A literary novel which guides you through the lives of the artists Paula and Jonas, who are learning trompe l’oeil techniques. It’s as though you are watching them paint, laugh and love. Their story has many ups and downs, separations and reconciliations as they go about their work in places from smart drawing rooms to film sets and prehistoric sites. Vivid descriptions of both the natural world and their painted illusions make this a book to savour.

From the first page, I wondered whether I was in for a Ducks, Newburyport single-sentence stream of prose. I needn’t have worried; Painting Time soon settles in to a more conventional style. It’s no less immersive and descriptive for that, though. Paula, Jonas and Kate are students in a small cohort training at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels. In a claustrophobic six months, they learn the necromantic art of trompe l’oeil and the reproduction of woods and marbles. Maylis de Kerangal’s descriptions of not just the pigments they use but the techniques, the surroundings – and pretty much everything else in the book – are suffused with colour. It’s delicious.
The three go in different directions as they start their careers but stay in touch. We follow Paula from the Institut, via her parent’s apartment in Paris to Italy, Moscow and then south to the Dordogne where a vast undertaking awaits.
I don’t read much in translation. Given that one of my major joys in reading is finding out about different people, different lives, I should probably remedy that. Would I have known just from reading it that it is a translation? I don’t think so: the idiom is all English, but the language does have a sort of exotic otherness, a languid fluency. Perhaps translation imbues that sense of other; the locations contribute too. I can only imagine how beautiful it is in the original French.
Whilst not a difficult read, it stretched my imagination. I bookmarked sentences and paragraphs to come back to, to savour anew. I’m going to push this book on a friend who has a more refined literary palate than mine; and it’s not often I do that. As a wrangler of an ever-growing reading list, I rarely re-read. But I can see myself revisiting this for the sheer joy of being enveloped in colour.

I thought that the premise here was interesting and I enjoyed the conversations about art, however, I found the characters utterly vacuous and thought that the prose was self indulgent. Consequently, I wouldn't recommend.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

The book starts with a reunion after a decade or so between three friends who met at a college that taught decorative art. It then goes back into the life at the college and how the main character finds her career.
Paula is a young woman not sure what she wants in life. She thinks she wants to be an artist and is finally excited about learning about the decorative arts. She delves into the technical aspects as much as the practical and it is in this area the book shines. Paula also struggles with self confidence and a feeling she is not good enough struggling to handle her crush on her flatmate, her talent and then her career.
Her flatmate and the third friend an Englishwoman were all a bit wooden and never fully developed. As is the strange last part of cave painting and what it means for Paula.
A book that offered a lot at the beginning but struggled towards the end.

Never read anything like this before. Beautiful in places; poetic, lyrical, transporting. But for me, quite shallow characterisation and loosely constructed plot.
But to be positive:
Absolutely gripping, are the sections where de Kerangel describes to us the painting techniques learned by three young students at the prestigious Institut de Peinture in Paris, to create decorative visualisations of wood, marble and most impressively, tortoiseshell. And in our minds we marvel at the craft, the tenacity, the talent and courage of the young artists and the uncompromising standard of the teaching.
Main character Paula becomes more and more renowned, mature and confident, moving between jobs in Europe including recreating landmarks of Rome sets for film. But what moves her and us more than anything is the chance to work on a reproduction of the Lascaux caves in France.
The documentary aspect of this novel; putting colours, shapes and textures into words until the finished piece emerges, is de Kerangel’s triumph.
Many thanks to #NetGalley and #PaintingTime @Quercus Books/@MacLehosepress for my digital download

This has the wow factor. A french translation focusing on art students learning the style of trompe l’oeil - visual illusions designed to trick the eye into perceiving the real thing. It’s also a coming of age story, as the students leave home for the first time and gradually metamorphose in their new surroundings. Finally we follow Paula on a nomadic painter life through Europe, until one job resonates on a deep level - creating a replica of the ancient Lascaux cave paintings.

My first thoughts, ironically, were that this was an overwritten style I was not going to enjoy. But the writing honestly became something completely wonderful: by the time Paula is painting tortoiseshell I was captivated by delight for the highly visual images being painted for the mind, it felt so vivid and fluid to read.

