The Painted Kiss
Author: Elizabeth Hickey
Translator: Eun-ju Song
Publisher: Yedam
440 pages | 223*152mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
From Booklist
*Starred Review* This first novel, which springs boldly to the
reader's attention as an admirably accomplished, beguilingly effortless
story, is based on the lives of two actual historical figures. Hickey
takes us back to the lush elegance of fin-de-siecle Vienna, "the most
beautiful, cosmopolitan city in the world"--back to when the emperor
still ruled divinely yet the arts were breaking old barriers. Gustav
Klimt, a denizen of Viennese bohemia, has already made a painter's name
for himself when a well-to-do businessman commissions him to draw his
young daughters' portraits. Thus the lives of this permanent fixture in
the world's artistic firmament and his mistress-to-be, Emilie Floge,
intersect. Alternating flash-forwards to mid-World War II, when the Old
World truly crumbled and Klimt was long dead, frame the story with a
perfect nostalgia for the novel's "real" time: the beautifully expressed
charting of the growing relationship between Klimt and Emilie, who
eventually runs a fashion house in the Austrian capital and dresses all
the ladies of the arts world. Hickey possesses a comfortably secure
voice in sharing her understanding of the nature of this unsordid affair
and her knowledge of the glamorous but teetering-on-the-edge time and
place. --Brad Hooper
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