The underpainter - Hardcover

Urquhart, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771086644 ISBN 13: 9780771086649

Publisher: Viking, 1997

Synopsis

The Underpainter is a novel of interwoven lives in which the world of art collides with the realm of human emotion. It is the story of Austin Fraser, an American painter now in his later years, who is haunted by memories of those whose lives most deeply touched his own, including a young Canadian soldier and china painter and the beautiful model who becomes Austin’s mistress. Spanning decades, the setting moves from upstate New York to the northern shores of two Great Lakes; from France in World War One to New York City in the ’20s and ’30s. Brilliantly depicting landscape and the geography of the imagination, The Underpainter is Jane Urquhart’s most accomplished novel to date.

About this title

Review

Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter is a very modern novel preoccupied with the power of the past. Austin Fraser, born in 1894, is a modernist who relentlessly paints over his canvases, much as he tries to eradicate people from his life. Though he insists that he has forgone emotion and love, when he receives news of a women he once knew, he can no longer stop memories from encroaching. Urquhart's novel ranges from late-century Rochester, New York, on to Ontario then Paris and New York City. Not since Patrick White's The Vivisector have there been such disturbing scenes of the painter in action: "I believed that I was drawing-- literally drawing--everything out of her, that his act of making art filled the space around me so completely there would be no other impressions possible beyond the ones I controlled." Intriguingly, by exposing Fraser's emptiness, Urquhart makes us pity him. Though she has said that she was "quite angry with Austin" while writing The Underpainter, the author's language incises his reluctant humanity and turns his life into a work of art.

Review

"Her language is pure, dazzling in its precision, like the etching of ice on glass."-"Globe and Mail" "A painterly masterwork...poignant in each of its several landscapes and subtle in tracing the mingled nuances of love and pain."-Kirkus Reviews "The detached eye of the narrator never falters, though passion hums beneath the surface like some vast primeval beast beneath the ice." -"The Independent" (U.K.) "Writing with the eye of a painter, Urquhart transforms the energy of the world into enduring literature."-"Kitchener-Waterloo Record" "Urquhart is one of Canada's most accomplished and interesting writers." -"Edmonton Journal" "Original and dazzling, radiant and quietly perceptive, Urquhart's new novel delights the senses even as it astonishes the mind...."-"London Free Press" "A lyrical novel with a deep, unsentimental connection to ordinary life...[Urquhart's] language is vivid enough to take your breath away."

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0771086644
• ISBN 13: 9780771086649
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352