Painting Time
A Novel
ISBN10: 1250829550
ISBN13: 9781250829559
Trade Paperback
240 Pages
$17.00
In Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time, we are introduced to the burgeoning young artist Paula Karst, who is enrolled at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels. Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she’s painting—replicating a wood’s essence or a marble’s wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art.
With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula’s apprenticeship, punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand finale: a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the world’s most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human cultural expression.
An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, Painting Time is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.
Reviews
Praise for Painting Time
"[A] sensuous, language–relishing, richly evocative new work . . . A curiosity as introspective, finely wrought, and devotedly crafted as the art form it traces."—Kirkus Reviews
"Celebrated French novelist Kerangal . . . is a master of the metaphysical bildungsroman . . . [An] enthralling tale of vocation, discovery, and love . . . Kerangal balances the gloriously sensuous with the deeply reflective in an exquisite and omniscient streaming narration as she explores the title's implications . . . Kerangal’s elegant, sexy, subtly Proustian, and fluidly dimensional drama of discipline and passion, imitation and imagination is resplendently evocative and exhilarating."—Donna Seaman, Booklist
"As she did with The Cook, award-winning French author de Kerangal offers stunning portraiture suffused with the joy and meaning of work . . . There's only one word for it: superbe."—Library Journal (starred review)
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
Imbricata
Now let’s talk a little about the rue du Métal. Let us see Paula arriving in front of Number 30 bis that September day in 2007, stepping back onto the sidewalk to cast her eyes up and take in the façade—this...