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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
Сјајна књига! Аутор нам предочава дневнике/мемоаре свога деде, човека уметничког сензибилитета, али огрубелог и суздржаног, обликованог сиромаштвом и оскудицом у детињству и, потом, ратним страхотама Првог светског рата у младићком добу. Највећи део чине управо описи бесмисленим ратовањем исцрпљене војске и ужасима који се око њих и у њима дешавају. Можда то и није најоригиналнија тема, али ионако је сваки рат исти - најдубљи кал, морални суноврат и смрт.
Уосталом, следећа реченица из романа то потврђује:
"Моја прича постаје монотона, као што и рат постаје монотон, као што и смрт постаје монотона, као што наша мржња према Немцима постаје монотона, као што сам живот постаје монотон и на крају нам се згади."
Све препоруке.
Уосталом, следећа реченица из романа то потврђује:
"Моја прича постаје монотона, као што и рат постаје монотон, као што и смрт постаје монотона, као што наша мржња према Немцима постаје монотона, као што сам живот постаје монотон и на крају нам се згади."
Све препоруке.
Ik ben zeer bevooroordeeld aan dit boek begonnen. De zoveelste loopgravenroman, dacht ik. Maar Hertmans schrijft zo mooi en ontroerend het relaas van zijn grootvader neer, dat ik zelfs van een meesterwerk durf spreken. Komt in mijn top 10 aller tijden!
War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans is is part history, part biography, and part autobiography all compiled as a novel. It is the portrait of a man, an artist by choice and a soldier by necessity. The descriptive narration conjures up vivid images of time and place. The descriptive narration and the multiple narrators, however, also create distance between reader and character, making it more difficult to engage with the story.
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2016/08/war-turpentine.html.
Reviewed for the Penguin First to Read program.
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2016/08/war-turpentine.html.
Reviewed for the Penguin First to Read program.
I loved this book! It had a slow start for me, maybe because it's translated from Dutch and I had to really get the feel for the author's style. Around page 100 or so, though, I started to feel the rhythm of the book click with me, and I read the rest of it in one day.
It's a beautifully written combination of personal history, speculation, and nostalgic reminiscence, interspersed with some very interesting WWI memories. Highly recommend!
It's a beautifully written combination of personal history, speculation, and nostalgic reminiscence, interspersed with some very interesting WWI memories. Highly recommend!
voor school. Het is erg mooi geschreven en je krijgt een duidelijk beeld over eind 19e eeuw en de eerste wereldoorlog. Ik had wel iets meer verwacht, ik vond hem een beetje meh.
In my view, some books emphasize the transient nature of life and there are others that focus on the importance of the past. The former might trivialize everything and the latter emphasizes a few important things while ignoring the rest. ‘War and Turpentine’ takes a different route by emphasizing the transience and beauty in an individual life, a life that was remarkable in itself, but did not leave a permanent mark. The author does this by revisiting and reconstructing his grandfather’s life using a combination of his grandfather’s notes, his memories, talking to others, and revisiting the places that were part of his grandfather’s life. The book is categorized as a novel, but it relies heavily on real life.
The exploration of the past and the use of memory reminds one of Sebald, but the use of old diaries and trying to stay close to the problems of the subject reminds me of Stegner.
Mr. Martien, the author’s grandfather, was a decorated soldier who grew up impoverished and wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps as a painter. He led a hard but admirable life. While his grandson succeeds in showcasing the beauty in life while acknowledging the impermanence of life, he might have also ensured that Mr. Martien’s life lingers with us longer and brighter.
The author portrays this combination of beauty and transience of life in many ways using his reconstruction of his grandfather’s life as a canvas, while not looking past him. Here are a few of them. He explores the role of objects that play a role, become part of us, lead our memories, and even live across generations and are gone. He points both to the beauty in remembering things and the unreliability of memory. But he also speaks about the power of certain incidents in shaping our memory and hidden lives. He shows how the journey from being alive and present to the dead and forgotten is not straight but can traverse multiple unexpected ways (One of the most remarkable scenes was when his grandfather goes looking for the works of his own father’s fresco works in Liverpool. His father was a painter who lived a short and sad life who spent a short time in Liverpool far away from their home in Belgium. He finds a fresco where his father had used his own face in the fresco, immortalizing himself at least for a time, but where no one would have recognized him). His curiosity on motivations and reasons why certain things occurred the way they did shows how we will never have the complete picture.
His deep exploration of all this does make me wonder if I am guilty of paying too little attention to my past? Or is he guilty of obsessing over his past too much? But in any case, it is enjoyable to explore the thoughts of someone whose attitude to the past is very different from oneself.
The book starts with the author cleverly bringing us as coconspirators in his journey to reconstruct the life of his grandfather from the diaries and other recollections using a variety of approaches. The latter half is written as a story of Mr. Martien’s war life. It works without appearing as wild swings within 300 pages.
