The Painting

The Painting is a lovely story and a remarkable debut from a talented writer. Dually set in Japan and Western Europe, the reader is transported into two disparate yet equally compelling worlds. Schuyler's language reads more like poetry than prose -- the scenes with the pigeons are downright unforgettable. I'm eagerly awaiting her next work.

Imagine being transported through beautiful language to the late 19th century Japan and France. I love a book that creates a world that is so rich, so compelling that I don't want to leave it. Schuyler does that in this novel. She uses a parallel story structure, part of the story taking place in Japan, part in France. The two stories echo each other with great subtlety. Her writing is so sensual-- I could see her characters, the landscape, feel their feet, the cup of tea held in a hand. Beautiful, compelling.

I am impressed that this is the author's debut novel - as it reads as though written by a master storyteller of the highest level. The story itself is original and emotionally moving. The author not only uncovered the worlds of 19th century Paris and Japan, but she gracefully uncovered the spirit of these cultures caught in historical change through the insight and thoughts of these wonderful, sensitive characters, who themselves undergo spiritual change.

I'm not the type to write reviews, but I am the kind to recommend books, and I highly recommend this novel! It's rare when a writer combines beautiful sentences with compelling story, but Schuyler manages to do it. There are times I just had to pause on a beautiful sentence and let it sit there in my mind. And yet, there was the pull of the story-- actually two intertwined stories-- that are woven together through the themes of beauty, art, longing, desire. In one story line- the Japanese-- desire begets beauty; in the France story line, beauty begets desire. Both stories, as I said, pull you in. Color is also throughout the novel, and sensual details. Schuyler is quite adept at writing scenes that are so well imagined, so abundant with precise detail that you, too, as a reader slip easily into the late 19th century.

Hayashi has feared fire ever since fire took the lives of his family and permanently disfigured his feet. A talented potter who was raised by Buddhist monks, he is a part of the new Japanese government, even though his heart isn't completely into it. He keeps the now-illegal Buddhist shrine on his property open, even though someone set fire to his teahouse, possibly as a warning. Similarly, he can't make out what's going on in the mind of his beautiful young wife, Ayoshi. Ayoshi is dreamy, sometimes spending hours upon hours painting things she rarely lets him see. She feels a great distance between herself and the man the matchmaker married her to. Though she feels bad about it, she resents his deformity, the fact that she has to massage his feet while soaking them in ice water to calm their pain. She cannot find space for him in her heart --- it is too full with the desire to paint the world she sees, especially the memories of her beautiful lover, who she misses deeply. When she paints the first painting, the passion of her muse pours perfectly out into the paper, capturing a moment of lust and profound love and joy. She cannot let her husband see this work, so she wraps it around one of the pots he has sold and is sending to France. In France, Jorgen is the one who discovers the painting. Once a solider hired from his homeland of Denmark to fight in the place of a rich Frenchman, the loss of his leg has forced him to leave the army he feels so much at home in. He happened to be billeted in the hospital next to a young man whose sister, Natalia, visited constantly, and, in return for a small act of kindness on Jorgen's part, she has convinced her other brother to hire him to sort and unpack things in his warehouse. She also convinces him to help her learn how to shoot and be a real solider, for Natalia's one desire is to be a truly good person, a hero, someone who, along with the other women who are training to become soldiers, fights for her homeland. The painting is, in many ways, the pivotal event of the story. It is love and desire melted and pressed to paper, a form of release for a trapped young woman, a tool for healing for a similarly trapped man. Every time he looks at the painting, Jorgen sees something new; it is not that the painting is magic (though beauty and the capturing of a perfect moment has a magic all its own), but that Jorgen changes. As he transforms, falling in love with the almost saintly Natalia, he becomes a better person and is able to see different things. Natalia also changes as she faces loss and sees the realities of war. The way she and her fellow female soldiers are treated isn't what she expected, but strangely enough, she still finds a sort of liberation. Ayoshi and Hayashi also change; Hayashi's struggles to understand and try to find a common place with his wife are heartbreaking, as are Ayoshi's attempts to find herself. THE PAINTING is extremely well written. Nina Schuyler uses imagery to create subt