- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Forge Books; First Edition edition (Nov 23 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0765304031
- ISBN-13: 978-0765304032
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.2 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 408 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,885,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
As intricate-if not as fluent-as one of its subject's own vivid depictions of 16th-century life in the Spanish-dominated Low Countries, Rucker's fictionalized life of Bruegel draws its readers into a teeming world of politics, art, love, sin and loss. Rucker has marshaled years of research into 16 chapters, each built around one of Bruegel's famous paintings and highlighting a pivotal experience in the artist's life. Bruegel left his boyhood village to be apprenticed to Master Coecke of Antwerp, and once a master himself, traveled to Italy to be smitten by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Once back in Belgium, he began to receive commissions for his paintings, using audacious perspectives and even more risky interpretations of religious themes. Rucker's own boisterously crowded canvas includes characters like homosexual cartographer Ortelius, the scheming bishop and later cardinal Granvelle, the charismatic half-American Indian Williblad Cheroo, and young Mayken, Bruegel's adored wife and canny business manager. Though Rucker's literal-minded narration repeatedly leads him to tell rather than show ("Bruegel was beginning to feel the stirrings of romantic love"; "For her part, Mayken acted quite unromantic"), he skillfully interlaces his account of Bruegel's various artistic and literary influences with insights into the genesis of some of his most renowned works. This is clearly a labor of love and, though sometimes less than graceful, it grapples handily with Bruegel's genius-his ability to wittily and gracefully recreate all human activity, from the sublime to the scatological. 16 b&w reproductions.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* What possesses a popular science fiction writer to write a historical novel about a sixteenth-century Flemish painter enamored of peasant ways? Unbridled fascination with the depiction of worlds real and imagined. Rucker's keen insights into Peter Bruegel's spellbinding and politically subversive work underpin this animated, suspenseful, and affecting tale, a step up from Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000). Biographical information about Bruegel is scant, but Rucker's sense that the painter was lively, compassionate, courageous, and determined feels right, and the characters Rucker invents to flesh out Bruegel's violent and precarious universe are equally compelling, especially the cultured mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, who is so careful to conceal his homosexuality; the sexy and volatile half-Native American, Williblad Cheroo; and Bruegel's smart, saucy wife. Just as Bruegel's paintings are a great joy to behold even as they induce the viewer to face the grimmer aspects of life, Rucker's vivid imagining of Bruegel's trials and triumphs is set against a cutting indictment of the horrors of the Spanish occupation and Inquisition. Bruegel's great gift was his perception of the sacred in the earthy, and Rucker follows suit in this vital portrait of a sweet-natured disciple of life's fecund beauty in a time of cold-blooded tyranny. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Peter Bruegel was looking at his first mountain, a steep, rounded foothill at the edge of the Alps. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Peter Bruegel was looking at his first mountain, a steep, rounded foothill at the edge of the Alps. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Look deeper!,
By
This review is from: As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (Hardcover)
I picked this up blind from the new book bin at the Kailua-Kona public library, and boy, I'm glad I did. I've always enjoyed Bruegel, but this novel really makes you look at each picture with new eyes. Thank goodness I had an art book (Phaidon) of Bruegel at home with big color plates, which really complemented the text of this book. I love the feeling of delving into the past, but with good friends, which is how I think of Bruegel now that I've read this book.
3.0 out of 5 stars
A great artist, a fine life,
By
This review is from: As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (Hardcover)
Rucker's telling of the life of Bruegel is built around 16 of his extant drawings and paintings. At the beginning of each chapter is a reproduction, in black and white, of the painting that provides the name to the chapter. The chapter then recounts anything from a day in Bruegel's life to several months, often refering to the composition of the painting, or alluding to it through descriptions of the people around Bruegel. At times, such as in the chapter "The Peasant Wedding," this works wonderfully. Rucker develops Bruegel's character, and simultaneously evokes the daily life of the era that is at the core of Bruegel's work. At other times, however, this structure does not work. It becomes snapshots, spread over time, of a man's life. Unlike a story, a life does not necessarilly have narrative drive, and this becomes a problem here. Narrative tension starts to dissipate as Bruegel ages (this despite the growing repression of the Spanish in Belgium and the terror they hold over both the country and Bruegel's household). When we walk through an art gallery we see, alternatively, the art work and the blank spaces of the wall between them. Too much of this novel works this way, moving between wonderful set pieces and less interesting bridging. Going to a show of an artist's work, the currator may place the pieces in chronological order. Walking by, you might note the chronology, but it is the contents of the individual works that are most important. In this novel, unfortunately, the chronology too often overshadows either Bruegel's or Rucker's images, to the detriment of the book as a whole.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Spend some time in Renaissance Belgium,
By
This review is from: As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (Paperback)
Rucker builds a series of chapters around particular paintings by Bruegel, in order to produce a biographical novel that is well-informed concerning the (known) historical details of Bruegel's life and the political and cultural history of the day. The book offers a good way to get engaged with the period and with the paintings. The writing is a bit clunky, and the novel works more because of the inherent interest of the artist and the period than by what the writer contributes. I could easily have put the book down had other things been available, but as it was it served as a welcome companion during a day of many, many delayed flights and long layovers as I flew across the US.
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