battle between the transcendent, which he yearned for, and the memory of death and destruction, which held him in its clutches." -- Eithne Farry * Daily Express * A masterly treatise on the interconnections of life, art, memory, and heartbreaking love...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. * Publishers Weekly * War and Turpentine is an exquisite, loving reconstruction of a man's interior life, at once deeply personal and yet so evocative of many of his generation, affected by the long shadow of war. In beautiful, glimmering prose, Hertmans shows us how our experiences shape us all, and how, even in a life of sorrow and heartache, dignity can be found. * Dovegreyreader *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Random House (Digital)
File size
5,20 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-4735-1169-9 (9781473511699)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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Persons
Stefan Hertmans (Author)
Stefan Hertmans is the prizewinning author of many literary works, including poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories and a handbook on the history of art. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, at the Sorbonne, and at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. His first novel to be translated into English, War and Turpentine, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and was chosen as a book of the year in The Times, Sunday Times, and The Economist, and as one of the ten best books of the year in the New York Times.
Stefan Hertmans is the prizewinning author of many literary works, including poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories and a handbook on the history of art. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, at the Sorbonne, and at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. His first novel to be translated into English, War and Turpentine, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and was chosen as a book of the year in The Times, Sunday Times, and The Economist, and as one of the ten best books of the year in the New York Times.
