Painter of Silence: A Novel [Hardcover]

Georgina Harding (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 18, 2012

It is the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. He is deaf and mute, but a young nurse named Safta recognizes him from the past and brings him paper and pencils so that he might draw. Gradually, memories appear on the page: the man is Augustin, the cook's son at the manor house at Poiana, where Safta was the privileged daughter. Born six months apart, they had a connection that bypassed words, but while Augustin's world stayed the same size, Safta's expanded to embrace languages, society, and a fleeting love one long, hot summer. But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and nothing would remain the same.

Georgina Harding's kaleidoscopic new novel will appeal to readers of Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, and Sandor Marai. It is as intense and submerging as rain, as steeped in the horrors of our recent history as it is in the intimate passions of the human heart.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[An] accomplished work of fiction." --The New York Times

"The novel’s magic lies in Harding’s poignant but unsentimental portrayal of people who face such losses and yet find a kind of wholeness."--O, The Oprah Magazine

“Though Harding’s novel is firmly set in historical time, which is Safta’s reality, Tinu seems to exist on a different plane, and the multiple dimensions give the book a peculiar power.”--Booklist

“Harding has created a memorable portrait in words of an exile from language.”--Kirkus

About the Author

Georgina Harding is the author of the novels The Spy Game and The Solitude of Thomas Cave. She lives in London and the Stour Valley, Essex.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (September 18, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1608197700
• ISBN-13: 978-1608197705
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #602,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "When Tinu drew a room, he drew it empty. He drew it as it was but somehow what you saw was not the room but its emptiness." September 18, 2012

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

(4.5 stars) In this sensitive novel about an unusual and touching friendship, author Georgina Harding tells the story of life in a rural community in Romania beginning in the 1930s and extending through World War II and the Communist Occupation. As the novel opens, Augustin, a sick and almost starving man, has just arrived by train in Iasi, a city with which he is unfamiliar. He is looking for Safta, a childhood friend whom he has not seen since they were separated by the war and Communist Occupation. Years ago, they both lived at Poiana, a large country estate some distance from Iasi, where Safta now lives. The novel's narrative moves back and forth in time, changing perspectives as the author alternates the action between Augustin (Tinu), the son of the cook, and Safta, the daughter of Poiana's owners.

Tinu is both deaf and mute, and he is either uninterested in or unable to learn sign language. He can write a few words, but does not seem able to connect them with what they represent in the outside world. His only form of communication is through haunting drawings which he makes with soot and spit on found materials - paper, boxes, wrappings, pieces of cloth - and these drawings reflect an unusually selective view of the world in which the people have no faces and the buildings feel empty. Without a trace of easy sentimentality, the author depicts his life, limited view of the world, and the conclusions he draws about life. Though Safta intuitively understands much of what he feels and tries to teach him to write, she is a child, too, easily distracted by the natural excitements of her own childhood, and she has other friends with whom to spend time, especially in adolescence. "Tinu had a way that let you forget him," she notes, years later.... "Even when he stood right in front of you there was no insistence to his presence."

Simple, sensitively depicted scenes from childhood send out ripples that include the individual members of Safta's family, the servants and Tinu's family, visitors, villagers, and their children, and broaden naturally to encompass bigger, more complex observations about life and the novel's themes of identity and connection. The author unifies the novel with perfect details, carefully connecting even the earliest scenes with the characters' perceptions as they grow, delicately shifting the focus back and forth between them at Poiana. She then puts everything into perspective in scenes from the later events in which Tinu is now a patient at the hospital where Safta works as a nurse. Many scenes stir the reader's emotions without being sentimental or maudlin, and the author's respect for these characters (and her audience) is obvious.

