02/22/2021
De Kerangal (The Cook) tells an insightful story of a young woman’s exploration of her relationship to art. Paula Karst is a student at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels, where she determines to master the exacting processes of wood graining, marbleizing, and tortoiseshell. Fully immersed in her work, Paula becomes detached from life but eventually bonds with two classmates, including her attractive roommate, Jonas. Later, she builds a career working as a scenic painter on film sets throughout Europe, and keeps in touch with Jonas on the internet. Rather than plot, the book is driven by an extended contemplation of the creative process and what it means to be human. As Paula works on a replica of the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings, Jonas and Paula reunite. Jonas imagines a world without humans, while Paula feels a connection through her art with the Cro-Magnons who made the original cave paintings. What begins as Paula’s personal story expands by the end to a brilliant philosophical study on the origins of human art, capped with a moving epiphanic moment. This perfectly captures a craftsperson’s singular passion. (Apr.)
"So good it makes me want to puke . . . I discovered Painting Time in a bookstore, never having heard of its author, and went on to recommend it widely and increasingly indignantly to many people . . . [Kerangal's] books aren’t just technical portraits but careful, steady re-creations of emotional worlds . . . [Painting Time] derives its power from the precision that accrues within it." —Lauren Oyler, The New Yorker
"There is something magnificently true about De Kerangal’s fiction, which braids technical fluency with winged prose . . . 'Capsules of pure sensation'–it’s a description worth stealing to describe this novel, which is strung together image by beautiful image. This is writing that defies haste, that slows the eye . . . That [De Kerangal's] new novel's painterly resonances feel elemental, rather than effortful, cements her reputation as one of contemporary fiction’s most gifted sentence builders." —Beejay Silcox, The Guardian
"[Decorative painting] is given a thrilling treatment in Maylis de Kerangal’s [Painting Time] . . . Who else writes with such poetry about the tools of trade, and the intricacies of work? Michael Ondaatje springs to mind, but Maylis de Kerangal is mining a rich and individual seam." —Jonathan Gibbs, Times Literary Supplement
"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)
"[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
★ 03/01/2021
As she did with The Cook, award-winning French author de Kerangal offers stunning portraiture suffused with the joy and meaning of work. Paula Karst labors in trompe-l'œil to render wood and stone realistically with paint, and de Kerangal takes great pains to show us how "this average girl, sheltered and predictable (and a little on the lazy side),…this impetuous dabbler…ended up plunging headlong" into a craft that readers will come truly to admire. (The excellent translation helps.) As Paula pursues her studies at Brussels's rigorous Institut de Peinture, her eyes and muscles burning from 18-hour days, then plies her trade at film studios throughout Europe, the author dazzlingly describes the materials and techniques involved with an almost touchable physicality that matches the subject. Meanwhile, Paula comes of age, moving away from her befuddled parents and forging meaningful ties with classmates Kate and Jonas, who recommends her for the job that crowns the last third of the book: helping to create Lascaux IV, which replicates the famous prehistoric caves. Seeing Paula merge with the black deer she re-creates, feeling its fear of the woolly rhinoceros as time drops away, is enough to make one cry. VERDICT There's only one word for it: superbe.
2021-01-13
Three art students at a European college form a bond as they learn the unique, demanding details of their profession.
A novel it may be, but French author de Kerangal’s sensuous, language–relishing, richly evocative new work is less about plot, more an aesthetic appreciation and exploration of one branch of the figurative arts, namely trompe-l’œil painting, “the art of illusion.” The discipline is about detail, texture, and effect and demands exhausting devotion to minutiae, as French student Paula Karst learned at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels in 2008 while also making two firm friendships, one with her flatmate, Jonas, the other with statuesque Kate who bears “a vague resemblance to Anita Ekberg.” As the novel opens, these three are reunited at a bar in Paris, Paula having flown in from a film-set job in Moscow where she's painting Anna Karenina’s sitting room. All-nighters and a rootless existence are the characteristics of their freelance work, which also often means accepting commissions from the one percent. Kate’s current job, for example, is painting a complicated marble effect on a wealthy client’s walls. All three have “learned to glaze, to score, to soften, to stipple, to moiré, to lighten, to create a little iridescence with a polecat-hair round brush,” and it’s this wealth of terms, tones, and applications that fascinate the author. Paula’s career is followed most closely; much of it is spent in Italy, where a transformative leap occurs with her decision to work at Cinecittà film studios. Later, at Lascaux, where Paula is painting a facsimile of the world-revered cave art, the narrative cements the relationship among the work, history, and time.
A curiosity as introspective, finely wrought, and devotedly crafted as the art form it traces.
