War and Turpentine A Novel Author:Stefan Hertmans A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year — An Economist Best Book of the Year — The life of Urbain Martien?artist, soldier, survivor of World War I?lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died in 1981. In War and Turpentine, his grandson, a writer, retells his grandfather?s story, the notebooks providing a key to the locked ch... more »ambers of Urbain?s memory.
With vivid detail, the grandson recounts a whole life: Urbain as the child of a lowly church painter, retouching his father?s work; dodging death in a foundry; fighting in the war that altered the course of history; marrying the sister of the woman he truly loved; being haunted by an ever-present reminder of the artist he had hoped to be and the soldier he was forced to become. Wrestling with this tale, the grandson straddles past and present, searching for a way to understand his own part in both. As artfully rendered as a Renaissance fresco, War and Turpentine paints an extraordinary portrait of one man?s life and reveals how that life echoed down through the generations.« less