The Underpainter - Softcover

Jane Urquhart

3.67

2,819 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747535213 ISBN 13: 9780747535218

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 1998

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Austin Fraser's painting teacher had indoctrinated him with the view that unless something could be turned into art, it simply was not worth his time. And in this he included people. Austin certainly applied the principle to Sara Pengelly, who lived alone on the northern edge of Lake Superior, and whom Austin travelled north to visit for fifteen summers. During his annual visits Austin scrutinised Sara's every nuance of face and body with a bloodless and voracious intimacy - accumulating and hoarding her image for the paintings he executed in his New York studio during the rest of the year. He was her lover but he never dreamt of loving her. Art did not demand it. THE UNDERPAINTER is a breathtaking novel that examines art as exploitation, whilst interweaving captivating narrative threads of First World War drama; a world of war the purist Austin snobbishly despised until his friend in the field was himself shattered.

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Review:

Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter is a very modern novel preoccupied with the power of the past. Austin Fraser, born in 1894, is a modernist who relentlessly paints over his canvases, much as he tries to eradicate people from his life. Though he insists that he has forgone emotion and love, when he receives news of a women he once knew, he can no longer stop memories from encroaching.

Urquhart's novel ranges from late-century Rochester, New York, to Ontario to Paris to New York City. And not since Patrick White's The Vivisector have there been such disturbing scenes of the painter in action: "I believed that I was drawing--literally drawing--everything out of her, that his act of making art filled the space around me so completely there would be no other impressions possible beyond the ones I controlled." Amazingly, by exposing Fraser's emptiness, Urquhart makes us pity him. Though she has said that she was "quite angry with Austin" while writing The Underpainter, the author's language incises his reluctant humanity and turns his life into a work of art.

From the Back Cover:

“Her language is pure, dazzling in its precision, like the etching of ice on glass.”
– Globe and Mail

“A painterly masterwork…poignant in each of its several landscapes and subtle in tracing the mingled nuances of love and pain.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“The detached eye of the narrator never falters, though passion hums beneath the surface like some vast primeval beast beneath the ice.”
– The Independent (U.K.)

“Writing with the eye of a painter, Urquhart transforms the energy of the world into enduring literature.”
– Kitchener-Waterloo Record

“Urquhart is one of Canada’s most accomplished and interesting writers.”
– Edmonton Journal

“Original and dazzling, radiant and quietly perceptive, Urquhart’s new novel delights the senses even as it astonishes the mind.…”
– London Free Press

“A lyrical novel with a deep, unsentimental connection to ordinary life…[Urquhart’s] language is vivid enough to take your breath away.”
– Boston Globe

“Urquhart explores the ability to love and the failure to love; the visual pictures and images of humanity beneath the surfaces on which art is created. The Underpainter is a savory read.”
– Flare

“Urquhart’s evocation of time and place shimmers with clarity.…”
– Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Urquhart has written a novel whose narrative power matches her delicate artistry with words…lodges in the mind and heart forever.”
–Montreal Gazette

“Richly textured prose, and an intricate, many layered structure.”
– Sunday Times (U.K.)

“A rich, multifaceted story, skillfully told.”
– San Francisco Chronicle

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