- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books (Oct 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140269738
- ISBN-13: 978-0140269734
- Product Dimensions: 13.8 x 1.8 x 19.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,217,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter is a very modern novel preoccupied with the power of the past. Austin Fraser, born in 1894, is a modernist who relentlessly paints over his canvases, much as he tries to eradicate people from his life. Though he insists that he has forgone emotion and love, when he receives news of a women he once knew, he can no longer stop memories from encroaching. Urquhart's novel ranges from late-century Rochester, New York, on to Ontario then Paris and New York City. Not since Patrick White's The Vivisector have there been such disturbing scenes of the painter in action: "I believed that I was drawing-- literally drawing--everything out of her, that his act of making art filled the space around me so completely there would be no other impressions possible beyond the ones I controlled." Intriguingly, by exposing Fraser's emptiness, Urquhart makes us pity him. Though she has said that she was "quite angry with Austin" while writing The Underpainter, the author's language incises his reluctant humanity and turns his life into a work of art.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Austin Fraser's painting teacher had indoctrinated him with the view that unless something could be turned into art, it simply was not worth his time. And in this he included people. Austin certainly applied the principle to Sara Pengelly, who lived alone on the northern edge of Lake Superior, and whom Austin travelled north to visit for fifteen summers. During his annual visits Austin scrutinised Sara's every nuance of face and body with a bloodless and voracious intimacy - accumulating and hoarding her image for the paintings he executed in his New York studio during the rest of the year. He was her lover but he never dreamt of loving her. Art did not demand it. THE UNDERPAINTER is a breathtaking novel that examines art as exploitation, whilst interweaving captivating narrative threads of First World War drama; a world of war the purist Austin snobbishly despised until his friend in the field was himself shattered.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Underpainter is a riveting novel about an artist, whose defining trait, is to wash overtop what he originally painted, and paint over that, leaving only faint images, of what had been. In this novel, Jane Urquahart has painted the picture of an artist who is obsessed with painting,to the point of destroying both himself and those who care about him. I could not put this book down.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I simply couldn't believe how good this novel was. The quality of the writing, the spellbinding story, and the subject matter itself - so different from anything I've read before. It made me want to savour every word. Set in Canada and the northern USA in the decades between 1910 and 1940, it is told through the eyes of "the underpainter", a man who has squandered his opportunities for happiness and personal fulfilment - one could hardly call him the hero of the story. If the book has a hero, it is his friend, George, who paints pictures of quite a different kind.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's been a wet Saturday which gave me a good excuse to read this beautiful novel in one sitting.I'd never heard of Jane Urquhart but am now eager to read more of her work.Her landscapes and characters are vividly portrayed as their story draws us in.A novel which is absorbing,thought-provoking and a real page-turner.
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