![]() Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. ![]() She must first describe the woodwork, the stucco, and especially the “very particular treatment of the shadows” before she reveals that all this work, the product of years of training, was under threat. Paula has an ideal audience-fellow-painters, who will know exactly what having to work by candlelight means-but that doesn’t mean she can skimp on the details. Indeed, we learn the source of the story’s tension before her friends do the actual writer here knows that her reader might need a bit of dramatic nudging to care about wainscoting and celadon, though the words themselves are mesmerizing. Although much of the novel shows Paula painting, we first see her operating as a kind of writer: using language to set the scene and then to slowly and deliberately up the stakes. However, Paula Karst is right if I began that way I would be getting ahead of myself. ![]() Were I to begin with a chronological account, I might narrate how 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, none of whom had heard of de Kerangal, either. Were I to begin this review with panoramic impressions, I might mention the weird refrain that looped in my head-it’s so good it makes me want to puke-while reading de Kerangal’s novels. Instead of panoramic impressions and sweeping narration, instead of a chronological account, she begins by describing the details of Anna Karenina’s sitting room, which she had to finish painting by candlelight after a power failure plunged the sets into darkness the night before the very first day of filming she begins slowly, as though her words escort the image in a simultaneous translation, as though language is what allows us to see, and makes the rooms appear, the cornices and doors, the woodwork, the shape of the wainscoting and outline of the baseboards, the delicacy of the stucco, and from there, the very particular treatment of the shadows that had to stretch out across the walls she lists with precision the range of colors-celadon, pale blue, gold, China White-and bit by bit she gathers speed, forehead high and cheeks flaming, launching into the story of that long night of painting, that mad crunch.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |