Product Description

Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon. Covering half a century, this is a luminous and searching novel, and Hall's most accomplished work to date.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4810 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974 and now lives and works there. Her first novel, Haweswater, was published by Faber in 2002. Her second, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. In 2007 Sarah won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

Customer Reviews

A great middle
A great middle, but where's the beginning and the end?

How To Paint A Dead Man pitches straight in to the story - no introductions - and this means that any significance in the first chapters is rather lost in the confusion. I'm told this is a style called "in medias res" and is often a sign of an artist at work. And in case we missed it, we get it four times over - as the novel comprises four stories, chopped up and we get a chapter of each in turn, before we return to the first. This, too, isn't quite spelt out adding to the air of confusion. In fact, it later becomes apparent that each of the four stories has its own title, and this is the heading at the start of the chapter, but it takes a while to twig onto that.

We then have four separate narrative strands, each one quite self-consciously beautiful, and each with theme of art. Writers seem to like writing about art - perhaps it gives them licence to paint with words. Whilst that can irritate, in this case some of the narratives really came into sharp and atmospheric focus at times. At its best, the narrative was gripping with clear, strong characterization and compelling story lines. We felt Peter's pain as he struggled to free himself from the wet, cold rocks. We rooted for Annette's courage in facing her blindness and the vulnerability that brought. At other times the focus seemed to drift and one narrative - The Mirror Crisis - never seemed to arrive at all.

Although the narratives had characters in common (the focus of one might be mentioned in another) the stories were really separate, like four novellas interleafed. Perhaps this was necessary to add relief to the intensity of the narrative, perhaps it was useful in masking the fact that none of the narratives was strong enough to stand on its own. Who can say? The overall effect, though, was to make the novel appear a little bit deeper than it really was.

Not content with the "in medias res" openings, Sarah Hall has opted for studied ambiguity in the ending. Four times over. That felt just a bit tacky - as a gimmick, ambiguity can work once in a while. But yo use it four times in the space of twenty or so pages just makes it look as though Sarah Hall didn't know how to write an ending. The effect then, is one of the Trail Pieces of which Seamus Heaney wrote. Beautifully crafted, intricate works with no purpose - not part of a bigger thing. Sure there are themes, particularly death, loss, infirmity, disability. There is just a lack of something to bring it all together.

A slow-burning read that will make you think.
This is an unashamedly literary novel about art, life, death, and ultimately rebirth, with four separate but linked stories in alternating chapters looking back over about forty years. There's the former hippy enfant-terrible of the art world Peter, who, now part of the establishment, lives happily in Cumbria with his second wife Lydia; There's Susan - Suze - Peter's daughter and twin of drop-out Danny, making a name for herself as a photographer. Then there are two strands set in Italy - the great dying artist Giorgio who only paints still-lifes of bottles; and finally the blind girl Annette whom Giorgio used to teach before she lost her sight. The English and Italian strands are then linked initially by Peter's correspondence with Giorgio. There are many other tiny links that only become apparent as you read on.

The most thought-provoking story of the four though is that of Susan; the other three often appear to be in mere supporting roles, although they do all have their starring moments. Susan is suffering, her twin brother is died in a stupid accident, and normal life for her can't go on without her true other half. Numbed, she can only look life from outside of herself, and indulges in a wanton affair so that she can just feel something. Her story is written in the second person, and this makes it so detached, brutal yet clear. Yet the other three lives are in stasis too. In Italy, Giorgio is waiting to die and Annette is growing up blind and cushioned from normal life by her overbearing mother. Peter meanwhile is physically trapped - having fallen while out walking the fells trapping his leg. All are forced to look back upon the past as they wait for something to happen.

It took a couple of chapters of each of the stories to get into this novel. By the end though, you really cared about the characters, particularly Peter and Susan. Their stories resonate with an English reality in a way that is hard to compare with the comparative village idyll of the Italian strands. This is a slow-burning and challenging read that ends up forcing you to you think and meditate on what true artists think as well as the value of a life lived.

Exhibition Of Writing Art
Some of the sentences are achingly beautiful; "Dina wore a white lace corset for our marriage, the waist of it drawn tight enough to grind pepper".

4 interrelated stories, like the four panels of a sequence of paintings. Each one a unique voice, but always referring back to art and love. One of them narrates her story in the second person, communing with her dead twin, which is hauntingly affective.

Any one of the four narrators on their own had enough lyrical language and metaphor to just lie back and bask in. The whole thing IS very much like looking at paintings in a gallery. An Impressionist still life, looking at the objects from different angles, with different plays of light on it. But the one fault of the book comes from this. You can lose yourself in the detail of colour or brushstroke, but then you eventually leave the gallery and the memory loses sharpness. I came away from this book not really changing the way I saw anything in the world. While I was in the gallery of the book, admiring the tones I really enjoyed myself. When I left I wondered what I was going to eat.

But if language is your thing and enough to keep you interested in a book, this one could well be for you.