Tiepolo Blue: The smart, sexy read - set over a long hot summer
Autor James Cahillen Limba Engleză Paperback – 27 apr 2023
Observăm că „Tiepolo Blue” se adresează în primul rând cititorului care caută în beletristică o fuziune între rigoarea intelectuală și senzualitatea descoperirii de sine. Este un roman ideal pentru cei atrași de atmosfera mediului academic britanic, dar și pentru pasionații de istoria artei care doresc să vadă cum teoriile estetice se ciocnesc brutal cu realitatea viscerală a vieții. Notăm cu interes cum James Cahill, el însuși un istoric de artă distins, folosește figura profesorului Don Lamb pentru a chestiona fragilitatea unei existențe construite exclusiv pe erudiție.
Premisa este una de o eleganță clasică: un savant de la Cambridge, a cărui întreagă lume este limitată la analiza cerurilor pictate de maestrul venețian Tiepolo, este smuls din confortul său și aruncat în efervescența cartierului Soho din anii '90. Această trecere de la ordinea academică la anarhia scenei artistice londoneze marchează un punct de cotitură nu doar profesional, ci și identitar. Remarcăm stilul meticulos al lui Cahill, care reușește să infuzeze narațiunii o tensiune amestecată cu o melancolie fină, specifică unei „maturizări întârziate”.
Atmosfera te trimite cu gândul la London Triptych de Jonathan Kemp, prin explorarea straturilor ascunse ale Londrei și a identității masculine, deși „Tiepolo Blue” păstrează o ancoră mult mai puternică în dialogul cu arta clasică, ceea ce marchează o voce proprie, profund contemplativă. Față de lucrările sale anterioare de non-ficțiune, precum studiul despre David Hockney sau incursiunea în mitologie din Flying Too Close to the Sun, Cahill reușește aici să transforme cunoștințele sale enciclopedice într-un motor narativ emoționant, în care arta nu este doar decor, ci oglinda unei prăbușiri personale inevitabile.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 1529369428
Pagini: 342
Dimensiuni: 128 x 196 x 36 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: Hodder & Stoughton
Colecția Sceptre
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom
De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm acest roman pentru portretul fascinant al unei transformări interioare radicale. Cititorul va câștiga o perspectivă nuanțată asupra Londrei anilor '90 și a modului în care pasiunea pentru frumos poate deveni atât o salvare, cât și un blestem. Este o lectură esențială pentru fanii prozei psihologice care apreciază personajele complexe și fundalurile culturale bogate, oferind o experiență de lectură deopotrivă cerebrală și emoționantă.
Despre autor
James Cahill este profesor de istoria artei la University of California, Berkeley, poziție care îi conferă o autoritate rară în descrierea lumii academice și artistice. Expertiza sa este vastă, publicând anterior lucrări de referință precum Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting și monografii despre artiști contemporani. În „Tiepolo Blue”, debutul său în ficțiune, Cahill îmbină rigoarea cercetătorului cu sensibilitatea romancierului, explorând teme precum identitatea, dorința și intersecția dintre viața privată și canonul estetic. Stilul său este influențat de cariera sa academică, fiind recunoscut pentru capacitatea de a face arta accesibilă și relevantă prin narațiune.
Descriere
***OUT NOW: James Cahill's new novel THE VIOLET HOUR***
SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS' CLUB FIRST NOVEL AWARD
'Divine . . . the smart, sexy read you need' Evening Standard
'Startlingly impressive' Daily Mail
'An electric new novel' Guardian
Exiled from his university position for an inexcusable blunder, art historian Don Lamb flees to London, a city alive with sex and creativity. There, over the course of a long, hot summer, as he is immersed in the anarchic art and gay scenes of the mid-90s, Don sees his carefully curated life irrevocably changed. But his epiphany is also a reckoning, as his unexamined past is revealed to him in a devastating new light.
Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don's turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life.
