The God of Spring: A Novel [Hardcover]

Arabella Edge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2007

Set in Paris during the upheavals of the French Revolution, Gericault's career took off at an early age when his painting , 'Charging Chasseur', was selected for the prestigious 'Salon'. He was awarded the gold medal and then began an affair with his benefactor's young wife.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Edge's second historical (after The Company) takes as its subject the French artist Théodore Géricault and the genesis of one of his best-known paintings, The Raft of the Medusa. It is 1818, and Géricault is trying to extract himself from an affair with Alexandrine, six years his senior but much younger than her husband, who happens to be Géricault's uncle and benefactor. Géricault is also at a crossroads in his career: six years after winning the gold medal at the Paris Salon for his painting Charging Chasseur, Géricault is in desperate need of a subject for a new painting that will get him back into the Salon. At this point Géricault becomes obsessed with the shipwreck of the Medusa, a frigate that went aground off the coast of Cape Blanco. He interviews survivors and becomes increasingly obsessed with every vivid and unsettling detail of the shipwreck. As Géricault begins to paint his vision of the aftermath of the catastrophe, his own life disintegrates: Alexandrine becomes pregnant and their affair is discovered, with disastrous consequences. This is a thoughtful and richly imagined story about the darker aspects of the artistic process and the costs of obsession. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Shipwrecks fascinate Edge. In The Company (2001), she fictionalizes a horrific 1629 wreck off the coast of Australia. In her second historical novel, she not only tells the hellish story of the passengers of the Medusa, a French frigate, who were abandoned on a raft off the coast of Africa, but she also dramatizes the audacious creation of perhaps the most famous of marine disaster paintings, Theodore Gericault's enormousRaft of the Medusa (1818-19). In pursuit of authenticity, Parisian Gericault--young, wealthy, and feverishly creative--opens his home to two survivors of the criminal maritime debacle, commissions a replica of the raft, brings in cadavers for props, and sketches terminally ill hospital patients. Edge intensifies her live-hard-die-young hero's mania by orchestrating a scandalous affair with his uncle's sexy young wife. Just barely steering clear of cheesy romance and gothic kitsch, Edge achieves an electrifying depiction of the Medusa catastrophe, a vivid reenactment of Gericault's revolutionary artistic achievement, and a provocative inquiry into the moral quandaries of an artist determined to depict the truth at any cost. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074329484X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743294843
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,531,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The throbbing energy of artistic passion, April 2, 2009

By 

Luca Graziuso (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The God of Spring: A Novel (Hardcover)

Metaphor, transference and aesthetic sensibilities are paced brilliantly in this second novel by Arabella Edge, who also wuthored the award winning The Company, which described the wreck of the Batavia in the sixteenth hundreds off the coast of Australia, where to this day the once University of Bristol English professor now resides. There are plenty of reasons why Arabella Edge opted to write of a shipwreck once again, likewise in a present-tense, yet no longer a first-person narrative that evokes the perils and the affairs of fate as they are bandied about in a storm of distress. Arabella Edge is able to drive a narrative with effortless imagination, absorbing details while unveiling the fragile subjectivity of the personalities that people the story. The energy of the writing is essential to the portrayal of the passionate genius that in the face of destruction anchors the artistic sensibility of Theodore Gericalt. The tempestuous affairs of the heart are consonant analogues to the tale of betrayal, madness, murder and cannibalism abroad the life raft of the scuttled French frigate, Medusa. There writing and narrative do not pretend to be Conrad-like in the inner nihilisitc distress nor does it assume to navigte metaphysical depths as does MobyDick; however it does stay the course amidst the buffets of fate and chance and allows for the spiritual abyss that leads artistic genius to describe the nuances of the human condition with enough deft and tact to deserve a reading that entertains, astounds and provokes in ways that the best novels manage to. A soulful and gripping tale that paints a picture worth pondering over, while canvassing a portrait of human failings with mythopoetic proportions.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A very interesting read, April 5, 2008

By 

David L. Sowers (Roanoke County VA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The God of Spring: A Novel (Hardcover)

Edge creates a real sense in the readers mind of being there as this story unfolds into the creation of the famous painting.