Young artist Paula Karst takes up a place at the renowned Institut de Peinture in Brussels (a real place, look it up, very interesting) where students learn to imitate marble and wood, to paint backdrops for film and theatre, to paint trompe l’oeil. We accompany Paula through her studies and friendships at the Institut and on to the jobs she gets after graduation. The book has been described as a coming-of-age novel but I never really felt that Paula did in fact come-of-age. In fact I found her hard to relate to at all. Her relationships seem to remain shallow – and uninteresting. There’s a lot in the book about the artistic process, about paint and textures and colours, but all in an overdone and somewhat pretentious manner. I found myself skipping some sections, in fact. I enjoyed de Kerangal’s previous novels but this one just didn’t do it for me, unfortunately.

Painting Time is a richly described, decadent and aesthetic, existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter from award-winning author de Kerangal. It's 2007 and young Parisian artist Paula Karst is about to begin her studies at the prestigious Institut Supérieur de Peinture in Brussels where the students learn how to paint sets for film and theatre, and trompe l'oeils. In the intense year she spends there, she meets two new friends, both enigmatic, resourceful, impulsive and gifted. There's shy, retiring, enigmatic roommate Jonas, with whom she begins a romantic affair, but they soon lose contact after graduation and Kate, a statuesque red-haired Scotswoman. Together, the three weave a complex relationship that mirrors the interconnectedness of their artistic materials and over their years of enthusiastic creativity. Replicating the grain of wood, the wear of marble, or the protrusion on a tortoiseshell requires method, technique, talent but also something else. Paula strives to understand what she's painting, the "micro" that she is and the "macro" of the world and its history. She chooses the painstaking demands of craftmanship over the abstraction of high art.

Paula's apprenticeship is punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles and saturnalian evenings. The rigorous learning, the fast pace of work with great physical involvement represent, in particular for Paula, a moment of growth and maturation. Once she graduates, after an initial period of difficulty, she ends up finding herself in large construction sites, especially in Italy, where at the legendary Cinecittà studios on the outskirts of Rome, she is in charge of the scenarios of Habemus Papam by Nanni Moretti, and she will live a fleeting love affair with a handsome Italian. And after an engagement in Russia, on the set of the film Anna Karenina, she returns to France and an old fellow student makes her a proposal that will prove to be peculiar. He suggests that she work on the great cave recreation project: a huge facsimile, Lascaux IV, where our distant ancestors painted Palaeolithic scenes on the walls to tell their stories; the apotheosis of human cultural expression. One day Jonas visits her in Lascaux. They have not seen each other for years, and because of his arrival, past and present, image and reality merge.

Painting Time is a beautifully composed bildungsroman about the growth and love of a young woman, but above all it is a novel about the big questions of art, creativity, reproduction, presenting and understanding the world. Throughout these pages, these questions are tangible and flicker in thousands of colours of stones, plants, minerals, and paints. With wonderful attention to detail and acute observations, as in her past books, Maylis de Kerangal introduces us to young people in search of themselves, in a metaphorical descent into the intimacy of art in its deepest, most concrete and all-encompassing sense. Exquisite and beguiling, this is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. The author unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within and mirrors the enchanted materialism of her protagonist's artistic journey in her rich, lyrical prose. Highly recommended.

Paula is a decorative artist who specializes in trompe d'oeil, which she learns at an academy in Brussels. She meets Jonas and Kate there; he becomes an object of attraction but disappears for a long stretch as Paula's career, such as it is, takes her to multiple locations. Now, she's working on reproducing the Lacscaux caves and Jonas is back in her life. This is more about art than it is about people. There are interesting details of how Paula makes her art and rumination on the subject. It is also more philosophical than plot driven and surprisingly unemotional. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

Painting Time is a beautifully written novel, albeit frustrating at times to get through. Maylis de Kerengal cares a great deal about the aesthetic she creates for her characters to inhabit – it is easy to picture the smooth marble and the brush strokes of a repainted set designs, but it is hard to decipher the novel’s intentions as a piece of art. Painting Time’s conclusion seems to indicate a greater theme around the permanence of art and the creative process’ effect on the artist, which creates an interesting meta-narrative around de Kerengal’s work, but it comes so late in the story that I was left unsatiated.

