{"id":72048,"date":"2023-02-28T23:41:52","date_gmt":"2023-03-01T04:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=72048"},"modified":"2023-03-09T20:01:42","modified_gmt":"2023-03-10T01:01:42","slug":"war-turpentine-march-reading-group-selection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2023\/02\/28\/war-turpentine-march-reading-group-selection\/","title":{"rendered":"War & Turpentine: March reading group selection \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stefan Hertmans\u2019s grandfather Urbain in his soldier\u2019s uniform.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Book Beat reading group selection for March is War and Turpentine<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Belgian author Stefen Hertmans. Our meeting will be held online through a virtual Zoom link on Wednesday, March 29 at 7:00 pm<\/strong>. Books are available at Book Beat and discounted 15%. Meetings are free and a zoom link is sent on the morning of the meeting to anyone interested in attending.<\/p>\n

An international best seller: a vivid, masterly novel about a Flemish man who reconstructs his grandfather\u2019s story\u2014his hopes, loves, and art, all disrupted by the First World War\u2014from the unflinching notebooks he filled with pieces of his life. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The life of Urbain Martien\u2014artist, soldier, survivor of World War I\u2014lies 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\u2019s memory. He vividly recounts a whole life: Urbain as the child of a lowly church painter, retouching his father\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/strong> paints an extraordinary portrait of one man\u2019s life and reveals how that life echoed down through the generations.<\/p>\n

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In the Flemish writer Stefan Hertmans\u2019s potent new book, \u201cWar and Turpentine,\u201d we meet a World War I veteran of the garrulous variety. This man is the author\u2019s grandfather, Urbain Martien, a forgotten war hero who told his battle stories so often that his children and grandchildren plugged their ears.<\/p>\n

\u201cWar and Turpentine\u201d is billed as a novel, but that\u2019s hardly the word for it. It\u2019s an uncanny work of historical reconstruction. Late in his life, his family bored with him, Mr. Martien retired to a table. Writing in ballpoint with painful, gouty fingers, he began to pour his crystalline memories of the war and of his impoverished childhood in Belgium into two large notebooks, some 600 pages of manuscript.”<\/p>\n

–The New York Times<\/p>\n

“A staggering richness of language; brutal, deep, haunting. Mesmerising from page one. If you think you\u2019ve had enough of the muddy gore of Flanders Fields, believe me you haven\u2019t, not until you\u2019ve read this book.”
\n–Simon Schama<\/p>\n

“War and Turpentine is the astonishing result of Hertmans\u2019 reckoning with his grandfather\u2019s diaries. It is a book that lies at the crossroads of novel, biography, autobiography and history, with inset essays, meditations, pictures. It seems to be aching to be called \u201cSebaldian\u201d, and earns the epithet glowingly.Urbain considered himself and his life ordinary. More than 20 years after his death, he has been given a kind of immortality by his grandson, an extraordinary afterlife that he never could have imagined. War and Turpentine has all the markings of a future classic.”<\/p>\n

—The Guardian<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n