War and Turpentine, Paperback

Descriere

Longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award The life of Urbain Martien--artist, soldier, survivor of World War I--lies con-tained 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; mar-rying 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 Renais-sance fresco, War and Turpentine paints an ex-traordinary portrait of one man's life and re-veals how that life echoed down through the generations.