How to Paint a Dead Man
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon.
4.1 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
304 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
June 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0571224890 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon.
Reviews
The Sunday Telegraph
Lucy Beresford
"Hall is as scrupulous debating the artistic impulse as when taking the odd swipe at art-world snobbery, or paying attention to insects with 'wings like oat husks’. And her verbal depiction of fictional art never stales. Some of the narrative strands do lose a little of their momentum and pungency. But overall this deeply sensual novel is what you rarely find – an intelligent page-turner which, perversely, you also want to read slowly to savour Hall’s luscious way of looking at the world."
31/05/2009
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The Times
Natalie Sandison
"Hall's writing manages to combine acute sensitivity and daring. She experiments with voice and form, giving each of her characters a distinctive means of addressing the reader... Hall manages to juggle the individual trajectories brilliantly. Her writing is visceral and engaging, and the emotional lives of her characters are skilfully realised in this bright weave of disparate voices"
04/06/2009
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The Sunday Times
Trevor Lewis
"It is a skilful, not to mention brave writer who eschews conventional narrative structure in favour of impressionistic tableaux, yet still manages to sustain a compelling emotional arc. Hall does precisely that, her delicate brush strokes delicately adding layer upon layer to her characters and, in the process, creating a memorable novel."
19/07/2009
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Times Literary Supplement
Tom Bailey
"...rich and intriguing... Hall's text nurtures an underlying sadnes that there is in humankind a void, an emptiness which is briefly masked by mental images before being extinguished by biological decay... Yet the novel's central idea -- that in nature morte, the frozen stillness of things (the ambiguous appaearance of live objects as dead), we can begin to comprehend the nature of the living -- glazes the writing with an affirmative strength."
05/06/2009
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The Independent
Jonathan Beckman
"[A] finely crafted novel... If Hall has a fault, it is a tendency to abstraction and overearnestness when talking about the everyday. She accomplishes, however, the conceptual ambitions of the novel with great skill: it is a tough and unsentimental exploration of the way art feeds on the dead. What we call still life, the French call nature morte."
26/06/2009
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The Literary Review
Joanna Kavenna
"This is a delicate series of character portraits, and a nuanced meditation on love and death, on the crazy struggle inherent to ‘being here’. There is the struggle for bare existence, and then, perhaps crazier still, the battle for happiness in the face of the bizarre conditions of life, the lengthening shadows and the prospect of annihilation or something equally unknowable. ‘Human beings can’t be given happiness, after all. They have to fight for it,’ Hall writes, at the end of her unusual and beautiful book."
01/06/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
"Sarah Hall writes a fine, vivid prose of exceptional poetic intensity and there are passages in this novel, in particular the sections in Annette’s voice, of luminous beauty. These chapters have a strange originality that is not so marked elsewhere. There is the faint sense that the author cherishes her other characters just a fraction more than is good for them – the substance of their thoughts on art and life lag slightly behind the ravishing prose in which they are expressed."
08/06/2009
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The Financial Times
Meg Rosoff
"How to Paint a Dead Man sets out to tell a big story about art and consolation and is often affecting. With nothing but the writer’s dexterity to keep the reader engaged, the book occasionally falters. Hall’s attachment to the poetic means that our down-to-earth landscape painter lies with his ankle trapped under a boulder, musing on the nature of existence for nearly 200 pages before he thinks to pull his foot out of his boot. But it is the minor characters – drawn by the author in a few deft lines – who come to life most effectively."
15/06/2009
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The Guardian
Sarah Dunant
"Hall builds her characters as a pointillist uses paint: intense vivid dots; instances, images, observations, some precise and punchy, others digressing into meditations on life, death, art and creativity. How far you revel in this mix of detail and tangential thinking, or yearn for a more dynamic structure and pace says as much about how you read novels as about how Hall writes them, but there is no denying the confidence of her style and her emotional intelligence."
06/06/2009
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