Basic questions about how we know and understand each other, how we perceive the world, and how we communicate with it echo throughout the novel, and the outbreak of war and the eventual Occupation put these themes into stark perspective. The elegant language sometimes gets in the way of natural-sounding dialogue; the character of Safta's love Andrei during her adolescent years is shallow; and the ending is implausible, but these missteps feel minor in a novel which is profoundly moving and often breath-taking, and it is one of my favorites for the year. Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully haunting April 30, 2013

By Louise Gouws

Format:Kindle Edition

Set in pre and post World War II Romania, this book tells the story of a deaf mute boy and his childhood friend. I would recommend this to anyone who loves a hauntingly beautiful book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a beautiful, provocative tale April 25, 2013

By paula ventre

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

A unique look at a deaf individual as he negotiates through the harsh maze of life in post W.W.II eastern Europe. Fascinating perspective. The narrative travels back and forth in time, but the threads of survival and salvation remains intact.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another kind of golden landscape March 4, 2013

By Lady Fancifull

Format:Hardcover

Georgina Harding has a wonderful gift for the evocation of time, place and the physical heft and weave of life. I read, with absorption, her previous 2 novels The Spy Game, The Solitude of Thomas Cave where her use of language, her quiet and rich ability to really inhabit another person's truthful, unique inner landscape, was mesmerising.

With those earlier 2 books, I got so far, so very far, but could not go to the final 5th star, as something, in each case, did not completely work

With her third book, 5 stars seem mean!

Set in Romania, before the second world war, and finishing some years later, when grim, Stalinist Communism had placed other changes upon that country, her central character is a young, deaf mute baby at the start, child of a servant in the great house, and the parallel life this child, and the daughter of the great house, inhabit. Childhood in the house for both of the infants, who are close in age and in friendship, is described in ways which evoke the much written about Edwardian landscape of pre first world war England - except that we have a much more unchanged, less modern world, in Romania. The children grow, and Tinu, the young boy, finds ways of seeing, interpreting and communicating the world through drawings.

It is a fascinating book. The central character is wordless, and those around him find a strange freedom to share their thoughts because he cannot hear or speak them.

Although a huge narration is happening in the book - the large historical events, much of it a dreadful history, Harding does not dwell on the narrative - changes are experience by snapshot images - she is a real adept at show-not-tell - for example, the couple in the city, and the relationship of fear and control set up by the Party machinery.... She does not describe the interior landscape of her characters in dramatic language, there are these quiet pictures, postures, details, which reveal everything.

She is a cool, unjudgemental, compassionate writer, with no self-indulgence, and her descriptions of the very texture and presence of trees, cups, paper, dust and the matter of things is powerful. Tinu, as child and man, really experiences the physicality of the world in a totally present, almost meditative way - and Harding makes the reader do the same

I am now buying one of her non-fiction books, as her ability to evoke other lands and times is so utterly magnificent.In Another Europe: A Journey to Romania Read more ›

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written with richly developed characters June 16, 2013

By MomOfHighSchooler

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

An unusual book that took a little while for me to understand the relationships. Worth reading through to the end. Poignant.

5.0 out of 5 stars Painter of Slience June 7, 2013

By Sandra F Parnes

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Thought provoking and engaging book. As an artist and art therapist who has worked with special populations the descriptions of living in a concrete visual world without the nuances of language were fascinating.

5.0 out of 5 stars Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding March 29, 2013

By rainpebble

Format:Hardcover

A beautiful title for a beautiful story.
The backdrop of this story is pre & post war Romania and tells the tale of a deaf-mute stable boy, Tinu, who is the son of a house cook and his friend and defender, Safta, the daughter of the house. They live in the countryside and as described in the book, it is very lovely and peaceful there. Then comes the war. The family all leave for safer parts of Europe except for Safta and her mother, who eventually leaves as well. Safta soon leaves also and goes to live with her father, attending university and becomes a nurse.
She goes to work in a hospital and after some time she notices a young gentleman patient who doesn't speak and soon realizes that he is her childhood friend Tinu. Tinu has a horrible pulmonary illness and coughs incessantly. She pays special attention to him in her hours & days off and after a long period of recovery, though yet ill, she and a fellow nurse are allowed to take him to her fellow nurse's home to complete his recovery.
Because Tinu could never communicate naturally, he has learned to draw and to draw beautifully. But he doesn't just draw images and pretty pictures. He draws the world around him. Things he has seen, loved; things that were part of his life.
This story was written in the form of past tense, present tense, past tense, present tense. etc. A form of writing that doesn't always work but in this book it does so beautifully. The main part of this storyline is Tinu telling of he and Safta's time apart in pictures.
I liked this book very much indeed, rated it 5 stars and highly recommend it. I know that it will not leave my mind for some time to come.