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Loading... Painter of Silenceby Georgina Harding
None.  mongoosenamedt | Jun 15, 2013 |  arty, the past and a nice read asyouth | Apr 20, 2013 | A moving book about Safta, the daughter of a well to do family, and Tinu, the son of their cook, deaf since birth, and without language despite rather brutal attempts at an oral education. After many years apart they meet again and we look at the events of the intervening years including the run up to WW2, the war years, and afterwards. How did they both survive such harsh times, and in particular how can Tinu make sense of it. This is essentially an exploration of what level of understanding is possible without language. Fascinating in the historical details too. (  ) eclecticdodo | Mar 17, 2013 | Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding A beautiful title for a beautiful story. The backdrop of this story is pre & post war Romania and tells the tale of a deaf-mute stable boy, Tinu, who is the son of a house cook and his friend and defender, Safta, the daughter of the house. They live in the countryside and as described in the book, it is very lovely and peaceful there. Then comes the war. The family all leave for safer parts of Europe except for Safta and her mother, who eventually leaves as well. Safta soon leaves also and goes to live with her father, attending university and becomes a nurse. She goes to work in a hospital and after some time she notices a young gentleman patient who doesn't speak and soon realizes that he is her childhood friend Tinu. Tinu has a horrible pulmonary illness and coughs incessantly. She pays special attention to him in her hours & days off and after a long period of recovery, though yet ill, she and a fellow nurse are allowed to take him to her fellow nurse's home to complete his recovery. Because Tinu could never communicate naturally, he has learned to draw and to draw beautifully. But he doesn't just draw images and pretty pictures. He draws the world around him. Things he has seen, loved; things that were part of his life. This story was written in the form of past tense, present tense, past tense, present tense. etc. A form of writing that doesn't always work but in this book it does so beautifully. The main part of this storyline is Tinu telling of he and Safta's time apart in pictures. I liked this book very much indeed, rated it 4 stars and highly recommend it. I know that it will not leave my mind for some time to come. ( )1  rainpebble | Jan 13, 2013 | Some books are hard to describe, as is the case with The Painter of Silence. August is a deaf, mute, born into a servant family in Romania in the 1930s. Also the estate owner tries to have him learn to read and write, it is really to no avail. His outlet is drawing, primarily with pencil, scenes around him. When the owners leave their estate in the hopes of avoiding Hitler, the servants are left behind. Painter of Silence describes life pre and post WWII and Augustin's life during this time. His only form of communication is through drawings. Painter of Silence is a well written, absorbing book of relationships, youth, war, and silence. Readers are drawn immediately to the characters and setting. One of the endearing thing about the book is the vernacular which sounds something like that spoken by people whose native language is not English. You can imagaine a Romanian speaking the dialogue and writing the descriptions. All in all, an excellent book. ( ) EdGoldberg | Dec 3, 2012 |
 Harding’s writing has a careful, lilting fluency which nourishes a slow-burning momentum. Although there ought to be a law against the now ubiquitous present tense, the post-war scenes in which Harding employs this technique are not entirely egregious, and do add a certain urgency. There are problems with using Tinu’s point of view – when soldiers come to Poiana, we don’t know what they’re there for, which is a little perplexing for the reader. His ability to parrot words also lands him in trouble; which seemed a perfect parable for the chaos of war in which all signs and symbols gain and lose their meanings at a turn of the wheel. And what more salutary message could there be in these days, when a tweet in jest can land you a prison sentence in earnest? Harding’s book is an adroit examination of our need for a home, and the terrible consequences of its loss. She is a writer to watch.  Painter of Silence insists on being recommended because of its unassertive orginality, its sense of history, its knowledge of the unsaid and the unsayable, and - not least - its delightfully surprising ending. Painter of Silence has recently been longlisted for the Orange prize, an accolade it richly deserves. Harding writes with exquisite restraint, capturing the grim greyness of the communist city with as much delicate tenderness as the idyllic landscape of Poiana. Her deceptively simple prose gives a startling beauty to the ordinary, and evokes great depth of suffering. It is a challenge for any writer to conjure the world of the wordless through words and in this Harding triumphantly succeeds, exploring through her silent protagonist profound questions of identity and attachment, of the inadequacy of language and the baffling inconsistencies of humankind. ....– Andrei, the young man with the green car, is a frustratingly sketchy character, while the improbable neatness of the ending undermines the novel's subtle complexity – but these are decisively outweighed by its pleasures.
References to this work on external resources.
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"It is the early 1950's. A nameless man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. He is deaf and mute, but a young nurse named Safta recognizes him from the past and brings him paper and pencils so that he might draw. Gradually, memories appear on the page; the man is Augustin, the cook's son at the manor house in Poiana, where Safta was the privileged daughter. Born six months apart, the two had a connnection that bypassed words, but while Augustin's world stayed the same size, Safta's expanded to embrace languages, society, and a fleeting love one long, hot summer. But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and nothing would remain the same"--Dust jacket.… (more)
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