'Wildly enjoyable . . . A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling' Financial Times
'Dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told' Reverend Richard Coles, Daily Mail
Recenzii
This divine debut from art critic and academic James Cahill is the smart, sexy read you need . . . Not only an addictive pageturner, Cahill's book taps into the tensions and suspicions between generations that feels incredibly relevant for our testy times
Already a compelling psychosexual story about beauty, desire and art, Tiepolo Blue is all the more interesting because it hits notes of such strangeness
One of the standout debut novels is James Cahill's Tiepolo Blue, a coming-of-age tale set in London in the 1990s that deftly explores what it is like to suffer a very public fall from grace
Art, academia and abject self-denial combine in this startlingly impressive, 1990s-set debut . . . A heavily perfumed, sexually tender, psychologically acute novel . . . as full of light and colour as Tiepolo's incandescent skies
Arresting . . . a masterly attention to (especially visual) detail and an irresistibly propulsive, almost swaggering style . . . Cahill is by no means a polemical author, and the novel is all the better for it. Any authorial commentary is barely detectable above the crowd of vivid characters with which Cahill has populated his novel, for Tiepolo Blue is, at its heart, an astute character study
What starts off as a campus novel soon shades into something weirder and much more mesmerizing . . . The plot is propulsive, though the crafted ambience of unease simultaneously destabilizes the reader at every turn. The prose is fluid and precise but the tone equivocal, bathos merging into pathos, tragedy into farce and back again . . . It's a measure of Cahill's sleight of hand that he manages to inject his plot with such page-turning momentum
Tiepolo Blue is about a buttoned-up art historian in Cambridge in 1994 who messes up and gets a job managing a London gallery just as the Young British Artists enter their glory. One of them initiates his unbuttoning which is dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told
A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling . . . wildly enjoyable . . . The combination of arty milieu and sexual stirrings may evoke Alan Hollinghurst, but Iris Murdoch is a more obvious point of comparison . . . Snobbish and incompetent, Don may be difficult to like, but his painful awakening is delicately rendered
An ambitious novel about the wonders of art and the depths of the human heart, full of people and ideas
With touches of Alan Hollinghurst, the musings of the book's protagonist on the radical power of art to act as a catalyst for personal change make it an exhilarating, erudite read
Interrogating beauty and meaning in art, Tiepolo Blue rewards rereading. Pointing to masked, tricksy identities, clues glitter gem-like amid hallucinatory prose . . . a stylish tale of love and long-game revenge
An absorbing coming-of-age story
Bringing together the Italian masters and the Young British Artists, this is a debut that looks at art, power, academia, and the potential of the urban setting at the end of the 20th century
Simmering
Most giddying are the passages that evoke the slow-mo slide of Don's professional collapse . . . I shivered with awful delight
The worlds of art, academia and queerness collide in James Cahill's debut
The story of Tiepolo Blue and its people have invaded my dreams . . . something in the way Cahill puts the reader in Don Lamb's shoes does (or has done in my case) extraordinary things. I blushed and howled warnings and wanted to slap, cajole, hug, disown, disavow and walk away from him. His life will look so squalid and pathetic from the outside, but Cahill takes us inside and we somehow respect and love him. This is the best novel I have read for ages. It is so beautifully written, not a false note in any sentence. Cahill's presentation of the agonising clash of aesthetics, of culture, of generations . . . it's just masterly. Don's disintegration is painful to read, but it all grips you like a thriller. My heart was constantly in my throat as I read . . . There is so much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in
Imagine if Hollinghurst and Murdoch collaborated on a witty update of Death in Venice and you'll see the appeal of James Cahill's assured debut
The spirit of E. M. Forster is alive and well in James Cahill. The same palpating of damaged moral tissue, the same psychological canniness, the same gently invoked erudition, the same exactitude and eloquence - except Cahill is able to explore forbidden themes that Forster feared to touch on except posthumously
This is a novel full of suspense and surprise. It made me laugh and brought back memories of a time in my own life. I missed the characters as soon as I'd finished
I travelled on the exquisite vessel of James Cahill's prose, unable to disembark. The journey is sensual, treacherous and elegiac. The final landing, breath-taking
Wow. It is magnificent. Simply magnificent . . . Tiepolo Blue really has blown me away: the gorgeous phrase-making; the sure-footed pacing; the (re-)immersion in a world I know, or knew, in a way that is both hard-edged with historical detail and almost hallucinatory . . . The last debut novel I read that had this much talent buzzing around inside it was Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library
James Cahill's first novel, drawn from close observation, tells a gripping tale of the worlds of traditional academia and art history pitted against those of contemporary art, each failing horribly to understand the other. As a result all becomes infused with satirical comedy and ghastly tragedy
I just devoured Tiepolo Blue, I could not put it down. The longing, the beauty, the detail, the complexity, the art, the intellect and the emotion . . . What a triumph!