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Ekphrasis: Art as a Literary Device |
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
'Only beauty can save the world', proclaims Prince Myshkin. But in the brutally materialistic world of late nineteenth-century Petersburg, infested with greed and vulgarity, Prince Myshkin's naive beliefs can only be the subject of mockery and ultimately lead to failure and tragedy.
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Villette
by Charlotte Brontèe
Fleeing a tragic past, Lucy Snowe leaves her home in England to pursue a career as a teacher at a girls' boarding school on the Continent, in this classic romantic novel that captures the narrator's ability to transform her mundane daily existence into the extraordinary. In Villette, the narrator, Lucy Snowe, is critical of art, particularly painting, and uses her art criticism to reflect on her own narrative and its principles. Lucy's art criticism often reveals her preference for realism and simplicity over artificial and ornate styles, and she identifies with the characters and emotions depicted in art.
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My Name Is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
A furor erupts when the Sultan hires a group of artists, under the direction of Master Uncle, to illuminate a great book in the European style to celebrate his reign at a time in which all figurative art is considered Islamic heresy, but the situation becomes worse when one of the miniaturists vanishes, in a mystery set against the backdrop of religious repression in sixteenth-century Istanbul. 30,000 first printing.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
The handsome appearance of dissolute young Dorian Gray remains unchanged while the features in his portrait become distorted as his degeneration progresses
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The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
In Donna Tartt's novel, The Goldfinch, the Dutch painting "The Goldfinch" by Carel Fabritius is a central symbol and drives much of the plot. The painting, a small, vibrant depiction of a goldfinch, is owned by the protagonist, Theo, and becomes a symbol of his life's journey and the fragility of art.
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Tremor
by Teju Cole
A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speak out from a pulsing metropolis. Tunde, the man at the center of this novel, reflects on the places and times of his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.
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A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East
by Lâaszlâo Krasznahorkai
The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless: a place of prayer and deliverance, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him: "he continually saw the garden in his mind's eye without being able to touch its existence." This exquisitely beautiful novel by National Book Award-winner Lâaszlâo Krasznahorkai-perhaps his most serene and poetic work-describes a search for the unobtainable and the riches to be discovered along the way. Despite the difficulties in finding the garden, the reader is closely introduced to the construction processes of the monastery (described in poetic detail) as well as the geological and biological processes of the surrounding area (the underground layers revealed beneath a bed of moss, the travels of cypress- tree seeds on the wind, feral foxes and stray dogs meandering outside the monastery's walls), making this an unforgettable meditation on nature, life, history, and being.
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Septology
by Jon Fosse
"What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbor, êAsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bj²rgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgèangers--two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness. The three volumes of Jon Fosse's Septology--The Other Name, I is Another, and A New Name--collected here for the first time, are a transcendent exploration of thehuman condition"
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Killing Commendatore
by Haruki Murakami
In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist's home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors. A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art--as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby -- Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.
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How to Be Both
by Ali Smith
How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life's givens get given a second chance.
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The Forgery
by Ave Barrera
A failing artist turned forger, an architectural masterpiece hidden behind high walls, an impish vagabond, and some very resourceful, very intimidating twins-Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragâan, traversing late 20th Century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th Century picaresque.
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Jazz
by Toni Morrison
As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. ... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear." -- Glamour
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What I Loved
by Siri Hustvedt
The long friendship between art historian Leo Hertzberg and artist Bill Wechsler leads to a growing involvement between their two families as they live in the same New York building, share a summer home in Vermont, and deal with the joys, sorrows, tragedies, and loss that transform their lives.
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An Artist of the Floating World
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Masuji Ono saw misery in his homeland and became unwilling to spend his skills solely in the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he envisioned a strong and powerful nation of the future, and he put his painting to work in the service of the movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Masuji Ono struggles through the spiritual wreckage of that war, his memories of the "floating world" of his youth, full of pleasure and promise, serve as an escape from, a punishment for-and a justification of-his entire life. Drifting without honor in Japan's postwar society, which indicts him for its defeat and reviles him for his aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being. An Artist of the Floating World is a sensual and profoundly convincing portrait of the artist as an aging man. At once a multigenerational tale and a samurai death poem written in English, it is also a saga of the clash of the old and new orders, blending classical and contemporary iconography with compassion and wit
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Cat's eye
by Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman-but above all she must seek release form her haunting memories. Disturbing, humorous, and compassionate-and a finalist for the Booker Prize- Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life.
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The Death of Francis Bacon
by Max Porter
A great painter lies on his deathbed, synapses firing, writhing and reveling in pleasure and pain as a lifetime of chaotic and grotesque sense memories wash over and envelop him.
In this bold and brilliant short work of experimental fiction by the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Max Porter inhabits Francis Bacon in his final moments, translating into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind. Writing as painting rather than about painting, Porter lets the images he conjures speak for themselves as they take their revenge on the subject who wielded them in life.
The result is more than a biography: The Death of Francis Bacon is a physical, emotional, historical, sexual, and political bombardment--the measure of a man creative and compromised, erotic and masochistic, inexplicable and inspired.
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Cold Enough for Snow
by Jessica Au
"A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city's most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here-is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another's inner world. Selected from more than 1,500 entries, Cold Enough for Snow won the Novel Prize, a new, biennial award offered by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form"
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Swann's way/In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, art is a central theme, explored through both direct references to specific artworks and the broader concept of artistic creation and its impact on memory and perception. Proust uses art as a way to explore the human experience, including love, loss, and the nature of time.
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The Sea
by John Banville
In John Banville's "The Sea," art serves as a significant motif, particularly through the lens of Max Morden's, an art historian and the novel's narrator. It's not just a professional background, but a way of understanding the world, reflecting on memory, and exploring themes of loss and identity.
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Girl Reading
by Katie Ward
A kaleidoscopic tale follows the experiences of seven women models from different historical periods, the artists for whom they sit, the factors that shape the creations of their portraits and the ties that connect them to each other.
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