Similarly to the other art book I’ve read recently, (Painter to the King) this adopts a stream of consciousness approach to the writing style, which worked well overall, apart from right at the outset where it felt a bit pretentious, and the odd moment the plot became obscured by the long unending prose. But this one had more plot, and I became more invested as a result despite occasionally losing my way. In many ways a book of two halves: at the beginning, I found the characters unlikeable, but gradually the three protagonists grew on me, as they became more confident and more immersed in their artistic pursuits. There is a sense of size and grandeur at the resolution of the novel and the writing really does finish off in exquisite style, it is hugely enjoyable to read.

My thanks to #NetGalley and MacLehose Press for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I have my problems with stream-of-conciousness books. This reunion of art students was no different. Managed to fight through 20% of it, but just could not hack it. Others might enjoy it, hence a ***.

I came to this having loved de Kerangal's 'Mend the Heart' but sadly didn't find this as powerful. There's a similar forward motion as the prose races and trips over itself, eschewing conventional punctuation in its rush but this didn't have the same emotional resonance for me. In places this feels positively baroque as it drools over details of paint tones, gold and marble, but then it turns away to more mundane topics and can feel a bit directionless. There is a movement overall from trompe d'oeil to the climactic merging of artist and painting but it felt a bit forced and overly self-conscious. An interesting read that didn't wholly work for me.

Painting Time is the English title of de Kerangal’s novel “Un mode à portée de main” which I guess translates into English as “A world at your fingertips”. It is a novel that plunges us into the world of trompe l’œil, of art that tricks the eye into believing something is real and is not a painting. It might only be January as I write this, but so far 2021 has included a lot of art in the books I have read (e.g. “The Portrait of a Mirror”, “The Death of Francis Bacon”, “Stories with Pictures” and “Understanding a Photograph”).

I have previously read, and really liked, de Kerangal’s novel “Mend the Living”. That novel had the peculiar privilege of being translated into English twice, once for the UK market and once (under the title “The Heart”) for the US market. I read the UK edition which was translated by Jessica Moore who is also the translator of Painting Time.

in Painting Time, we meet Paula Karst. At the start of the book, she is a dissatisfied student who decides to take up a place the famous “Institut de Peinture” in Brussels. It is here that she learns the techniques of trompe l’œil and becomes skilled at creating paintings that do not look like paintings but rather like some other substance, such as marble or wood. Incidentally, I find this a fascinating topic because I am a photographer working in the opposite direction: my favourite feedback on my images is when someone says “I thought it was a painting”. In Brussels, Paula strikes up a friendship with Jonas and Kate, although the friendship with Jonas threatens to develop into something more. But, at the end of the course, the three split up to follow their various careers. We stay with Paula as she takes any job she can until she is snapped up by the film industry (Moscow working on Anna Karenina and Cinecittà in Rome) and then, as the blurb tells us, the incredible work at Lascaux IV creating a replica of the cave paintings. This is a book grounded in our real world which makes a further surprising appearance right at the end of the novel for reasons I am not quite sure of (it might come to me if I pause to think about it for a while).

This is a very technical novel. De Kerangal has immersed herself, and immerses us as readers, in the detail of the world in which her book is set. There are long descriptions of techniques, long lists of very specific colours and several technical terms I had to look up. At times, it feels like the author has forgotten about her readers in her desire to write down everything she wants to record about the technical details of the craft she is explaining. It is interesting (if that kind of thing interests you), but it comes at the expense of emotion and, in the case of Jonas and Kate, character development.

Some of the writing is very strong. I am great fan of Richard Powers and there are several passages in this book where you feel for a number of pages that you have jumped over to a Powers novel. As you would probably expect me to say, these were the best bits of the book for me and they seem to come when Paula gives herself to her craft. At other times, the writing felt to me to be rather forced and the story never had the same power that made it impossible for me to put down “Mend the Living” until I had finished it. It occurred to me part way through the book that some of my reaction might be to deliberate choices by the author. After all, a key to the art that Paula engages in is that there is incredible attention to detail but that the viewer should not see that but rather see something they believe to be something else. I wondered if that’s what this book was trying to do. For this reader, and it may be that the problem lies with me, it didn’t quite work if it was because I did find myself getting bogged down in the detail.

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.