Synopses & Reviews
A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year
The life of Urban 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.
Review
“Potent... Harrowing... Built to last... War and Turpentine is billed as a novel, but that’s hardly the word for it. It’s an uncanny work of historical reconstruction... a gritty yet melancholy account of war and memory and art that may remind some readers of the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald.” Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Review
“War and Turpentine is literature at its best: giving voice to the voiceless.” Dagblad De Limburger
Review
“A wide domestic fresco which retraces Flanders’ spiritual geography, straddling between two worlds: the world of honor and innocence and the world of the horrors of war.” Alias
Review
“An exceptionally rich and rewarding piece of writing. It is hard to imagine a wiser and more important book at this point of time.” Stavanger Aftenblad
Review
“Wonderful, full of astonishingly vivid moments of powerful imagery... moving moments of mysterious beauty... Hertmans... brilliantly captures the intractable reality of a complex man.“ Sunday Times (UK)
Review
“Poignantly nuanced… readers will thank an exceptional novelist (and a skilled translator).” Booklist (Starred Review)
Synopsis
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)
About the Author
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.