The Season of Migration
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The lyrically told story of one of the world's greatest artists finding his true calling
Though Vincent van Gogh is one of the most popular painters of all time, we know very little about a ten-month period in the painter's youth when he and his brother, Theo, broke off all contact. In The Season of Migration, Nellie Hermann conjures this period in a profoundly imaginative, original, and heartbreaking vision of Van Gogh's early years, before he became the artist we know today.
In December 1878, Vincent van Gogh arrives in the coal-mining village of Petit Wasmes in the Borinage region of Belgium, a blasted and hopeless landscape of hovels and slag heaps and mining machinery. Not yet the artist he is destined to become, Vincent arrives as an ersatz preacher, barely sanctioned by church authorities but ordained in his own mind and heart by a desperate and mistaken spiritual vocation. But what Vincent experiences in the Borinage will change him. Coming to preach a useless gospel he thought he knew and believed, he learns about love, suffering, and beauty, ultimately coming to see the world anew and finding the divine not in religion but in our fallen human world.
In startlingly beautiful and powerful language, Hermann transforms our understanding of Van Gogh and the redemptive power of art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fledgling talent of a future artistic giant is the subject of this second novel by Hermann (The Cure for Grief). Young Vincent Van Gogh ventures out on a journey into the mining region of Belgium, observing the impoverished, often wretched lives of those who work underground. Written half as a third-person narrative, half as Vincent's letters to his brother, Theo, the book gradually illuminates Vincent's artistic development through his experiences of family, love, spirituality, and occasional, sublime glimpses of beauty amid the gloom and dust of his environment. Vivid imagery skillfully evokes Van Gogh's paintings, an effect marred only by moments of heavy-handedness in the concluding scenes. Subtle and winding, but deeply felt, the novel succeeds as an origin story of a particular creative genius.
