How to Paint a Dead Man: A Novel (P.S.) [Paperback]

Sarah Hall (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 8, 2009 | Series: P.S.

From Sarah Hall, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Daughters of the North and The Electric Michelangelo comes the Harper Perennial paperback original novel How to Paint a Dead Man, a daringly imaginative tale in which multiple lives are woven together through the prism of a still life painting. Moving from Italy to England, spanning nearly half a century, and bringing together the lives of four disparate characters, How to Paint a Dead Man is Hall’s fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Stunning visual descriptions link the stories of four artists in crisis in Hall's fourth novel (after Daughters of the North), but marginal, cross-generational relationships are what ground the book. Giorgio is a well-known painter and hermit in Italy in the 1960s, the near-blind Annette his favorite primary school student. Peter is a 50-something landscape artist in England, and Peter's daughter, Susan, a talented photographer and curator. Giorgio has cancer and for his final days tackles one last painting of his constant subject, colored bottles. Soon after his death, Annette tends his grave, innocent and fearful and now completely blind, fearing imaginary things like the Bestia—a demon that is depicted in her church. Thirty years later, Peter, who corresponded with Giorgio, is pinned under a boulder near his cottage, and contemplates the haunting relationship he had with his ex-wife, while in present-day London, Susan searches for feeling (through sex) after the sudden loss of her twin brother. Hall gracefully conveys a sense of the eternal through these imaginative, disconnected creatures who share the same unrelentingly contemplative disposition. (Sept.)
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Review

“Sarah Hall is a huge talent. Her third novel, How To Paint A Dead Man, is a beautiful, powerful book of love, lust, death, passion, art, desperation and loss. She writes her characters brilliantly.” (Bookseller (London), “Bookseller's Choice, June 2009” )

“Invigorating….her verbal depiction of fictional art never stales…This deeply sensual novel is what you rarely find - an intelligent page-turner which, perversely, you also want to read slowly to savour Hall’s luscious way of looking at the world.” (The Sunday Telegraph )

“Her latest novel, even more than ever, reads as though it was an absolute thrill to write....a maddeningly enticing read...an amazing feat of literary engineering.” (The Independent on Sunday "New Review" )

“Daring...Along with contemporaries like Scarlett Thomas and Lydia Millet, Hall is staking new ground for women in the “novel of ideas” category. Full of haunting images and thought-provoking ideas, How to Paint a Dead Man will linger in the mind.” (BookPage )

“In this gorgeous still life of a book, Sarah Hall gives us four lives…each narrated in a different voice…Hall has a poet’s gift, and this novel is best enjoyed as a prose poem whose blindingly beautiful insights gradually accrue…She has made visible to us…the ever-present shadow of eternity.” (Washington Post Book World )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 289 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; First Edition edition (September 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061430455
• ISBN-13: 978-0061430459
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #845,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Existential Connection between life and art September 17, 2009

By K. L. Cotugno VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

There are four disparate strands to this muscular rope of a book, apart at the beginning but ultimately woven together to create a story that promotes the importance of art in life. Each strand is set in a different time, written in a different style, the author challenging the reader to make the connections and draw their own conclusions. There is Suze's story, told in the second person, which is the most compelling, seemingly the centerpiece of the narrative. The story of her father, Peter, is told through his reflections while he is caught, trapped, overnight on the fells. Both Suze and Peter are artists, active in the art world, and it is Peter's connection to Georgio, an Italian artist, that sets in motion the other two narratives. This book was long listed for the Man Booker award, but didn't make the final cut to the short list. As I haven't been able to read the five that did, I can't make a comparison except to say they must be quite remarkable to have beaten out this seductively readable, highly original work.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Of Art and Emotion January 19, 2010

By Roger Brunyate TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

It is inexplicable to me how Harper Perennial, the publishers of this deeply serious novel, could have given it such a frivolous cover! The cartoon drawing of a girl dancing down a hillside with hair flying suggests a carefree romp, not the meditation on loss and perception that Sarah Hall gives us here. And it is certainly no preparation for a novel centered so much in the visual world, in which three of the four principal characters are artists. One of these (though acknowledged only in the front matter) is based on the painter Giorgio Morandi, probably the most fastidious Italian painter of his generation, whose mature work, heedless of contemporary Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, consisted entirely of paintings of bottles, meticulously arranged in a luminous opalescence.

