Painting Time: A Novel by Maylis de Kerangal

 

 

Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by The Guardian | The Millions

An aesthetic and existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter

In Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time, we are introduced to the burgeoning young artist Paula Karst, who is enrolled at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels. Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she’s painting―replicating a wood’s essence or a marble’s wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art.

With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula’s apprenticeship, punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand finale: a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the world’s most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human cultural expression.

An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, Painting Time is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal

 

 

A New York Times Bestseller
An Economist Book of the Year
Costa Book Award Winner for Biography
Galaxy National Book Award Winner (New Writer of the Year Award)

Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.

The White Road: Journey into an Obsession by Edmund de Waal

 

 

An extraordinary blend of narrative history and memoir, by the author of the award-winning and bestselling international sensation, The Hare with Amber Eyes

In The White Road, artist Edmund de Waal gives us an intimate portrait of his lifelong obsession with porcelain, or “white gold.” A potter who has been working with porcelain for more than forty years, de Waal describes how he set out on five journeys to places where porcelain was dreamed about, refined, collected, and coveted―and that would help him understand the clay’s mysterious allure. From his studio in London, he begins by travelling to three “white hills”―sites in China, Germany, and England that are key to porcelain’s creation. But his search eventually leads him around the globe and reveals more than a history of cups and figurines; rather, he is forced to confront some of the darkest moments of twentieth-century history.

Part memoir, part history, part detective story, The White Road chronicles a global obsession with alchemy, art, wealth, craft, and purity.

 

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal

 

 

A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moise de Camondo

Letters to Camondo is a collection of imaginary letters from Edmund de Waal to Moise de Camondo, the banker and art collector who created a spectacular house in Paris, now the Musée Nissim de Camondo, and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art.

The Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, “the Rothschilds of the East,” who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became philanthropists, art collectors, and fixtures of Belle Époque high society, as well as being targets of antisemitism―much like de Waal's relations, the Ephrussi family, to whom they were connected. Moise de Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with art for his son, Nissim; after Nissim was killed in the First World War, the house was bequeathed to the French state. Eventually, the Camondos were murdered by the Nazis.

After de Waal, one of the world’s greatest ceramic artists, was invited to make an exhibition in the Camondo house, he began to write letters to Moise de Camondo. These fifty letters are deeply personal reflections on assimilation, melancholy, family, art, the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.

 

 

Antilibbro di Claude De Bray

 

 

Dovrei citarvi cosa sia un "Antilibro", ma non ho tempo e nemmeno voglia, volendo troverete nella prefazione una esaustiva analisi.Se portere con voi l'umanità bruciando i panni intrisi di bigottismo farete un viaggio nell'uomo, con l'uomo... una introspettiva, una analisi di questo tempo, il confronto con la "grandeur" dell'umanità e la sua desolnte meschinità. Vi condurrò lungo il Malecòn di una Avana sconosciuta, amori, passsioni e sentieri dell'anima. Racconti, prose e poesie con un registro desueto, fuori dagli schemi e dalle comuni regole in cui traspare il profonda amore per il popolo e la terra a cui appartengo.Scoprirete come una Sirena incatena, lega, con un filo invisibile e perenne un popolo alla propria terra fino a divenire cieco e dissoluto pur di mantenere fede al suo dolce richiamo e incanto.

Vocabolario etimologico dialettale molisano di Roberto De Rubertis