The Italian Teacher
A Novel
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4.1 • 41 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“An exotic touch of intrigue arises in THE ITALIAN TEACHER . . . deliciously ironic and deeply affectionate.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
A masterful novel about the son of a great painter striving to create his own legacy, by the bestselling author of The Imperfectionists.
Conceived while his father, Bear, cavorted around Rome in the 1950s, Pinch learns quickly that Bear's genius trumps all. After Bear abandons his family, Pinch strives to make himself worthy of his father's attention--first trying to be a painter himself; then resolving to write his father's biography; eventually settling, disillusioned, into a job as an Italian teacher in London. But when Bear dies, Pinch hatches a scheme to secure his father's legacy--and make his own mark on the world.
With his signature humanity and humor, Tom Rachman examines a life lived in the shadow of greatness, cementing his place among his generation's most exciting literary voices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Rachman's artful third page-turner (after The Rise & Fall of Great Powers), the son of a world-renowned painter struggles to escape the dark shadow cast by his father. Born in Rome to a mistress turned bride, Pinch Bavinsky only sees his domineering father, Bear, during the elder's summer visits to Europe. After a trip by teenage Pinch to 1960s New York ends with Bear crushing his artistic ambitions, the son abandons his dreams of painting to embark on a failed career in academia before becoming a foreign language instructor in London. The most trusted of Bear's 17 children, Pinch appoints himself overseer of his aging father's work, and much of the novel's well-staged tension emerges from Pinch's choice in the early aughts to paint a reproduction of one of Bear's paintings and sell it, passing it off as one of his father's. Spanning the 1950s to the present, the novel does traffic a bit in familiar notions of the art world and difficult artists, but its subversion of these tropes makes for a satisfying examination of authorship and authenticity, and a fine fictionalization of how crafting an identity independent of one's parents can be a lifelong, worthwhile project.