Overall, this is a wonderful book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading and thinking out in between. The book does require us to invest time in thinking about the structure and intent but does pay many times over.
The exploration of the past and the use of memory reminds one of Sebald, but the use of old diaries and trying to stay close to the problems of the subject reminds me of Stegner.
Mr. Martien, the author’s grandfather, was a decorated soldier who grew up impoverished and wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps as a painter. He led a hard but admirable life. While his grandson succeeds in showcasing the beauty in life while acknowledging the impermanence of life, he might have also ensured that Mr. Martien’s life lingers with us longer and brighter.
The author portrays this combination of beauty and transience of life in many ways using his reconstruction of his grandfather’s life as a canvas, while not looking past him. Here are a few of them. He explores the role of objects that play a role, become part of us, lead our memories, and even live across generations and are gone. He points both to the beauty in remembering things and the unreliability of memory. But he also speaks about the power of certain incidents in shaping our memory and hidden lives. He shows how the journey from being alive and present to the dead and forgotten is not straight but can traverse multiple unexpected ways (One of the most remarkable scenes was when his grandfather goes looking for the works of his own father’s fresco works in Liverpool. His father was a painter who lived a short and sad life who spent a short time in Liverpool far away from their home in Belgium. He finds a fresco where his father had used his own face in the fresco, immortalizing himself at least for a time, but where no one would have recognized him). His curiosity on motivations and reasons why certain things occurred the way they did shows how we will never have the complete picture.
His deep exploration of all this does make me wonder if I am guilty of paying too little attention to my past? Or is he guilty of obsessing over his past too much? But in any case, it is enjoyable to explore the thoughts of someone whose attitude to the past is very different from oneself.
The book starts with the author cleverly bringing us as coconspirators in his journey to reconstruct the life of his grandfather from the diaries and other recollections using a variety of approaches. The latter half is written as a story of Mr. Martien’s war life. It works without appearing as wild swings within 300 pages.
Overall, this is a wonderful book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading and thinking out in between. The book does require us to invest time in thinking about the structure and intent but does pay many times over.
Het eerste helft van dit boek vond ik ontzettend zwaar om doorheen te komen. Ik genoot er wel van, en ik vond het verhaal ook echt erg mooi, maar ik werd te erg afgeleid door school etc. om me er goed op te kunnen concentreren en het verhaal ten volle te waarderen. De tweede helft van dit verhaal heb ik in een zit achter elkaar gelezen. Door een vlucht van 6 uur werd ik gedwongen om verder te gaan en werd ik ook niet afgeleid, perfect dus. Deze zit was erg zwaar, vooral vanwege alle informatie die in elke zin is verwerkt. Het verhaal zelf is natuurlijk ook niet erg licht. De tweede helft heb ik veel en veel meer kunnen meekeijgen en waarderen dan de eerste. De volle emotie en ervaringen die erin gelegd waren kwamen eindelijk aan. En toen ik begon te lezen in het laatste deel van het boek, waar de kleinzoon verteld, na de geschreven verhalen van Urbain, begon ik diepe sympathie, medeleiden en bewondering te ontwikkelen voor Urbain. Ik vond het heel mooi dat dit verhaal afgesloten werd met visies om liefde die uiteindelijk allemaal teruggekoppelt werden aan de schilderwerken van Urbain. De allerlaatste passage, waarin Urbain sterft en in de hemel terecht komt, gaf je kippenvel. "Sergent-major Marsjèn?' Vraagt de Heilige Petrus ten slotte, bladerend in de ellenlange namenlijst van de vuurkruisers. 'Non, mon commandant. Je m'appelle Martien, pas Marsjèn, à vos ordres.' Hij salueert." Hiermee komt het hele verhaal 'full circle' en laat het precies zien dat Urbain nooit zijn onderdanigheid en trouw kwijt is geraakt. Zoals Jan zelf schreef over zijn grootvader: " de zuivere naïveling die mijn grootste bewondering wegdroeg omdat hij geen egoïsme leek te kennen, geen eigendunk, geen zelfingenomenheid, alleen deze vanzelfsprekende dienstbaarheid, iets dat hem stempelde tot een held en een verheven sul tegelijk.".
Al met al was dit een erg zwaar boek om te lezen, maar het was het uiteindelijk waard.
Al met al was dit een erg zwaar boek om te lezen, maar het was het uiteindelijk waard.
I hadn't heard of Stefan Hertmans' memoir-fiction about his amateur artist grandfather Urbain Martien (1891-1981) until it showed up on the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2016 year-end list. The description there of "a masterly book about memory, art, love and war," intrigued me immediately.
