Painting Time

February 1, 2021
Three art students at a European college form a bond as they learn the unique, demanding details of their profession. A novel it may be, but French author de Kerangal's sensuous, language-relishing, richly evocative new work is less about plot, more an aesthetic appreciation and exploration of one branch of the figurative arts, namely trompe-l'oeil painting, "the art of illusion." The discipline is about detail, texture, and effect and demands exhausting devotion to minutiae, as French student Paula Karst learned at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels in 2008 while also making two firm friendships, one with her flatmate, Jonas, the other with statuesque Kate who bears "a vague resemblance to Anita Ekberg." As the novel opens, these three are reunited at a bar in Paris, Paula having flown in from a film-set job in Moscow where she's painting Anna Karenina's sitting room. All-nighters and a rootless existence are the characteristics of their freelance work, which also often means accepting commissions from the one percent. Kate's current job, for example, is painting a complicated marble effect on a wealthy client's walls. All three have "learned to glaze, to score, to soften, to stipple, to moir�, to lighten, to create a little iridescence with a polecat-hair round brush," and it's this wealth of terms, tones, and applications that fascinate the author. Paula's career is followed most closely; much of it is spent in Italy, where a transformative leap occurs with her decision to work at Cinecitt� film studios. Later, at Lascaux, where Paula is painting a facsimile of the world-revered cave art, the narrative cements the relationship among the work, history, and time. A curiosity as introspective, finely wrought, and devotedly crafted as the art form it traces.

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February 15, 2021
Celebrated French novelist Kerangal, author of The Heart (2016) and The Cook (2019), is a master of the metaphysical bildungsroman. In this enthralling tale of vocation, discovery, and love, young and striking Paula, whose discerning, crossed eyes are different colors, leaves her family's plush Parisian home to attend a decorative arts institute in Brussels. As she is pushed to the brink while learning the painstaking techniques of painting faux wood and marble and negotiating her feelings for elusive fellow student and roommate Jonas, Paula finds in the rigor of trompe l'oeil, the art of illusion, profound meaning. Kerangal balances the gloriously sensuous with the deeply reflective in an exquisite and omniscient streaming narration as she explores the title's implications. This is about how time spent painting shapes the protagonist's consciousness, but it is also an inquiry into time itself and how it is painted, or manifest, in everything from the rings of a tree to art. As Paula graduates and becomes a nomadic painter, each job a "sensory adventure," we enter Cinecitt�, Rome's famed film studio, where Paula paints sets, and, in the ultimate plunge into humanity's artistry, the Lascaux caves as Paula works on an exacting replica of their magnificent prehistoric paintings. Kerangal's elegant, sexy, subtly Proustian, and fluidly dimensional drama of discipline and passion, imitation and imagination is resplendently evocative and exhilarating.

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Starred review from March 1, 2021

As she did with The Cook, award-winning French author de Kerangal offers stunning portraiture suffused with the joy and meaning of work. Paula Karst labors in trompe-l'oeil to render wood and stone realistically with paint, and de Kerangal takes great pains to show us how "this average girl, sheltered and predictable (and a little on the lazy side), ...this impetuous dabbler...ended up plunging headlong" into a craft that readers will come truly to admire. (The excellent translation helps.) As Paula pursues her studies at Brussels's rigorous Institut de Peinture, her eyes and muscles burning from 18-hour days, then plies her trade at film studios throughout Europe, the author dazzlingly describes the materials and techniques involved with an almost touchable physicality that matches the subject. Meanwhile, Paula comes of age, moving away from her befuddled parents and forging meaningful ties with classmates Kate and Jonas, who recommends her for the job that crowns the last third of the book: helping to create Lascaux IV, which replicates the famous prehistoric caves. Seeing Paula merge with the black deer she re-creates, feeling its fear of the woolly rhinoceros as time drops away, is enough to make one cry. VERDICT There's only one word for it: superbe.

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