The story’s narrative follows Paula Karst first as a student at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels and then at various job sites as she develops her career as a “decorative painter.” In addition to Paula, the book is most concerned with Paula’s classmate, Kate, and her roommate, Jonas, and how their lives diverge once they leave Brussels. Paula’s career takes her to Italy where she works painting sets and later to Moscow before she and Jonas are reunited on a project in Lascaux.

De Kerengal is less concerned with plot than she is with describing the artistic process, which works for large segments of the book’s 200 plus pages. Still, it is hard to connect with any of the characters and the novel has an oddly lugubrious tone for a story that is so attached to describing such beautiful artistry and settings. I appreciated the novel’s commitment to an almost pedagogic description of an esoteric art form, but ultimately did not connect with the work.

“Trompe-l’oeil has to make us see at the same time that it obscures, and this involves two distinct and successive moments: one in which the eye is deceived, and one in which it is undeceived.”

De Kerangal’s Painting Time is the story Paula Karst, a young woman studying the art of trompe-l’oeil and learning to make her way in the world. I enjoyed learning about the craft and science of decorative painting and the novel raises interesting questions: What does it mean to be a “real painter”? Is trompe-l’oeil an art form or merely the work of “tricksters and counterfeiters”? How do modern and ancient art coexist?

The a-little-too-obvious name Karst (karst: “landscape eroded by dissolution, producing ridges, towers, fissures, sinkholes”) previews Paula’s struggles in her relationships as her self-awareness develops and matures. The novel’s other characters remain fairly uninteresting, poorly developed and on the periphery.

Occasionally the third person narration changes briefly to a first person narrator speaking directly to the reader, as in a film when a character turns to directly address the camera. I’m not sure who that narrator is or what the author intended with these brief narration changes.

Although the prose can be entrancing, at times the use of obscure vocabulary causes the prose to lag: “…until it becomes a pleochroic mote of dust…” or “that these big parallelepipeds contain something to spark these metamorphoses. She waits for a passage to open…similar in this way to speleologists who walk along the base of cliffs…” I got bogged down in the lengthy sections about Lascaux, and didn’t understand why Charlie Hebdo was thrown in at the end of the novel. Overall, it felt like de Kerangal was trying too hard.

Despite the repeated references to eyes, sight and vision throughout the novel I found it interesting that that the author would choose a dedication about the sense of hearing.


Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to review the ARC via Netgalley.

Painting Time is a very deep dive into the lives of visual artists. However, this novel suffered from lack of pace and plot.

I wanted to like this book so badly. On the surface it was everything I wanted from a book. A young woman studying art in Brussels. I wonder if part of my issue was the translation but it was so difficult to connect with the characters. They (and the writing) were far too pretentious. I honestly did not finish this book.

A deep and fascinating dive into the world of trompe l'oeil. Rich in language and description, this coming of age novel is reminiscent of Anna Gavalda.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the early ebook. A young woman, Paula, leaves Paris to study art in Brussels and finds that she wants to be a craftsman instead of an artist. She graduates and does work for hotels and painting movie sets in Moscow and in Italy’s famed Cinecitta Studios. At school she meets fellow painters Kate from Scotland and the very talented Jonas, who becomes her roommate during school. They push each other to do good work, but the most extraordinary part of the book as how these studies have opened up the visual word in such a micro way, so that how they now see the world is nothing less than poetry. Paula gets the ultimate job of recreating the cave paintings at Lascaux and it makes her think and rejoice about how art has transformed from these first recorded drawings to all that has come since.

De Karangal seems to enjoy deep dives into professions, and this time round has taken a long loving look at trompe l’oeil painting. Her prose is so lovely and her appreciation of technique, materials and so on so intense that she beguiles the reader - up to a point. That point is where you start to want a plot or something in the way of events. As it is, one must suffice with a kind of brief history - apprenticeship, career, with long descriptions of the work. It’s admirably done, but limited.