Kirjahaku

From the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of Son of the Morning Star and Deus Lo Volt!, a biography that breaks the mold-recounting with stunning immediacy the dark genius behind the renowned Spanish painter. Enigmatic, compelling, darkly brilliant and casually masterful in turn, Francisco Goya changed art forever, although the nature of his influence has been widely interpreted. Degas, for one, lamented that because of Goya he was condemned to painting a housewife in her bathtub. During the vile days of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya painted royalty, street urchins and demons with the same brush, bringing his own distinctive touch to each. This unusual man and his ghastly times are the perfect subject for Evan S. Connell, one of our greatest and least conventional writers. This unorthodox biography shines with wit, erudition and prodigious research. To say Connell is intimate with his subject is an understatement: He seems to be inside Goya's famously impenetrable skin.In a colloquial, wry style, Connell introduces a wealth of detail and a comic cast of weird and eccentric characters-dukes, queens and artists-as lewd and incorrigible a group as history has ever produced. And he shrewdly sifts through two centuries of commentary on Goya's art, deftly weaving insults-like "seeking to avoid the eyes and the image of God."(Paul Claudel)-with raves-"a masterpiece of loathing"(Ernest Hemingway). Connell has conjured Goya, his art, and his times with ease and imagination. This is an unforgettable biography from an American master.

The author of Son of the Morning Star and Deus Lo Volt probes the mind of the Spanish painter, reconstructing the violent, repressive Spain he called home and charting his powerful influence on Western art. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

"We have here on the planet with us a man of such courage and strength of spirit that he has not lost what Alfred Adler calls 'the nerve for excellence.' He has kept it despite the burden of an awareness not only of the enormity of his project and of the limitations of his own human understanding, but also of the abject ignorance and indifference of his audience... "Somehow Connell makes you care. Many modern poets demand a good deal of work; Connell excites it. Sometimes the note-taker's [narrator] tone is hectoring, even belligerent; if you have any competitive spirit at all, you seize a thread--any thread--follow it, and lo, it traces a pattern... you understand at last that these notes are not tentative explorations, and far less are they 'expression: ' they are instead the magnificent artifices of a giant intellect... "These poems are masterpieces. You could bend a lifetime of energy to their study, and have lived well. The fabric of their meaning is seamless, inexhaustible... their language is steely and bladelike; from both of its surfaces flickering lights gleam. Each page sheds insight on every other page; understanding snaps back and forth, tacking like a sloop up the long fjord of mystery."--Annie Dillard, Harper

Karl Muhlbach, hero of Evan Connell's previous novel, The Connoisseur, has a new obsession--a beautiful, nubile girl-about-New York named Lambeth Brent, whose puzzling background and swinging activities lead Muhlbach into dark areas, causing new revelations of himself as a man to emerge. The mysterious bonds between opposites come into sharp relief as we follow the course of Muhlbach and Lambeth's relationship. An uncomfortable visit to the ballet, an abortive country vacation, brief but sparkling happy moments, and Muhlbach's final, shocking discovery add up to a mosaic of vignettes, rendering the characters startlingly real. Double Honeymoon explores the built-in dangers of a love affair between a cautious, conservative, middle-aged widower and a neurotic, high-strung, self-destructive girl. But far from just another May-September romance, the book is a keen examination of the dilemma posed by two people who are attracted to each other, yet unable to come together because of the profound differences in their backgrounds and outlooks. With a sure hand, Evan Connell demonstrates just how profound those differences can be.