I have to say honestly that the Part I Pre-1914 Section didn't really grab me and I found myself plodding through it for a long time. I mention this as I suspect there may be others with the same experience who may be tempted to give up on the book due to this seemingly rambling first half where often it is the story of Hertmans' great-grandfather that is being told. Don't give up on the book early.
The Part II 1914-1918 Section plunges you along with the young Urbain Martien into the face of the German Army's August 1914 "blitzkrieg" (the word apparently wasn't invented until 1935, but Hertmans uses it here on pg. 144 to describe the "shock and awe" tactics used) on Belgium in its roundabout path to attacking France. Suddenly I was totally swept up in the story as now it is being delivered as a first-person account as if in the voice of Urbain himself. The sheer terrors faced by the Flemish speaking Walloon soldiers in the middle between the ruthless German advance and their own contemptuous French-speaking officers. This is among the best on-the-ground descriptions of the chaos & desperation of war that I've ever read, certainly as good as, if not better than, Hemingway's "The Retreat from Caporetto" section in [b:A Farewell to Arms|17978811|A Farewell to Arms|Ernest Hemingway|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1369579147s/17978811.jpg|4652599] (that section is sometimes excerpted under that title in anthologies such as [b:Hemingway on War|16001183|Hemingway on War|Ernest Hemingway|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1379313462s/16001183.jpg|151960]).
The final Part III is a post-1918 section where we return to Hertmans' point-of-view as he describes his grandfather's post-war years and the copies that the elderly Urbain made of classic paintings as his hobby. But now the seemingly rambling style of Part I feels completely engrossing as Hertmans tries to piece together the story of his grandfather's life from the few clues that he has. I should probably re-read Part I with this hindsight as it wasn't until the Part II Section that I suddenly totally identified with Urbain and his life.
Still I don't hesitate to call this a 5 out of 5 based on the 2nd half alone.
I have to say honestly that the Part I Pre-1914 Section didn't really grab me and I found myself plodding through it for a long time. I mention this as I suspect there may be others with the same experience who may be tempted to give up on the book due to this seemingly rambling first half where often it is the story of Hertmans' great-grandfather that is being told. Don't give up on the book early.
The Part II 1914-1918 Section plunges you along with the young Urbain Martien into the face of the German Army's August 1914 "blitzkrieg" (the word apparently wasn't invented until 1935, but Hertmans uses it here on pg. 144 to describe the "shock and awe" tactics used) on Belgium in its roundabout path to attacking France. Suddenly I was totally swept up in the story as now it is being delivered as a first-person account as if in the voice of Urbain himself. The sheer terrors faced by the Flemish speaking Walloon soldiers in the middle between the ruthless German advance and their own contemptuous French-speaking officers. This is among the best on-the-ground descriptions of the chaos & desperation of war that I've ever read, certainly as good as, if not better than, Hemingway's "The Retreat from Caporetto" section in [b:A Farewell to Arms|17978811|A Farewell to Arms|Ernest Hemingway|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1369579147s/17978811.jpg|4652599] (that section is sometimes excerpted under that title in anthologies such as [b:Hemingway on War|16001183|Hemingway on War|Ernest Hemingway|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1379313462s/16001183.jpg|151960]).
The final Part III is a post-1918 section where we return to Hertmans' point-of-view as he describes his grandfather's post-war years and the copies that the elderly Urbain made of classic paintings as his hobby. But now the seemingly rambling style of Part I feels completely engrossing as Hertmans tries to piece together the story of his grandfather's life from the few clues that he has. I should probably re-read Part I with this hindsight as it wasn't until the Part II Section that I suddenly totally identified with Urbain and his life.
Still I don't hesitate to call this a 5 out of 5 based on the 2nd half alone.
Such a valuable book for vivid descriptions of life as a WWI soldier, and how foreign and unexpected this method of war was with all of the new technology and subsequent utter and complete decimation of towns and countryside. The author has done a brilliant job bringing his grandfather's memoir to life, with flavor. Really works quite well in switching POV from the author to the Grandfather. I do wish one of the images shared would have been the sketch of Urbain's first love. And a map would have been nice as well.
(note, not quite nonfiction, but somewhere in the middle)
at times truly evocative language: p 96 As my Aunt Melanie spoke to me, daintily holding her teacup in her wizened hand, adorned with a s single diamond ring, I pictured my grandfather, the little foundryman, with a ratty old blanket draped over his stocky shoulders, posing as Christ in that cold refectory in the quiet years before the Great War, with his father in front of him, sketching away without a word, and it's as if the scene in my imagination becomes a memory, the painter painting a painter, something I seem to have truly experienced and can call to mind right now, right here, now that I too feel the stealthy approach of old age, and the dead grow more and more alive in an ineffaceable fresco, an allegory no living soul can ever revisit or recover, but which has been burned into my being.
p 104 referring to the older generation Their dark forms are larger than life, because memories like that grow along with your body, so that adults from our childhood always resemble an extinct race of old gods, still towering over us.
