Name: How to Paint a Dead Man
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780061430459

Sarah Hall

The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall, "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain's young novelists" (The Guardian), delivers "a maddeningly enticing read . . . an amazing feat of literary engineering" (The Independent on Sunday).

A Novel

How to Paint a Dead Man

Brad Mitchell

You certainly have to take what you can see/feel as an individual with this book. The stories lack plot, but meaning's are subtle with the language she uses. Certainly makes an impression at points, but I think another read is in order.

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.

Amanda Wells

Big themes in a book that snuck up on me. I was in the midst of it and wasn't sure how I felt about it one way or the other. It was quiet, in a way - very internal in its description - but suddenly I felt strongly attached to each perspective, and horribly sad amongst a couple of the described tragedies. 

I wished only for a stronger resolution, but I think it does suit the tone of the book, how it ended. 

Might write more later once I've thought more about it... this is a thinker, that's for sure.

pluto

A Booker-longlisted novel of art, absence, loss and passion, from Britain's most exciting contemporary writer. Moving between Italy and England, the lives of four people intertwine across half a century: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma; a blind girl tries to make sense of a world she can no longer see; a landscape artist finds himself trapped in dangerous terrain, and a young woman embarks on a dangerous affair of darkness and sexual abandon.

How to Paint a Dead Man A Novel

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