a lifestyle blog for book lovers
Menu
Painting Time
Fall under the spell of a master craftsman in this breathless French coming of age novel. This is the story of Paula, a once-floundering French student who stumbles into her calling almost by accident, and enrolls to study trompe l’oeil, or “the art of illusion,” in Brussels. In her distinctive impressionistic style, de Kerangal invites us to accompany Paula as she throws herself into her craft and learns to flawlessly imitate rare and expensive materials with her brushstrokes—marble, tortoiseshell, the heart grain of oak. As Paula finds work abroad as a decorative painter—in studios and on film sets in Paris, Moscow, and Italy—she wrestles with the meaning of her work, and what to do about the relationships she left behind. To sound like a total nerd: I couldn’t get enough of de Kerangal’s voice.
About the Book
Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by The Guardian | The Millions
An aesthetic and existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter
In Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time, we are introduced to the burgeoning young artist Paula Karst, who is enrolled at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels. Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she’s painting—replicating a wood’s essence or a marble’s wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art.
With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula’s apprenticeship, punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand finale: a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the world’s most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human cultural expression.
An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, Painting Time is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.
Other books in "Books in translation"
Look Inside
