Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... The Center of the Worldpor Thomas Van Essen
Cargando...
InscrÃbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I do love a good novel about art and artists, and this one doesn't disappoint. It centers around a mysterious, marvelous painting by J.M.W. Turner, moves back and forth between the present and 1865, and involves a host of characters -- some fictitious, some not. It's a lot of fun, and also a bit deeper than it lets on until the end, which was a good surprise. Good summer reading! (Whatever that means...) Stay tuned for a more detailed piece on the book and its author in Bloom and The Millions in a couple of weeks. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Distinciones
Fiction.
Historical Fiction.
HTML: Alternating between nineteenth-century England and present-day New York, this is the story of renowned British painter J. M. W. Turner and his circle of patrons and lovers. It is also the story of Henry Leiden, a middle-aged family man with a troubled marriage and a dead-end job, who finds his life transformed by his discovery of Turner's The Center of the World, a mesmerizing and unsettling painting of Helen of Troy that was thought to have been lost forever. This painting has such devastating erotic power that it was kept hidden for almost two centuries, and was even said to have been destroyedâ??until Henry stumbles upon it in a secret compartment at his summer home in the Adirondacks. Though he knows it is an object of immense value, the thought of parting with it is unbearable: Henry is transfixed by its revelation of a whole other world, one of transcendent light, joy, and possibility. Back in the nineteenth century, Turner struggles to create The Center of the World, his greatest painting but a painting unlike anything he (or anyone else) has ever attempted. We meet his patron, Lord Egremont, an aristocrat in whose palatial home Turner talks freely about his art and his beliefs. We also meet Elizabeth Spencer, Egremont's mistress and Turner's muse, the model for his Helen. Meanwhile, in the present, Henry is relentlessly trailed by an unscrupulous art dealer determined to get his hands on the painting at any cost. Filled with sex, beauty, and love (of all kinds), this richly textured novel explores the intersection between art and eroticism. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |
This cleverly plotted novel shifts between the 1830's at Petworth, where the characters are involved in creating the painting, and the lives of Henry and wife Susan in the Adirondacks and their home in Princeton, New Jersey on 2003. Leiden's professional and personal life in his middle age is unsatisfying to him. His work at a foundation is humdrum and his marriage is failing. He is utterly transfixed by the painting and it lifts him to a plane of inspiration and yearning he has never imagined. But it isolates him further from his normal life. He does not reveal the painting to his wife and she reacts to his increasing distance as if he's having an affair, which in a sense he is.
A art dealer of highly questionable professional ethics hears hints of the discovery of the painting, a work he has for years vaguely suspected existed. He dispatches his assistant, Gina, on a search to confirm who has it and she discovers through historical research and detective work that it is in possession of Leiden. This portion of the story is suspenseful as Gina comes closer to discovering that the painting really exists and where it might be.
These three threads (and a fourth about how the painting came to be hidden in an Adirondack camp outbuilding) are weaved throughout the book in a suspenseful and convincing manner. The astounding impact of the portrayal of Helen through Turner's art is revealed through the reactions of all who have seen it. It was never meant by Turner and his patron and subjects to be seen publicly as its depiction of the power of beauty, love, sexuality and the influence of the gods over men are too powerful to behold. For all the characters in the book who see the painting, their lives are profoundly, if not always happily, changed.
Why use Turner as the artist for this mythical painting? He is not known as a portrait artist nor so much for his depiction of classical scenes. I think it's because of his phenomenal treatment of light. His paintings dazzle with lights of yellow and orange that capture the viewer and draw him into the drama and intent of the painting. It was the light bursting from Helen that so deeply affected the other viewers mesmerizing them to a degree of great intensity and personal meaning. The author's choice of Turner with his vivid and compelling use of light that makes the aspirations, dreams and desires of the viewers surface so achingly.
The ending, not revealed in this review, is well-conceived and in keeping with the immortal sense of the painting in its place in the art world. ( )