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

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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? The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Ashby, Chloë (6 June 2022). "Old Master meets YBAs: James Cahill tells us all about his debut novel". The Art Newspaper . Retrieved 8 December 2022. When an explosive piece of contemporary art is installed on the lawn of his college, it sets in motion Don's abrupt departure from Cambridge to take up a role at a south London museum. There he befriends Ben, a young artist who draws him into the anarchic 1990s British art scene and the nightlife of Soho.

This is an absolute masterpiece of a book that I'm not entirely sure I have the words to recommend enough. The novel starts out in Cambridge, at Peterhouse College where we meet Don, a don, professor, whose speciality is art history and who is currently involved in studying the skies in Tiepolo’s paintings. He lives a fairly secluded life, it’s very safe, sheltered from the exigencies of the world and he likes his routines. He has a room and study, he eats regularly in the refectory with other highfalutin minds from the world of academia and life is acceptable and certainly not challenging in a worldly way. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ There is something terrifying and lurking underneath this book, much like the art he spends all day observing.Tiepolo favored unhurried, fluid, brushstrokes through which he applied his trademark pastel palette. In the words of famous art historian E. H. Gombrich, the artist's style lent itself perfectly to "the whole aristocratic dream-world" which he did so much to help create. To this end, Tiepolo's dramatic narratives were often tallied with a noticeable degree of sparseness. This was not a blemish on Tiepolo's talent so much as an attempt to let the spectator add details to the picture by using their own imagination. Wildly enjoyable . . . A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling’ Financial Times

Meticulous and atmospheric . . . delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge’ Michael Donkor, Guardian Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ How to rate an unfinished novel? I recognized good penmanship and the narration was great. But the story is so depressing I dislike it. The foreboding feeling when following Don's lonely life, manipulated by a villainous character, was too strong for me. Don is a naive idiot and I don't want to know more about his life after listening 50%. I was waiting for the love interest but am afraid that will end depressing, too. Though his standing suffered following the rise of Neoclassicism, Tiepolo's reputation underwent a process of reassessment in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Historian Adriano Mariuz observes that "The Belle Époque rediscovered Tiepolo and made him its own, seeing him above all as a brilliant decorator and the creator of a kind of beauty suffused with sensuality." Indeed, the novelist Marcel Proust admired Tiepolo principally for his use of pink; the air of fin de siècle optimism that clung to Tiepolo spoke to Proust and others at the dawning of a new century.

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. As it is though, the story was told by a third person omniscient narrator and, even for 1990s standards, I struggled to swallow such naivety. Even less so, when the guy was described as a handsome and intelligent lad. He might not have known who he was or what he really liked but that doesn’t mean people around him also didn’t, if you know what I mean. At it’s heart I think there’s a good story here, and I thought it got off to a strong start as I enjoyed the early chapters set in Cambridge more than the later ones charting the protagonist’s demise, trying to adjust to life in 90’s London. It is, I accept, a clever enough work which does pass the time quite well, but I kept having the nagging feeling that this kind of thing has been done before, and the closest comparison I can think of is with Martin Amis’s Money, in which the main character finds that he has been the unknowing – until the very end – victim of a years-long conspiracy of vengeance for an offence committed long in the past. (Unlike Money, though, it is not trying to be funny.) The thing is that one doesn’t really read Amis for the plot, but the language; it’s kind of the other way round with this novel.