InhaltJane Urquhart führt mehrere außergewöhnliche Menschen zusammen, die Landkarten anfertigen. Da ist zunächst der Künstler Jerome, der sich allein auf der im Winter verlassenen Insel Timber Island im St. Lorenz-Strom absetzen lässt, um dort mit Fotos die Vergänglichkeit der Welt am Verfall ver...
Austin Fraser is an eighty three year old artist who is looking back on his life and the mistakes he has made. He is a man haunted by the memories of the people he never let into his life. One of them is George, a china painter he grew to know as a young man visiting the town of Davenport in the ...
This is a novel with many layers, complex and slow. The novel takes place in the summer of 1889.Patrick works for the government in Ottawa, but has been having issues and has come to stay with his aunt and uncle in Niagara Falls. He is also a published poet and his interest in nature has him wand...
Jane Urquhart's novel was not one I would have read on my own, but it was on my Canadian Literature reading list. Though her writing style is somewhat flowery, it is, for the most part, an easy read. It consists of three seperate parts, the second being tedious, especially in the beginning. When ...
Jane Urquhart has demonstrated in A MAP OF GLASS and THE UNDERPAINTER how a person can be transformed by the power of art and memory. The characters are sometimes made whole, or shattered, or both. In this fifth novel, her eccentric, parochial characters emerge from the harsh, often punishing 19t...
I discovered this book on a sales table at the local bookstore and bought it for the author and the mention of Emily Brontë on the back cover. While I had high expectations for it (Urquhart is one of Canada's finest authors), I was pleasently surprised: the novel not only explores the human expe...
“ ‘A pocketful of rye,’ ” he sang quietly as he painted, “ ‘four and twenty blackbirds diving in a pie.’ ” The tree appeared to explode from the man’s head, as if a vigorous dream could no longer be contained and must now be permitted to enter the world. Around him, everything planted demanded to...
Here he can keep his personality intact. His lust tied. Directly in front of the palace there is a large hill. The small immediate garden is enclosed on either side by steep cliffs. There is little he can do. This is comforting, at least at first. He cannot live there. But he will vis...
Then, a subsequent experience can become a positive print of a shadowy negative in the mind. Understand. There were originally two Johns; a dark silhouette followed by an idea. The latter added detail, colour to the outline of the former. And then there was only one. In the not too distant past e...
“Silenced” was the way she described it to me, the listener, the one with whom she was never silent. “Silenced,” she added, “because there is one place I will never be able to go with him, something elemental and essential about him that I will never have any real access to.”I often wondered if e...