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Laddar... An Equal Stillness (2009)av Francesca Kay
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. Novel about the sources of creativity. Told is the story of a woman painter, Jennet Mallow (1924-2000) from her youthfull discovery of her love for drawing, till the end of her eventfull, passionate and dramatic life. Described are her childhood, young womanhood, relations with her father (crippled by memories of devasting wars), her disappointed mother, her fat sister, her art schooling, husband, familylife, children and lovers. And foremost her drive to paint and the concentration she need to succeed. A good deal of the book is spent on the description of the paintings. The story is loosely modelled on the life of British sculptor Barbara Hepworth and her circle. The First half of the novel is a good read. Beautiful descriptions about form and colour, but then the concept starts to rankle and looses her credibility. Still I found it a readable book about a subject I love; painting in form, colour and substance.
You haven't heard of Jennet Mallow because she's fictional, but it's easy to forget that as you read this novel-posing-as-biography. So, too, do her paintings seem real, their colours and textures richly described in captivating detail. One wishes they did exist. It is despite rather than because of the novel's pretence of biography that we get a sense of the artist. That pretence is not altogether successful and the narrative voice slips too often. In every other way, this insightful first novel about life and art is gorgeously written.
After the discovery of a body in the graveyard of St. Matthew's Church, another corpse surfaces in St. Mark's churchyard. Detective Inspector Andy Ross and Detective Sergeant Izzie Drake must lead their team in a race against time to prevent further atrocities. But what links the dead men with an old mental hospital, now an orphanage, and the scarcely reported suicide of a teenage girl? Somehow, all clues point towards the enigmatic priest, Father Gerald Byrne, who recently returned to the city of his birth. But is it possible that the events that took place thirty years ago in Speke Hill Orphanage are connected to the murders? Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Klassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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An Equal Stillness is a novel but it reads like an intimate biography, charting an artist's professional and personal life from a close perspective. It's clear-eyed and not blind to the subject's faults, but it's gentle and not quite detached. It's not until the very end of the book that the reason for this is revealed, though some readers may guess it beforehand. What they may also not guess is that this is not a fictionalised retelling of a real artist's life... Jennet Mallow is an entirely fictional creation and using the form of a biography is the author's way of making the story convincing.
Jennet was born in England's north, in the fictional village of Litton Kirkdale in the upper valley of the River Aire, to a mother disappointed by life. Lorna wanted to escape her parents, and—this is not quite as cynical as it sounds—she married, fully expecting the man to die on the battlefields of WW1. Her father had died when she was 13, and her brother had died at Ypres. The people she loved had died, and she expected that Richard would die too. But he didn't, and he didn't want to stay in the army despite his family's traditions. He retreats to a quiet, humble life as a cleric, with a wife frustrated by his lack of ambition and their dull domestic life.
Somehow, from this blighted family, Jennet becomes an artist of renown. As a child she made art in a hidden space behind her bed, and untaught, she wins a scholarship to an art school in London in 1945. Thriving in the cultural milieu she marries another artist, David Heaton, older than her and already becoming successful. But before long she gives birth to a son called Ben, and her art takes second place to domestic life. When they go to Spain because they are fed up with dreary postwar England, she—pregnant again—is content with her role:
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