War and Turpentine

A Novel

By: Stefan Hertmans, David Mckay

Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith

An international best seller: a vivid, masterly novel about a Flemish man who reconstructs his grandfather's story - his hopes, loves, and art, all disrupted by the First World War - from the unflinching notebooks he filled with pieces of his life.

The life of Urbain Martien - artist, soldier, survivor of World War I - lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died in 1981. His grandson, a writer, retells his story, the notebooks giving him the impetus to imagine his way into the locked chambers of Urbain's memory. He vividly recounts a whole life: Urbain as the child of a lowly church painter, retouching his father's work; dodging death in a foundry; fighting in the war that altered the course of history; marrying the sister of the woman he truly loved; haunted by an ever-present reminder of the artist he had hoped to be and the soldier he was forced to become. Wrestling with this story, Urbain's grandson straddles past and present, searching for a way to understand his own part in both.

As artfully rendered as a Renaissance fresco, War and Turpentine paints an extraordinary portrait of one man's life and reveals how that life echoed down through the generations.

©2016 Stefan Hertmans (P)2016 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Potent.... Harrowing.... Built to last.... War and Turpentine is billed as a novel, but that's hardly the word for it. It's an uncanny work of historical reconstruction.... a gritty yet melancholy account of war and memory and art that may remind some readers of the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald." (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)

"A rich fictionalized memoir.... Death, destruction, obligation, duty - Urbain faces them all and yet he still finds joy in life." ( The Times [London])

"Poignantly nuanced...readers will thank an exceptional novelist (and a skilled translator)." ( Booklist )

Profoundly great storytelling

This book is in many ways a love letter from the author to his grandfather. You really get two books, two stories here, and they are so skillfully intertwined that they play with somehow knowing just what you crave to hear next.

One story is that of the painter-grandfather who wrote journals of his war-time experience in the fields of Flanders, his early life, and his true love. The other story is the author's as he searches to fill the gaps in those tales and give flesh and a backstory to the facts. It's a splendid blend, and its funny to suggest this but it might even be that the grandfather is the more brilliant writer - I've never before read battle scene writing that made me feel as if I knew what it was like to be there as much as in this book.

OK, a bit of a slow start and being without any knowledge that the book was great, I almost gave up. What a pity that would've been.

My favorite line is a description of a treasured and symbolic pocket watch described as "The talisman of a journey of which few photos survive."

When a book is as well written as this one is I find it's intimidating to write a review. I'd have had an easier time simply writing a thank you letter to the author telling him how much I enjoyed listening to his words in my head.

Beautifully written.

Sometimes difficult to keep track of generation changes. Too much war. Hard to deal with human suffering.

EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE, TIRING STORY

Would you consider the audio edition of War and Turpentine to be better than the print version?

I haven't read the print version. I expect it to be better in pint.

Would you ever listen to anything by Stefan Hertmans and David Mckay again?

Perhaps

What does Nicholas Guy Smith bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

The rich fullness of his voice, which evokes all of the senses.

If you could rename War and Turpentine, what would you call it?

I found the title confusing.

Any additional comments?

Grandfather became boring, as did the rest of the characters.

Fantastic Story

What a truly exquisite picture of a common man who lived through and survived the Great War.

Biography of a Belgian solder/artist

This book was very very slow in developing. The WWI action was the best part.

Left an indelible impression

Any additional comments?

The author's ability to translate his grandfather's diaries into a compelling WWI narrative was masterful, and left me with vital and lasting images of the horrors of trench warfare. I had never read about how the Flemish soldiers were mistreated by the French commanders, and was very sad to learn about it, but glad the author brought it to light. I loved the book, I loved the writing, and I loved the narration. I recommend this book.

Clever premise, captivating narrative

Vivid imagery and poignant story. Brilliant marriage of art and war. Combines the brilliance of the artist and the tenacity of the warrior in surprisingly clever ways.

Une Beauté Douloureux en Flandres

The more time passes from reading this book, the more I appreciate its dolorous beauty as a novel about art and war and memory and love. While I saw this as a decent 4 a month ago, I now see five stars in an iridescent visual collage of captivating and haunting splendour.

In 1981, the Belgian author Stefan Hertmans' 90-year-old Flemish maternal grandfather, Urbain Martien, gave him two large notebooks he had written in the prior several years of his memories of his Dickensian childhood growing up in Ghent, a port city of Belgium, and of his military service in World War I. Hertmans did not pull out the notebooks and begin work on the novel until after 2010 with the approach of the 100-year anniversary of WW I.

The novel is split into three parts. The first is Martien's childhood, the second his action in the war, and the final part is the sixty years of his life after the war. The first and third parts are written in third person with the author, going from his granddad's notes and his many visits to the sites mentioned therein, trying to imagine what it must have been like before and after the war. The second part is an transfixing first-person account of the grandfather from the frontline trenches of WW I.

Martien grew up in a poor household. His father painted frescoes in churches and died young, likely from long-term exposure to the paint's chemicals. At only 13, Martien went to work in an iron foundry where he witnessed several terrible factory accidents. Of a Flanders' tannery at the turn of the 20th Century, the author describes the shops' "penetrating odor of old wood and damp sackcloth," and a "closed courtyard" that "smelled of brussel sprout trimmings, horse manure scraped off the streets and drying tobacco leaves." After working in the foundry, he went off to military school.

In the summer of 1914, after Germany's invasion of Belgium, Martien was conscripted. During the war he was seriously injured three times, going back into service after the first two. He describes his first return to a "mob of emaciated ghouls." He describes an early German offensive as "a moving wall of metal, smoke and gunfire" that "seemed to herald the last judgment." Viewing the Zeppellin for the first time, he said it was like a "dream-fish drifting silently over our heads." In all the degradation of war, he can still see the nuance of nature: "The earth warms up; after the chilly morning hours, vapour rises from the miry fields, which shine in the strange light. A blanket of lapwings ripples over the horizon." Yet, as The Guardian put it, "these 90 pages are some of the most distilled expression of unremitting horror."

In the final part, we see Martien's love and loss and pain (a discussion of which would be a sort of spoiler). In probably the most poignant parts of this darkly gorgeous novel, we get a portrait of the aging painter who had little respect for more modern painters:

"They muddle along with no respect for the laws of anatomy, don't even know how to glaze, never mix their own paint, use turpentine like water and are ignorant of the secrets of grinding your own pigments, of fine linseed oil and the blowing of siccatives."

He loved the Flemish masters, such as Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Eyck.

And, in Martien as a war survivor, we see:

"His grand passions were treetops, clouds and folds in fabric. In these formless forms he could let go, lose himself in a dream world of light and dark, in clouds congealed in oil paint, chiaroscuro, a world where nobody else could intrude, because something--it was hard to say what--had broken inside him."


I always leave with visual impressions after viewing masterpiece paintings on a trip to a large gallery or museum. Some strike me, take my breath away once I've had time to contemplate them, visualize them, delight in their glory. While I wouldn't go so far as to say this novel is breathtaking, I will say its beauty has entranced me over the past month, in which time I've become enamored with it as a masterful novel of war and art and love.

ready for the printed version

this book chock full of beautiful descriptive phrases
needs to be read by me to squeeze all the beauty from it. listening was lovely, but it deserves closer attention

Elegiac, poetic, Belgian perspective on one Great

A challenge for listeners: the speaker shifts between grandfather and grandson regularly. It would be easier to pick up in print, but the only clue in the reading is the present tense of the grandfather's memoir and the past tense where the narrator fills in some of the gaps.