Tiepolo Blue: 'The best novel I have read for ages' Stephen Fry

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This books feels to me like a clever and thoughtful companion piece to Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty', a book I adore, with a similar sense of a sweltering summer, sexual energy, and lingering darkness, but it also takes a trip into unreliability and memory that I found riveting and the best kind of unsettling. also besides the book not being very fun (which is sad for me but fully understandable if that's not the book's aim) it is also not very sexy. bathhouse scene B+ but it comes too suddenly. it's not a 'simmering closet case sexual awakening' book, but if you're gonna do sad man sexual failure being dumped in it by his unrequited loves, it's weird to combine that with a few elements of simmering closet case sexual awakening that don’t fully come together. A sad novel and a poignant one too. A professor in his forties lives a secluded life so living in the city of Cambridge and working ina college seems apt. He is persuaded to move to London and escape the safety of that world and get a job in an art museum in London. This novel showcases how a place can transform you and give you a new outlook on life but also damage you. Tiepolo Blue comes trailing clouds of glory. Clouds borne by winged putti, perhaps, to fit its subject matter; I have rarely seen a first novel by someone who is not already famous puffed so much with pre-publication quotes by people who are. This would be fine if the novel were a work of great talent but, while not actually bad, I am not sure it fulfils its promise. The plot: Professor Don Lamb is an art historian at Peterhouse, Cambridge’s oldest and weirdest college. (The name “Don” is deliberately unimaginative.) An expert on the great Italian painter Tiepolo, about whom he has been writing the definitive work for years, he has lately been outraged by a permanent exhibition of modern art on the lawn of the College’s main court (Old Court, fittingly).

Original: The writing was great, sometimes so good that I felt like I was wearing the skin of the protagonist which I disliked so much. Although don was a remarkably pompous and unlikeable character to begin with, you grow to both love and respect him as he flounders through life with gross naivety.Don sees the world through an art historian’s eyes, and at one point the enigmatic young artist, Ben, says to him: “It’s possible to be too discriminating… You stop seeing the thing for what it is.” In writing the book, did you have to consciously stop thinking as an academic and start thinking as a novelist? A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling . . . wildly enjoyable' Financial Times There are some increasingly grotesque scenes, where you are not really sure whether some are hallucinated or real; based on his desire and jealousies. He has written for publications including Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, The London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. [2]

slight digression but i would have loved if they'd pressed on don/val's dynamic as former prize student/grad advisor, it would have unmuddied some of the waters behind their dynamic in the present, and also consolidated val's controlling temperament more realistically) In this, the third of four paintings for a room in the Venetian residence of the Conaro family, we find Tiepolo at the height of his powers. Inspired by Toquato Tasso's masterpiece, La Gerusalemme Liberata, it shows a reluctant Rinaldo taking his leave of the Saracen sorceress, Armida, with whom he has been dallying in an enchanted garden. He is being cajoled by friends, and fellow Crusaders, Charles and Ubaldi. Charles rests one hand on Rinaldo's shoulder and with the other points east to the Holy Land. Ubaldi presents him with a shield to remind him of his responsibilities to the Crusade. A ship awaits them at the right centre of the frame, leaving one in little doubt as to how the story must end. Armida tries to change his mind, even going so far as to stretch her leg provocatively to him, but her enticements are in vain.

It's the kind of "beautifully written" that inspires you to write your own things. You can definitely feel the academic sentence, which is not something I dislike.

Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ Set in the mid-90s, Tiepolo Blue follows Don Lamb, professor of art history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, who has led a life so attenuated he knows little or nothing of the world outside of his college until he’s thrust onto the London gallery circuit.This is a story of a man who has for most of his life to date preferred the hallowed halls of Cambridge University, rather than embracing the wider world and allowing himself to grow as a person. Literally pushed out into his new job by Val, he is like a man sliding around on an ice rink, away from the rarified atmosphere of Cambridge. His points of reference are skewed, he has little to anchor himself. Until now he has not bothered to engage with everyday life – he has had no real need – but something is stirring within him and he needs to identify what it is. Biography: James Cahill was born in London. Over the past decade, he has worked in the art world and academia, combining writing and research with a role at a leading contemporary art gallery. He is currently a Research Fellow in Classics at King’s College London. His writing on art has appeared in publications including The Burlington Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement,the Los Angeles Review of Books,and The London Review of Books.He was theleadauthorand consulting editor ofFLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN (Phaidon, 2018), a survey of classical myth in art from antiquity to the present day. He was the co-curator of ‘The Classical Now’, an exhibition at King’s College London (March-April 2018), examining the relationships between ancient, modern and contemporary art. I can’t remember when I first saw a Tiepolo painting, but I’ve loved those incredible vast ceiling frescoes full of swirling bodies for a long time, and the distinctive shade of blue that he uses—that mid-turquoise, a blue that seems to have a mistiness to it, like the traces of clouds. When I was young, I had an ambition or at least a desire to be an artist myself. I got as far as applying for a foundation course before I went to the Courtauld [Institute of Art]. I kept making work in a private and informal way, and one idea I had but never realised was to collage together a whole load of pieces of blue from reproductions of Tiepolo paintings to make a single variegated panel—something that happens in the book. I never did it in the end, so perhaps it was destined to be a fictional conceit rather than something that I literally created.

Edit: I'm a few months wiser now and I think I understand this book better as well because of it. It's about how life is too short and unpredictable to be so anal about what and how art should be. Art, something so human and sincere, shouldn't just hold grounds on what's beautiful and not. It's about what makes us feel, think and what inspires us. What first strikes one about this fresco, which Tiepolo painted on the ceiling of the church of the Gesuati (or Sta. Maria del Rosario) in his native Venice, is its sheer size. Indeed at 40 feet by 15 feet, it is the largest version of this subject in European art.I almost gave up on this book about a quarter of the way through. But I a so glad that I didn’t! It took me a while to really get into but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed it. James Cahill’s debut novel was a mixed bag for me. I’ve settled on a three-star rating as at times I felt I could’ve given it four, but then again at times perhaps even a two.