War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans, David McKay ISBN 9781101874035, 1101874031, B0180T0IS6 instant download

War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans, David McKay ISBN 9781101874035, 1101874031, B0180T0IS6 instant download

Stefan Hertmans’ imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the 20th century; is a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war. Translated by David McKay.He was born the son of a struggling church painter, who died young. Aged only 13, Urbain begins work in the inferno of an iron foundry. Then comes the Great War, and brutal frontline conflict that will haunt him all his days. Nor can he ever forget his great love, Maria Emelia, who dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic, soon after their wedding. The rest is not quite silence, but a second marriage with a sad secret at its heart, and the consolations found in art and painting."War and Turpentine is the astonishing result of Hertmans’ reckoning with his grandfather’s diaries. It is a book that lies at the crossroads of novel, biography, autobiography and history ... Narratives of the first world war are not exactly thin on the ground, but even with such bristling competition it is undeniable that these 90 pages are some of the most distilled expression of unremitting horror ... has all the markings of a future classic."  -  Neel Mukherjee, The GuardianStefan Hertmans works include poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories and a handbook on the history of art. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, at the Sorbonne, the Universities of Vienna, Berlin and Mexico City, at The Library of Congress in Washington, and University College London.