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War and turpentine a novel

"An international best seller: a vivid, masterly novel about a Flemish man who reconstructs his grandfather's story--his hopes, loves, and art, all disrupted by the First World War--from the unflinching notebooks he filled with pieces of his life. The life of Urbain Martien--artist, soldie...

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Main Author: Hertmans, Stefan (Author)
Other Authors: McKay, David, 1973- (Translator)
Format: Books Print Book
Language: English
Dutch
Published: New York : Pantheon Books, 2016.
Edition: First American edition.
Subjects:
Grandfathers > Fiction.
Grandsons > Fiction.
Life change events > Fiction.
World War, 1914-1918 > Influence > Fiction.
Historical fiction.
Domestic fiction.
Summary: "An international best seller: a vivid, masterly novel about a Flemish man who reconstructs his grandfather's story--his hopes, loves, and art, all disrupted by the First World War--from the unflinching notebooks he filled with pieces of his life. 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. His grandson, a writer, retells his story, the notebooks giving him the impetus to imagine his way into the locked chambers of Urbain's memory. He vividly 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; 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 story, Urbain's 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.)"--Provided by publisher.
Item Description: Subtitle from cover.
Previously published in Dutch as Oorlog en terpentijn (Amsterdam : De Bezige Bij, 2013); English translation originally published by Harvill Secker in 2016, in London,
Physical Description: 290 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
ISBN: 9781101874028
1101874023
Author Notes: STEFAN HERTMANS is an internationally acclaimed Flemish author. For more than twenty years he was a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, where he wrote novels, poems, essays, and plays. War and Turpentine was awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize in 2014.

Translated from the Dutch by David McKay.

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