War and Turpentine: A Novel by Stefan Hertmans explores how well we can really know another person, especially an older relative with whom we are very familiar.
Stefan Hertmans inherited two journals written by his grandfather, Urbain Martien, that provided a glimpse into the three great influences on his life: love, war, and painting. In these journals, Urbain wrote about his deep affection for his father, Franciscus, a sensitive and fragile church muralist, and his mother, Celine, a proud, beautiful woman. He wrote about his father's art and craft and his memories of the many long, quiet days he spent assisting him. He wrote about the horrors of hard labor in an iron foundry and of trench warfare in Flanders during World War I. And he wrote about meeting the great romantic love of his life, Maria Emelia, only to lose her to the influenza epidemic of 1918 and make a marriage of convenience to her sister Gabrielle. After thirty years of contemplating how best to understand and write about his grandfather, Hertmans decided to write this story as fiction--a detective story of sorts--and as a contemplation of the relationships between generations of a family, with someone very much like himself as the narrator framing the grandfather's story with memories and reflections of his own. He says, "This task confronted me with the painful truth behind any literary work: I first had to recover from the authentic story, to let it go, before I could rediscover it my own way." What he learns shakes him to his core, confronting him with the transience of life and its many personal dramas as well as the mystery of personality and character: "Clues like these turn out to have been present throughout my childhood, invisible to me, and only by drawing links between my memories and what I read could I begin work on a modest form of restitution, inadequate reparations for my unforgivable innocence in those days."
What do you think? Why does the narrator say that at first he "didn't even dare to open the first page [of his grandfather's journals], in the knowledge that this story would be a farewell to a piece of my childhood"? Do you remember when you first realized that your parents and grandparents had complex lives of their own? As you have grown older, have you discovered or realized a truth about an older relative whom you thought you knew very well? What were your thoughts and feelings upon making this discovery? Upon seeing a naked woman for the first time, the young Urbain "cannot believe [she] is real, a figure that opens the door to a whole new world inside him, a door he had taken great pains to keep shut, out of Christian piety and the repression it entails." When the narrator goes to visit the spot, now an urban wasteland, many years later, he thinks, "Never before have I been so deeply struck by the transience of human life." Why is this a pivotal moment in the novel? The narrator asks himself many questions about his grandfather's idealized attraction to Maria Emelia and his long marriage to Gabrielle (p. 236). What do you make of these relationships? What does the novel seem to say about love? Scholars of modernism have noted the effect of the mechanized violence of World War I on the ethics and worldview of people living at the beginning of the twentieth century. How does the novel portray this effect, and what does it seem to say about war? What do you think of the way Hertmans has divided his novel into three sections, the first and third in the narrator's voice and the second in Urbain's voice? Why do you think he chose to write the book this way, as a novel, rather than as a biography or memoir or transcription of his grandfather's journals? What is the effect on you as a reader? What do the many illustrations and photographs add to the story, and why do you think Hertmans does not include photographs in the middle section? There are many descriptions of painting in the novel, from the great-grandfather's technique of painting a mural in wet plaster, to the grandfather's very controlled and precise painting style and the effect of his partial color-blindness on the colors in his paintings, to the fact that the grandfather often included original portraits within the context of reproductions of great masterpieces. How are painting and writing similar? What does the novel seem to say about art? Why do you think Hertmans wrote War and Turpentine? What was his purpose for his readers? For himself?
We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, March 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, March 15, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog?
