![]() ![]() From her friends, she will learn to be a storyteller. To see, here, is something else.” The novel cements De Kerangal's reputation as one of contemporary fiction’s most gifted sentence buildersĪt the institute, Paula will learn the “patient work of appropriation”, with all its bruising rigours. ![]() “To see, under the glass roof of the studio on the rue du Métal, high on the fumes from paint and solvents, muscles sore and forehead burning, doesn’t just mean keeping your eyes open to the world,” De Kerangal writes “to see is to engage in a pure action, to create an image. To become trompe-l’œil artists, Paula, Kate and Jonas must learn to see anew. There’s Kate, a 6ft Glaswegian nightclub bouncer cryptic, talented Jonas and Paula, the painter we will follow once lessons end, with her untapped fervour and David Bowie eyes. For one trio, a lifelong friendship will form in the hectic months between October 2007 and March 2008, born of all-nighters and the unshakable stink of turpentine. The school’s trompe-l’œil course – immersive and uncompromising – will remake them all. The students at the Institut Supérieur de Peinture in Brussels are a dissonant bunch, ranging from penniless house painters to the rebellious daughters of aristocrats. In her new novel, Painting Time, translated by Jessica Moore, the French author turns her granular attentions to trompe-l’œil and its artisans: those “bamboozlers of the real” who can conjure marble, wood and ethereal skyscapes from pigment and lacquer. A meticulous researcher, she draws immensely humane stories out of niche vocational knowledge: the world-bending muscle of mechanical engineering ( Birth of a Bridge) the hermetic brutalities of transplant surgery ( Mend the Living, which won the Wellcome science book prize in 2017) the explorations of haute cuisine ( The Cook). There is something magnificently true about De Kerangal’s fiction, which braids technical fluency with winged prose. “A set doesn’t have to be real,” her guide explains, “it has to be true.” A s she wanders the immense backlot of Rome’s Cinecittà film studio – “Hollywood on the Tiber” – the heroine of Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time is struck by how unreal the sets seem up close, how patently confected. ![]()
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