The Struggle with the Angel: Delacroix, Jacob, and the God of Good and Evil [Hardcover]

Jean-Paul Kauffmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 22, 2002

In The Struggle with the Angel, Jean-Paul Kauffmann -- a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for his The Black Room at Longwood -- wrestles with good and evil. His muse is The Struggle of Jacob with the Angel, a Delacroix painting in Paris’s Saint-Sulpice. In this painting, Delacroix, a narrative artist of the mid 19th century, portrayed one of the most enigmatic episodes in Genesis. It was said to be his “spiritual testimony,” and it took him eight years to complete. In the manner of an intuitive detective, Kauffmann investigates the painting and the church that houses it. Stroke by meticulous stroke, he uncovers the painting’s deeper meaning — the struggle with God — for the artist and for himself, as he attempts to put his own troubled past into perspective. Color photos and illustrations accompany this meditation on humanity's struggles with God.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Kauffmann (Black Room at Longwood), a foreign correspondent who was imprisoned in Beirut from 1985 to 1988, here meditates on Delacroix's Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, a mural in the church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris. In his winding search for the place of humankind in the eternal battle of good and evil, Kauffmann consults a cast of characters associated with the church and the painting who offer their views on what the painting means to them. The symbolism gets a little heavyhanded and even repetitive, and some discussion of the artist is based on speculation. But the poignancy of this work comes to the fore when the reader realizes that this isn't art history at all but rather a memoir-of a church, of the biblical Jacob, and of the author, who tries to come to terms with his time as a prisoner in Beirut: "It was not a painter's secret that I was trying to discover, but the secret of another man who one day found himself in the kingdom of darkness." Here Kauffmann's insight is profound, and his connections from church to artist to humankind to his own life flourish. Recommended for libraries where there is an interest in memoir, France, and Delacroix.
Nadine Dalton Speidel, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows; 1 edition (October 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568582439
• ISBN-13: 978-1568582436
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,280,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.