War and Turpentine
SynopsisPlot
The story of Urbain Martien lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died. 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. But who is he, really? There is Urbain the child of a lowly church painter; Urbain the young man, who narrowly escapes death in an iron foundry; Urbain the soldier; and Urbain the man, married to his true love's sister, haunted by the war and his interrupted dreams of life as an artist. Wrestling with this tale, the grandson straddles past and present, searching for a way to understand his own part in both.
Story
About this book
War and Turpentine is a novel by the Belgian author Stefan Hertmans, translated from Dutch by David McKay. It centers on Urbain Martien, a man born into a modest Flemish family whose father worked as a church painter. From childhood, Urbain assisted his father in retouching religious paintings, and he carried ambitions of becoming an artist himself. Those ambitions were interrupted first by dangerous work in an iron foundry, and then, decisively, by the First World War.
After the war, Urbain married Gabrielle, the sister of the woman he had loved. He lived with the distance between the life he had imagined and the one the war left him. He died in 1981, leaving behind two handwritten notebooks filled with pieces of his past. His grandson, a writer, used those notebooks as a foundation for reconstructing Urbain's story, moving between documented detail and imaginative recovery of what the notebooks could not fully say.
The book moves between generations as the grandson tries to locate himself within the history he has inherited. Black-and-white illustrations appear throughout, and the novel became an international bestseller. The narrative holds two men together across decades: one shaped by war and unfinished work as a painter, the other reading the traces left on paper.
