How to Paint a Dead Man: A Novel - Softcover

9780061430459: How to Paint a Dead Man: A Novel
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The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall, "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain's young novelists" (The Guardian), delivers "a maddeningly enticing read . . . an amazing feat of literary engineering" (The Independent on Sunday).

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About the Author:

Sarah Hall was born in 1974 in Cumbria, England. She received a master of letters in creative writing from Scotland's St. Andrews University and has published four novels. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (overall winner, Best First Novel) and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award. The Electric Michelangelo was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Eurasia Region), and the Prix Femina Étranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Daughters of the North won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. How to Paint a Dead Man was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction. In 2013 Hall was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, a prize awarded every ten years, and she won the BBC National Short Story Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

From The Washington Post:
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Dara Horn In this gorgeous still life of a book, Sarah Hall gives us four lives -- two in 1960s Italy and two in contemporary Britain -- each narrated in a different voice. All are artists confronting mortal peril: Susan is a young British photographer mourning her twin brother, Giorgio is an Italian still-life painter facing terminal illness, Peter is a British landscape artist who becomes physically trapped under a boulder he is painting, and Annette is a blind Italian flower girl who once loved to draw and whose beauty makes her a target for assault. Their stories appear unrelated until the connections between them slowly unfold. Susan is Peter's daughter, Peter corresponded with Giorgio, Giorgio was Annette's art teacher, and Annette's connection to Susan becomes clear at the book's end. These links become especially evocative as the reader recognizes many connections the characters cannot see. Peter's disastrous hippie past resonates with the causes of Susan's brother's death. Annette's descent into blindness is a thematic echo of Giorgio's youthful sin, when he failed to see how his acceptance of fascist sponsorship enabled the murderers of his Jewish wife. Susan's grief evokes the book's title, drawn from a classic artist's manual used by both Peter and Giorgio. The effect is to make us wonder about the many moments of insight we miss in our own lives. After hearing from a friend, Giorgio says, "I am not lonely, but receiving such a letter reminds me of the other souls in this world whom I might have liked to meet." The book's great triumph is that we finish it feeling the same way. The downside of the novel's delicate architecture is that it lacks narrative drive. Even when Peter is trapped on a mountainside miles from help, the situation is played for profundity rather than suspense. But Hall has a poet's gift, and this novel is best enjoyed as a prose poem whose blindingly beautiful insights gradually accrue. Her portraits of these artists are captured moments, with each life slowed to a stop by loss and pain. She has made visible to us what we would otherwise be too blind to see in our mortal lives: the ever-present shadow of eternity.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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  • PublisherHarper Perennial
  • Publication date2009
  • ISBN 10 0061430455
  • ISBN 13 9780061430459
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages289
  • Rating

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