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War and Turpentine
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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Acclaimed as the greatest novel ever written about the War Between the States, this searing Pulitzer Prize-winning book captures all the glory and shame of America's most tragic conflict in the vivid, crowded world of Andersonville, and the people who lived outside its barricades. Based on the author's extensive research and nearly 25 years in the making, MacKinlay Kantor's best-selling masterwork tells the heartbreaking story of the notorious Georgia prison where 50,000 Northern soldiers suffered.
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Worthy of the Pulitzer
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The Canal Bridge
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In 1913, before there is a rumor of war in Europe, Matthias Wrenn and Con Hatchel, lifelong friends from Ballyrannel in the Irish midlands, decide to see the world at the expense of the king of England and join the British army. A year later, while en route to India, their troop ship is recalled and they soon find themselves in the European slaughterhouse that was World War I.
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Beautiful, disturbing and unforgettable
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For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex World War II relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject—the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.
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Interesting
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Gravity's Rainbow
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- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
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By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Dr. Laura Pavlov, an American forensic archaeologist, is about to unravel a mystery that promises to solve one of the twentieth century’s greatest enigmas. Dr. Pavlov is a member of an international team digging on the outskirts of the present-day Russian city of Ekaterinburg, where the Romanov royal family was executed by their captors in July 1918. When Pavlov discovers two bodies perfectly preserved in permafrost in a disused mine shaft, they offer dramatic new clues to the disappearance of the Romanovs and, in particular, their famous daughter, Princess Anastasia, whose murder has always been shrouded in doubt.
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Ho- Hum
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
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It's not just a thousand miles that separates Hanna Majewski from her younger sister, Stefa. There is another gulf—between the traditional Jewish ways that Hanna chose to leave behind in Warsaw, and her new, independent life in London. But as autumn of 1940 draws near, Germany begins a savage aerial bombing campaign in England, killing and displacing tens of thousands. Hanna, who narrowly escapes death, is recruited as a spy in an undercover operation that sends her back to her war-torn homeland.
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Courageous Sisters
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From 1501 to 1505, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti both lived and worked in Florence. Leonardo was a charming, handsome 50-year-old at the peak of his career. Michelangelo was a temperamental sculptor in his mid-20s, desperate to make a name for himself. Michelangelo is a virtual unknown when he returns to Florence and wins the commission to carve what will become one of the most famous sculptures of all time: David.
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Fact and Fiction Fuse for a Great Listen
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Remember Us
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Remember Us is a look back at the lost world of the shtetl: a wise Zayde offering prophetic and profound words to his grandson, the rich experience of Shabbos, and the treasure of a loving family. All this is torn apart with the arrival of the Holocaust, beginning a crucible fraught with twists and turns so unpredictable and surprising that they defy any attempt to find reason within them. Through the eyes of 91-year-old Holocaust survivor Martin Small, we learn that these priceless memories that are too painful to remember are also too painful to forget.
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A Tragic and Rich Life, With Lessons For All
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Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined - an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times notable book The Hazards of Good Breeding.
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Skating On The Thin Ice Of Life
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All the Lives We Never Lived
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From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
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Beautiful book
- By Sonia S. on 12-13-19
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
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It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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What listeners say about War and Turpentine
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Possum Bean
- 06-14-17
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.
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2 people found this helpful
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- D
- 07-27-17
Beautifully written.
Sometimes difficult to keep track of generation changes. Too much war. Hard to deal with human suffering.
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- CANDACE O'NEILL
- 05-07-17
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.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Susan Thornton
- 01-09-17
Fantastic Story
What a truly exquisite picture of a common man who lived through and survived the Great War.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Haraway
- 04-24-17
Biography of a Belgian solder/artist
This book was very very slow in developing. The WWI action was the best part.
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2 people found this helpful
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- barbara
- 02-13-18
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.
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- FinnsNana
- 08-01-18
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.
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- W Perry Hall
- 10-24-16
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.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Autodidact
- 05-03-21
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
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- James A. Dittes
- 12-27-16
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.
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6 people found this helpful