A Month in Siena

Author(s): Hisham Matar

Literature | Art | Italy

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.

After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists whom he had admired throughout his life, such as Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he has had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.


Complete with gorgeous full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in Matar's life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with the city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape--current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude--and shed further light on the present world around us.

Review: An intensely moving book, at once an affirmation of life's quiet dignities in the face of loss and a portrait of a city that comes to stand for all cities * The Economist *
This slim, beautifully produced book, sparkles with brilliant observations on art and architecture, friendship and loss. Matar's prose is exquisitely measured and precise - not unlike one of the paintings from the Sienese school that he has admired for so many years * PD Smith, Guardian *
This book tells us much about the extraordinary power of art to inspire * Literary Review *
What a jewel this is, driven by desire, grief, yearning loss, illuminated by hope, the kindness of strangers continually making tribute to the delicacy and grace of the Arab home the author lost so many years ago * Peter Carey, The Australian, Books of the Year *
fluid series of meditations on the big questions of life, on love, faith, time and on the nature and purpose of art, the influence of architecture and, most important of all to this author, grief, mourning and memory * Spectator *
Mingles insightful and often moving art history with frank personal recollection in a way that reminds us of the communality we share not only with our contemporaries, but with all historical epochs. I can think of no better expression of the humane than this economical, modest, yet altogether breathtaking book * New Statesman *
Hisham Matar is a brilliant narrative architect and prose stylist, his pared-down approach and measured pace a striking complement to the emotional tumult of his material * Wall Street Journal *
What interests him in this art is the human knowledge the painter is trying to convey. The description is exact and graceful, as Matar's prose tends to be * New York Times, 11 New Books We Recommend This Week *
A Month in Siena bears all the hallmarks of Matar's writing: it is exquisitely constructed and the use of language is precise and delicately nuanced without pretension. And there is a deceptive simplicity to his endeavour: to look at art. What emerges is an altogether more complex philosophical exploration of death, love, art, relationships and time * Financial Times *
deeply moving, engrossing book. Written in elegant, concise prose, it is a remarkable mediation on life, loss, mourning, exile, friendship and the power of art * Wall Street Journal *
Hisham Matar has the quality all historians - of the world and the self - most need: he knows how to stand back and let the past speak * Hilary Mantel *
A thing of beauty and wisdom * Monocle *
dazzling exploration of art's impact on his life and writing, and a moving contemplation of grief * Financial Times *
An exquisite, deeply affecting book * Evening Standard *
Everybody should get to spend a month with Mr. Matar, looking at paintings * Zadie Smith *
Bewitching . . . Meditating on art, history and the relationship between them, this is both a portrait of a city and an affirmation of life's quiet dignities in the face of loss * The Economist, Books of the Year *


 


 


Author Biography: Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He is the author of two novels, In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance and a work of non-fiction, The ReturnIn the Country of Men was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the National Critics Book Circle Award in the US and won six international literary awards. The Return won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the Folio Prize and was shortlisted for several other awards around the world including the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. Hisham Matar lives in London.


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9780241409503
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : Viking
  • : 0.35
  • : September 2019
  • : ---length:- '20.4'width:- '13.2'units:- Centimeters
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Hisham Matar
  • : Hardback
  • : 1911
  • : English
  • : 823.92
  • : 128