p 162 The pandemonium died down. Suddenly all we could hear was the flapping of wood pigeons and the crackle of the fires. Somewhere in the distance, a dog howled like a wolf. The Milky Way twinkled, endlessly far away from the black hole where this stupid planet was spinning.
p 179 That same morning, the rest of our battalion was massacred by the machine guns and shells of the exceptionally well-entrenched German forces. From Nieuwpoort to Diksmuide, one hundred and fifty thousand young soldiers fell in less than a week.
p 193 We turn tough and get sentimental; we laugh as we cry; our life's a waking slumber, a slumberous wake; we quarrel with our arms around each other; we lash out at each other while shrugging our shoulders; no part of our bodies or minds remains intact; we breathe as long as we live, and live merely because we are breathing, as long as it lasts.
p 212 My story is growing monotonous, just as the war grew monotonous, death monotonous, our hatred of the Huns monotonous, just as life itself grew monotonous and finally began to turn our stomachs.
p 227 The battlefields redolent of crushed grass, the soldiers who saluted even in their dying moments, the rural scenes of hills and glades in eighteenth-century military paintings gave way to a heap of psychological rubble choked with mustard gas, ravaged pastures filled with severed limbs, the physical annihilation of an old-fashioned breed of human being.
p 228 But somewhere a gasket had blown. That much was clear to the soldiers who looked on mutely, without joining in the cheers: the cozy intimacy of Old Europe had been destroyed forever. The war had shot humanism full of holes, and what came rushing in was the infernal heat of a barren moral wasteland that could hardly be sown with new ideals, since it was abundantly clear how far astray the old ones had led us. The new politics that would now flare up was fueled by wrath, resentment, rancor, and vengefulness, and showed even greater potential for destruction.
p 265 As the finely strung philosopher with the hammer once memorably wrote in The Antichrist, I can no longer look at paintings without seeing gestures, because I understand that was has touched my own life is not a book of innocence, but a reading saturated with historical guilt.
(note, not quite nonfiction, but somewhere in the middle)
at times truly evocative language: p 96 As my Aunt Melanie spoke to me, daintily holding her teacup in her wizened hand, adorned with a s single diamond ring, I pictured my grandfather, the little foundryman, with a ratty old blanket draped over his stocky shoulders, posing as Christ in that cold refectory in the quiet years before the Great War, with his father in front of him, sketching away without a word, and it's as if the scene in my imagination becomes a memory, the painter painting a painter, something I seem to have truly experienced and can call to mind right now, right here, now that I too feel the stealthy approach of old age, and the dead grow more and more alive in an ineffaceable fresco, an allegory no living soul can ever revisit or recover, but which has been burned into my being.
p 104 referring to the older generation Their dark forms are larger than life, because memories like that grow along with your body, so that adults from our childhood always resemble an extinct race of old gods, still towering over us.
p 162 The pandemonium died down. Suddenly all we could hear was the flapping of wood pigeons and the crackle of the fires. Somewhere in the distance, a dog howled like a wolf. The Milky Way twinkled, endlessly far away from the black hole where this stupid planet was spinning.
p 179 That same morning, the rest of our battalion was massacred by the machine guns and shells of the exceptionally well-entrenched German forces. From Nieuwpoort to Diksmuide, one hundred and fifty thousand young soldiers fell in less than a week.
p 193 We turn tough and get sentimental; we laugh as we cry; our life's a waking slumber, a slumberous wake; we quarrel with our arms around each other; we lash out at each other while shrugging our shoulders; no part of our bodies or minds remains intact; we breathe as long as we live, and live merely because we are breathing, as long as it lasts.
p 212 My story is growing monotonous, just as the war grew monotonous, death monotonous, our hatred of the Huns monotonous, just as life itself grew monotonous and finally began to turn our stomachs.
p 227 The battlefields redolent of crushed grass, the soldiers who saluted even in their dying moments, the rural scenes of hills and glades in eighteenth-century military paintings gave way to a heap of psychological rubble choked with mustard gas, ravaged pastures filled with severed limbs, the physical annihilation of an old-fashioned breed of human being.
p 228 But somewhere a gasket had blown. That much was clear to the soldiers who looked on mutely, without joining in the cheers: the cozy intimacy of Old Europe had been destroyed forever. The war had shot humanism full of holes, and what came rushing in was the infernal heat of a barren moral wasteland that could hardly be sown with new ideals, since it was abundantly clear how far astray the old ones had led us. The new politics that would now flare up was fueled by wrath, resentment, rancor, and vengefulness, and showed even greater potential for destruction.
p 265 As the finely strung philosopher with the hammer once memorably wrote in The Antichrist, I can no longer look at paintings without seeing gestures, because I understand that was has touched my own life is not a book of innocence, but a reading saturated with historical guilt.