While Hall's writing about art shows her love for the medium, her real subject is human feeling, and especially the way emotions can be aroused and distorted by the passage of time, the loss of possibilities, the ending of a life. Four protagonists take turns in the spotlight in a repeating sequence of short chapters. There is Giorgio not-quite-Morandi on his hilltop in Italy, working even as his death approaches. There is Peter, a landscape painter of rocks and mountains in the Northwest of England near the Scottish Border. There is Susan, a successful photographer in London, shocked by the death of her fraternal twin brother. And there is Annette Tambroni, an Italian teenager whose own sense of vision turns inward as she goes inexorably blind.

At first this is all you know. You have no idea why the author chose these four people and not others. You have only a dim sense of the time-frame. But clues gradually emerge. The sections with Susan seem to be contemporary; those with Giorgio are roughly mid-sixties (Morandi died in 1964); the other two fall somewhere in between. You also begin to discover connections between the four, some relatively close, others little more than a thread; I won't explain these, because there is great pleasure in the discovery. Hall gradually reveals more of each person's inner life, moving backwards in the case of the two men, and forward for the women. Giorgio, it seems, was a Fascist sympathizer until something happened to turn him in the opposite direction. Peter's second wife is as different as possible from his first, a relationship born in the cauldron of drug-culture Liverpool, San Francisco, and Greenwich Village. Annette's blindness coincides with her coming into womanhood, those confusing discoveries only complicated by a prudish and protective mother. And Susan works through grief by turning to illicit sex, shocking at first but brilliantly evoked.

It is not a perfect book. Relatively little actually happens in it, and there are chapters (with Peter especially) which seem to hang fire. It is satisfying to see the four portraits getting filled out, but you want to see more of the background than the author shows you; you want to see them calling to one another from behind their frames; you want to know why the author has hung them on the same wall. Eventually, most of these questions will be answered, but not all of them; the rightness of the book is to be found in the mind of the reader, not in revealed fact. Sarah Hall has written a novel that honors her readers' intelligence, and assumes that they can make their own connections, thematic or literal. That in itself deserves five stars.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Work of Art In Vivid Brushstrokes February 5, 2010

By Jill I. Shtulman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The title of this masterful work of art is taken from Cennino d'Andrea Cennini and as one of the characters reflects: "Sadly, the master craftsman is unable to instruct us in the healing of wounds."

For all of the characters in this book are wounded -- some figuratively, some literally. There is the famous Italian painter Giorgio (based on the real-life Giorgio Morandi), who, after a living life fully on his own terms, now moves inexorably towards death. His correspondent -- a renowned artist of the harsh Cumbrian landscape -- Peter Caldicutt, is navigating his own transition into middle age and contemplates his past as he lies wounded on a mountain. The third character, Annette-- a student of the Italian painter -- could have risen to the top of the art world but now practices her art as a flower arranger and seller; her creeping blindness has lead to a rich inner visionary life. And probably foremost, there is Susan, who is horrifically emotionally wounded from the death of her twin brother; this may be the most vivid, precise, and lacerating view of a person in grief that I have EVER read. She turns from the man with whom she shares a life to pulsating sex with her gallery partner's husband to feel alive and connected again.

Susan reflects: "It isn't grief. Grief would be simple. Something internal, something integral, has shifted. You feel lost from yourself. No. Absent. You feel absent. It's like looking into a mirror and seeing no familiar reflection, no one you recognize hosted within the glass." The book is filled with reflections like these on the human condition: grief and resiliency, reality and illusion, love and loss, art and creativity. Those who have studied art will discover even richer meaning, but it is not necessary to be an art student to appreciate the ripeness of the prose.

The book is fluid in its structure and pace; two of the four scenarios are set at least a generation apart, so it takes careful reading to keep track of the time sequence. The scenes -- both external and internal details -- are richly, intensely, and colorfully draw and teeming with authenticity. The tone is lyrical, sensual and downright ravishing throughout. And the ultimate question it raises -- what is REAL -- is universal.

At the end, it is the connection of these characters -- to each other, to the world they live in -- that is real. Rather than a single framed portrait in a gallery, the reader view four such portraits, all with different brush strokes, yet all related. To say this is an intelligent page-turner would not be doing it enough justice. This is a writer to watch.