STEFAN HERTMANS is an internationally acclaimed Flemish author. For more than twenty years he was a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, where he wrote novels, poems, essays, and plays. War and Turpentine was awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize in 2014.
Translated from the Dutch by David McKay.
Winner of the AKO Literature Prize
Winner of the Culture Prize of the Flemish Community 2014
Winner of the INKTAAP Prize
Shortlisted for the Golden Owl in Belgium
Shortlisted for the Libris Literature Prize 2014 in the
Netherlands
Shortlisted for the Premio Strega Europe in Italy International
Praise for War and Turpentine:
"Potent. . . . Harrowing. . . . Built to last. . . . War and
Turpentine is billed as a novel, but that's hardly the word for it.
It's an uncanny work of historical reconstruction. . . . a gritty
yet melancholy account of war and memory and art that may remind
some readers of the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald."
--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"A masterly book about memory, art, love and war. . . . Not since
reading W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn have I been so taken with
a demonstration of the storytelling confluence of fiction and
nonfiction. . . . War and Turpentine affords the sensory pleasures
of a good novel while also conveying the restlessness of memoir
through its probing, uncertain narrator, who raids the family
pantry in search of existential meaning. . . . One of the triumphs
of War and Turpentine is that the style of delivery is perfectly
suited to its central concerns--the flux of memory and the
unspooling of a human life. . . . In a world of novels with
overdetermined, linear plotlines--their chapters like so many
boxcars on a train--War and Turpentine delivers a blast of
narrative fresh air." --The New York Times Book Review"A rich
fictionalized memoir. . . . Death, destruction, obligation,
duty--Urbain faces them all and yet he still finds joy in life."
--The Times (UK) "A future classic. . . . 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, with inset essays,
meditations, pictures. It seems to be aching to be called
'Sebaldian, ' and earns the epithet glowingly. . . . In David
McKay's lyrical translation, every detail has the heightened
luminosity of poetry. . . . The book has such convincing density of
detail, with the quiddities of a particular life so truthfully
rendered, that I was reminded of a phrase from Middlemarch 'an idea
wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of
objects.' Hertmans' achievement is exactly that." --Neel Mukherjee,
The Guardian "Poignantly nuanced . . . readers will thank an
exceptional novelist (and a skilled translator)." --Booklist
(Starred Review) "Wonderful, full of astonishingly vivid moments of
powerful imagery. . . . moving moments of mysterious beauty. . . .
Hertmans. . .brilliantly captures the intractable reality of a
complex man." --Sunday Times (UK) "Hertmans follows in his
grandfather's footsteps in this brilliant and moving imagined
reconstruction, his imagination beautifully filling the gaps as he
describes 'the battle between the transcendent, which he yearned
for, and the memory of death and destruction, which held him in its
clutches.'" --Sunday Express (UK) "A mesmerising portrait of an
artist as a young man, a significant contribution to First World
War literature and a brilliant evocation of a vanished world."
--Herald (UK) "With War and Turpentine, Stefan Hertmans has written
one of the most moving books of the year." --De Standaard
"An exceptionally rich and rewarding piece of writing. It is hard
to imagine a wiser and more important book at this point of time."
--Stavanger Aftenblad "A gem of a novel, full of history, full of
life, full of wisdom." --Nederlands Dagblad "Recalls the great W.
G. Sebald." --Espresso "War and Turpentine is a masterfully written
story of a dramatic life, a piece of Ghent family history, and a
tribute to Hertmans' mysterious grandfather. . . . Beautiful."
--NRC Handelsblad "A masterpiece." --Humo "An unvarnished and
moving tribute to [Hertmans'] grandfather." --De Groene
Amsterdammer "A wide domestic fresco which retraces Flanders'
spiritual geography, straddling between two worlds: the world of
honor and innocence and the world of the horrors of war." --Alias
"War and Turpentine is literature at its best: giving voice to the
voiceless." --Dagblad De Limburger "A loving memorial. Hertmans
paints in words, each one carefully weighed, with sublime
composition and stylistic ingenuity." --Noordhollands Dagblad
"A successful mix of memoir and fiction." --Il Manifesto "Using the
methods of narrative collage. . . 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. .
. . 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." --Kirkus "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."
--Library Journal
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