June 27, 2016
In this autobiographical novel, Flemish essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright Hertmans draws on his extensive fine arts background in a stirring remembrance of his grandfather Urbain Martien—World War I hero and devoted painter—to create a masterly treatise on the interconnections of life, art, memory, and heartbreaking love. Shortly before his grandfather’s death in 1981, the narrator inherits the notebooks that Martien wrote in the last two decades of his life. “I wasted precious years diligently working on countless other projects and keeping a safe distance from his notebooks: those silent, patient witnesses that enclosed his painstaking, graceful pre-war handwriting like a humble shrine,” Hertmans writes of his reticence to retell his grandfather’s extraordinary life. But the notebooks provide insight into Martien’s many facets, not least his childhood as the son of Franciscus, a talented but poor church painter, his heroism, and a lifetime paying obeisance to the capricious gods of art. In the two bookend sections, Hertmans demonstrates a painter’s eye for the smallest detail, gracefully melding art criticism and philosophy. The book’s middle section focuses on the war. Variously chaotic, horrifying, and hauntingly beautiful, Martien’s war experience ends with his declaration of love for Maria Emilia, a woman from the neighborhood he watched from his bedroom while he convalesced, physically and mentally, from the war that shattered his life. Hertmans’s prose, with a deft translation from McKay, works with the same full palette as Urbain Martien’s paintings: vivid, passionate—and in the end, life-affirming.
June 1, 2016
Flemish author Hertmans' latest offers a grandson's often haunting reconstruction of his grandfather's life.Shortly before his death in 1981, Urbain Martien--an artist, widower, survivor of many a brutal campaign in World War I--left his grandson, a young writer, two notebooks in which he'd recorded (mostly) his harrowing tales of his experiences as a soldier. Decades later, the grandson uses those notebooks as a way to understand, even to reinhabit, his grandfather's life. Using the methods of narrative collage--excerpts from the notebooks (possibly reconfigured), interpretations of his grandfather's paintings (both originals and copies of masters), meditations on childhood incidents he didn't fully understand at the time, decipherings of photographs (these deployed in the text in a W.G. Sebald way), archival digging, visits to various locales of importance to Urbain, and affectionate detective work--the writer evokes his grandfather's life in full: his impecunious childhood, early work at a relative's smithy and then at a foundry that left his back scarred by red-hot tailings, his asthmatic painter-father's early death, his grotesque experiences in the trenches interspersed with hospital stays during the war. Soon after, Urbain's first love was cut short by the influenza epidemic, after which he dutifully proposed to his beloved's older sister, who dutifully acquiesced, and for the next four decades they lived together in harmony and respect and ambient disappointment: his at the loss of his love, for whom his passion never abated, and hers at having to play the role of poor substitute to her long-dead sister. The book is especially eloquent and persuasive about the role that art--especially painting but also music and, by extension, narrative--played in Urbain's life and in the life of the grandson who is his visitant and scribe and portraitist. And Ghent as setting is beautifully portrayed, too. Hertmans provides a richly detailed excavation of a life and a thoughtful exploration of familial memory. Not easy, but worth the effort.
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Starred review from July 1, 2016
On medical leave from the hellish violence of WWI, Urbain Martien wanders into a small chapel where he unexpectedly finds the face of his own father incorporated into the altar mural. In this minor episode, Hertmans distills the larger dynamic governing a novel in which the mysteries of art illuminate the complexities of life. Complemented by photos and reproduced paintings, the poignantly nuanced narrative unfolds Urbain's life through the eyes of a grandson poring over his grandfather's candidly autobiographical notebooks and his more cryptically autobiographical paintings. Clue by clue, notebooks and paintings reveal that alongside his visible war wounds, Urbain carries the invisible wounds of an artist forced to exchange paint and canvas for helmet and rifle. Subtly hinted at in his postwar paintings, another lacerating exchange scars his soul when the love of his life suddenly dies, leaving him to marry her frigid older sister. Retracing the private pilgrimage his grandfather sustained through religious devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows and imaginative devotion to Schubert and Beethoven, van Dyck and Velazquez, the grandson finally reaches the peace that accompanies hard-won understanding. Appreciative readers will thank an exceptional novelist (and a skilled translator) for their share of that peace, that understanding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)
August 1, 2016
Acclaimed Flemish novelist, poet, and playwright Hertmans won the 2014 AKO Literature Prize for this work, an often poetic account of an author's attempt to reconstruct his grandfather's life based on journals that the grandfather left behind. Covering Urbain Martien's life up to World War I, Part 1 reads more like memoir than fiction, as the author ruminates on his ancestor's early life in Ghent, Belgium, while reflecting upon his own. Some readers will find Part 2 more compelling, as it deals especially with Urbain's experiences as a solder during World War I. Related in the present tense, the narrative is conveyed through its subject's eyes and ends in 1919. In these pages you'll find some of the most graphic accounts of war: "[T]he rumbling of heavy guns...was like the growl of some gargantuan animal...on the horizon, opening its hungry jaws to devour us. We were headed back to hell." Photographs throughout help illustrate the text, and McKay's translation leaves nothing to be desired. VERDICT This work will be especially enjoyed by readers with an interest in recent European culture and history. [See Prepub Alert, 3/1/16.]--Edward B. Cone, New York
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 1, 2016
A multi-award winner in Europe that sold 200,000 copies in the Netherlands and Belgium alone, this broad-canvas work features a Flemish man reconstructing the life of his grandfather. From modest retoucher of church paintings to worker in a dangerous foundry to drafted soldier who married his beloved's sister, Urbain Martien has seen his life and dreams flattened. For readers of good literature and war stories, too.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.