How to Paint a Dead Man

The Independenton Sunday "New Review"

"Her latest novel, even more than ever, reads as though it was an absolute thrill to write....a maddeningly enticing read...an amazing feat of literary engineering."

The Independent on Sunday "New Review"

Her latest novel, even more than ever, reads as though it was an absolute thrill to write....a maddeningly enticing read...an amazing feat of literary engineering.

The Sunday Telegraph

"Invigorating….her verbal depiction of fictional art never stales…This deeply sensual novel is what you rarely find - an intelligent page-turner which, perversely, you also want to read slowly to savour Hall’s luscious way of looking at the world."

Washington Post Book World

"In this gorgeous still life of a book, Sarah Hall gives us four lives…each narrated in a different voice…Hall has a poet’s gift, and this novel is best enjoyed as a prose poem whose blindingly beautiful insights gradually accrue…She has made visible to us…the ever-present shadow of eternity."

BookPage

"Daring...Along with contemporaries like Scarlett Thomas and Lydia Millet, Hall is staking new ground for women in the "novel of ideas" category. Full of haunting images and thought-provoking ideas, How to Paint a Dead Man will linger in the mind."

The Independent on Sunday

“Her latest novel, even more than ever, reads as though it was an absolute thrill to write....a maddeningly enticing read...an amazing feat of literary engineering.”

The Independent on Sunday New Review

Her latest novel, even more than ever, reads as though it was an absolute thrill to write....a maddeningly enticing read...an amazing feat of literary engineering.

Bookseller (London)

"Sarah Hall is a huge talent. Her third novel, How To Paint A Dead Man, is a beautiful, powerful book of love, lust, death, passion, art, desperation and loss. She writes her characters brilliantly."

Dara Horn

In this gorgeous still life of a book, Sarah Hall gives us four lives…each narrated in a different voice…Hall has a poet's gift, and this novel is best enjoyed as a prose poem whose blindingly beautiful insights gradually accrue. Her portraits of these artists are captured moments, with each life slowed to a stop by loss and pain. She has made visible to us what we would otherwise be too blind to see in our mortal lives: the ever-present shadow of eternity.
—The Washington Post

Said Sayrafiezadeh

The book…explores the lives of four artists—two British and two Italian—appearing in distinct chapters with their own narrative modes and time periods, from the 1960s to the present. If that sounds like cause for confusion, it's not. And one of the achievements of How to Paint a Dead Man is that it moves seamlessly among its various elements without once feeling like a juggling act. Nor does Hall overemphasize how these four characters relate; instead, she concentrates largely on how they must contend with the limits of their bodies, their lives and their creativity.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Stunning visual descriptions link the stories of four artists in crisis in Hall's fourth novel (after Daughters of the North), but marginal, cross-generational relationships are what ground the book. Giorgio is a well-known painter and hermit in Italy in the 1960s, the near-blind Annette his favorite primary school student. Peter is a 50-something landscape artist in England, and Peter's daughter, Susan, a talented photographer and curator. Giorgio has cancer and for his final days tackles one last painting of his constant subject, colored bottles. Soon after his death, Annette tends his grave, innocent and fearful and now completely blind, fearing imaginary things like the Bestia—a demon that is depicted in her church. Thirty years later, Peter, who corresponded with Giorgio, is pinned under a boulder near his cottage, and contemplates the haunting relationship he had with his ex-wife, while in present-day London, Susan searches for feeling (through sex) after the sudden loss of her twin brother. Hall gracefully conveys a sense of the eternal through these imaginative, disconnected creatures who share the same unrelentingly contemplative disposition. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

Artists and the art world dominate this novel of love and landscape. Hall (Daughters of the North, 2008, etc.) deftly balances multiple narratives across a generation and a geographical area bridging England and Italy. Signor Giorgio, a reclusive Italian painter, dies in the early 1960s, his last years dominated by still lifes of bottles. After his death, Annette Tambroni, a blind girl overly protected by her mother, begins to tend his grave. More than 30 years later, Peter Caldicutt, a talented English painter, finds himself pinned down by boulders at the bottom of a gorge in Cumbria. When younger, Peter had written to Giorgio to express admiration for his work and to pose some questions that caused Giorgio to reflect on his preoccupation with the seeming anachronism of the still life. Now, trapped and desperate, Peter reviews his life while waiting for rescue. Two of the objects of his reminiscence are his twin children. Danny has recently been killed in a motorbike accident; Susan, who had served almost as a mirror of her brother's moods and emotions, takes his death particularly hard and deals with it largely through erotic escape. She neglects her long-term relationship with Nathan and begins a scorching affair with Tom, her fellow curator on an art exhibit in London. Peter also recalls his early days as an art student in the '60s, his marriage to the freewheeling Raymie and the threesome they formed with Peter's even more freewheeling artistic mentor, Ivan Dyas. Although Annette makes appearances throughout this many-voiced novel, the primary figures are domineering Peter, in his daughter's eyes a "colossal man . . . who smoked dope and rock-climbed with the Earl's sons, who walkedaround either stark bollock-naked or dressed for the theatre," and sensitive, anguished Susan, trying desperately to find herself after the loss of her alter ego. Displaying a sure command of character as well as a poetic mastery of language, Hall is a talent to be reckoned with.