War and Turpentine

A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year

An Economist Best Book of the Year

Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award

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. In War and Turpentine, his grandson, a writer, retells his grandfather’s story, the notebooks providing a key to the locked chambers of Urbain’s memory.

With vivid detail, the grandson 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; being 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 tale, the 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.