by John Updike
On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York.
Seek My Face
6,00 €
1 in stock
Description
Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope – interviewer and interviewee – try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes …
The Barnes & Noble Review:
A dazzling portrait of the artist as an old, super-connected woman, John Updike’s 20th novel is a remarkably compressed yet sprawling study, one that bursts with the detail of an intricately crafted miniature. The deliberately discursive narrative is framed by an intense, daylong interview between Kathryn, a writer for an unnamed online art journal, and 79-year-old grande dame Hope Chafetz, a successful painter and the former wife of two legendary artists. The tightly focused structure of Seek My Face relies on two sources of dramatic tension: the edgy, constantly shifting relationship between interviewer and subject and the stories Hope tells about her life, her marriages, and her intimate participation in two of the dominant artistic movements of the 20th century. Hope’s turbulent first marriage to doomed genius Zack McCoy — a lightly fictionalized rendering of Jackson Pollock — provides the basis for an authoritative account of the rise and fall of Abstract Impressionism. Her subsequent marriage to Guy Holloway — an obvious surrogate for Andy Warhol — describes the evolution of the Pop Art movement, a radically different attempt to find a new way of seeing and interpreting the world. Hope’s story is a personal, idiosyncratic account of love, sex, marriage, memory, and the inevitable effects of growing old — of losing all that once mattered. It also offers a unique perspective on the restless experimentation that fueled some of the most original paintings of the modern era. At the bottom, as the title indicates, Seek My Face is a novel about artistic and spiritual striving, about art as a means of apprehending the sacred, about imperishable creations “ripped from the perishing world.” This short, illuminating novel is itself a polished, deeply affecting work of art. At 70 years of age, Updike remains an awe-inspiring stylist, and his precise observations of human beings at their best and worst are as intelligent and compelling as ever. Bill Sheehan
Additional information
| Book Condition | Used – Good |
|---|---|
| Cover | Paperback |
| Size | 276 pages, ~13×20 cm |
| Published | January 29, 2004 by Penguin, first published 2002 |
| Genre | Fiction, Contemporary |
Related products
-
-50% Off
2,00 €Adventures of Tom and Huck #1
by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer revolves around the youthful adventures of the novel’s schoolboy protagonist, Thomas Sawyer, whose reputation precedes him for causing mischief and strife.
-
-50% Off
3,00 €by Philip Pullman
Will is twelve years old and he’s just killed a man. Now he’s on his own, on the run, determined to discover the truth about his father disappearance.
Then Will steps through a window in the air into another world, and finds himself with a companion – a strange, savage little girl called Lyra. Like Will, she has a mission which she intends to carry out at all costs.
-
-50% Off
2,00 €by John Updike
It is the year 2020. America has recently experienced a war with China, and social chaos and protection-racketeering prevail.
-
-50% Off
4,00 €by Safia Minney
Slow Fashion offers creatives, entrepreneurs, and ethical consumers alike a glimpse into the innovative world of the eco-concept store movement, sustainable design, and business that puts people, livelihoods and sustainability central to everything they do.
-
-50% Off
2,50 €by Giles Kristian
The first book in a thrilling Viking trilogy that launched the career of acclaimed historical novelist Giles Kristian – who’s now confronting the tumult and devastation of the English Civil War in The Bleeding Land…
-
-50% Off
1,50 €by Ken Kesey
The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…
-
-50% Off
3,50 €by Jules Verne
Capitaine Nemo #2
An adventure classic of deep-sea volcanoes, giant squid, and the renegade scientist Captain Nemo
-
-20% Off
5,60 €by Leandra Medine
The bold voice behind the popular Man Repeller blog shares humorous and deeply personal essays demonstrating that what we choose to wear may hold our dearest memories.
1 in stock