Painter of Silence

by Georgina Harding

It is the early 1950s. 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 at Poiana, where Safta was the privileged daughter. Born six months apart, they had a connection 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.

Georgina Harding's kaleidoscopic new novel will appeal to readers of Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, and Sandor Marai. It is as intense and submerging as rain, as steeped in the horrors of our recent history as it is in the intimate passions of the human heart.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romania, Literary Fiction, War, Historical, Art

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Georgina Harding is an English author of fiction. Published works include her novels Painter of Silence (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012), The Spy Game (shortlisted for The Encore Award 2011), and The Solitude of Thomas Cave.

She has also written two works of non-fiction: Tranquebar: A Season in South India and In Another Europe. She lives in London and the Stour Valley, Essex.

Reviews

[Adina ( back from Vacay…slowly recovering)]

Speed dating with books 4/6
Since I am moving my books from one room to another and building a new bookcase I realized (again) that I have way too many unread books. I decided to choose 6 (for the beginning) of the ones waiting on my shelves for a long time or that I do not know if I would like, read 50 pages and decide if I want to continue with them or send them away. This week and the next I will share with you the results.

The 4th attempt did not go very well either. I received this novel as a gift for my Birthday a few years ago. I wasn't too keen on the subject but it is set in Romania during and after the WW2 so I thought I should try it. As another plus, it was also shortlisted to Orange prize.

The main reason I stopped reading was because I did not enjoy the writing. As other reviews stated, it was something off with it.. Well, after some thought, I realized which one of the problems was. The author doesn't really know her way around commas. Some cases are really blatant. I understand it can be used as a stylistic artifice (such as in The Blindness by Saramago) but I doubt this is the case here. She does use some commas so it's not that. I have to admit and apologize that I also have problems with those tiny creatures but I do not plan to write a novel anytime soon and English is my 2nd language. Also, the construction of some phrases left me baffled.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially seemed overwrought, overly precious, straining too hard for profundity. But it grew on me.

It's the eve of world war two. A deaf mute Romanian boy, son of the cook at a big house, who obsessively draws. It was largely the descriptions of the drawings that were overwritten and overly melodramatic. He is a charmless character too. As mysterious as a wild animal. The book came alive for me when the narrative switches to the love story of the young girl whose parents own the house and then her relationship with the deaf mute boy. The second half of the novel, after the war, was much more compelling. Definitely an author I will read again.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not quite sure why I so very much enjoyed this book, but I know I did. It is a quiet book, with beautiful language that keeps you thinking. No splashy action filled drama. There are two main characters, one, a deaf mute, and the other his friend, a girl. They are born six months apart. They are born in the same house. Thus they have grown up together, but one was born to the cook and the other to the family of the manor. It is about their relationship. This is not a love story between these two. Neither is the book about being a deaf-mute, the boy born to the cook. But it is about communication, how we relate to each other, how it is our attitudes toward one another that dictates if communication can ever be possible. If you want to understand another, then you will understand. These two lives touch each other; they bump up against each other. Again and again. And the reader learns about both lives. You learn about one family living in Romania, before during and after World War Two, primarily through these two individuals.

And there is another theme that is wonderfully explored. Art. The deaf mute communicates through his art. Isn't all art a means to communication? I fell in love with the art that Augustin made. I saw his art work. Fabulous art. I wish it really existed. By reading this book it does exist for me.

The writing is special. Soft and gentle. You see, the communication between Safta and Augustin is not verbal. Augustin cannot hear. We are given only their thoughts. These thoughts are communicated without sound. They are communicated by looking at each other. This I love because I think so much is said by looking at another person. You see what a person is saying by how they move their body. I felt I was watching these two people rather than listening to their words. And often words lie, while people's actions reveal who they really are. I am not being very clear; the book conjures an atmosphere of honest communication without words. The woman who narrates the audiobook, Siân Thomas, carries this off without one single fault. Calmly we are given the thoughts of both Safta and Augustin. Occasionally another voice is heard and immediately you here a different tone. Tremendous narration. Through Thomas' voice and the author's words you feel you understand how Augustin experiences a silent world.

I have tried to pinpoint why I love this book.

***********************

After 15 of 35 chapters:
Beautiful lines, enhanced by the voice of the audiobook narrator: Siân Thomas. It is about our inner selves and who we are. It is about love relationships. It is about art. Really not about being a deaf mute at all.

***********************

Hmmm, another author compared to Michael Ondaatje. From the beginning, the writing has a special feel; it is smooth and soft. Yes, even lyrical, although I think that adjective is employed all too often!

I am so intrigued with the writing that I have already added another by the same author: The Solitude of Thomas Cave

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

In these fragmented lines of lyricism, I sense silent strength. Prosaic and poetic strength. This playful, yet deeply meaningful narrative traverses the mind of a deaf man, and a woman who nearly escapes war by abandoning her family; I'm reminded of the many things that we keep hidden. He's a deaf mute, so there isn't much anyone expects him to reveal; she's a nurse who has seen (and possibly endured) much, but she chooses to keep quiet about it, to live a life disentangled from those times:

She thought that she'd disconnected herself from the past. She has learnt that you can do that with pieces of your life. Disconnect them. Separate yourself from the person you were.

Some travel the world in silence. Silent horrors: sometimes we rarely hear about them, sometimes we choose to ignore them.

Silence abounds in subtleties throughout this novel, nothing is straightforward, nothing simply black or white, only quiet gray. Even the pace and points of view. The words are so softly placed, they soothe. Sometimes it gets so silent that if you don't listen closely, you'll miss the many underlying stories here, for they come in jolts, through riveting storytelling hidden beneath silent scenes. Each character faces some traumatic event, and each character endures differently. It is akin to entering someone's mind and having his or her memory inhabit your own as you revisit the scene of a dead house, dead parent, dead family legacy, deadened memory.You can never go home again. One never gets to the heartbreaking core of this statement until one has experienced displacement and loss of identity.

These things I saw could not happen there, I told myself, as if the place was held in some capsule untouched by the war. And gradually I put the capsule away, perhaps because I could not risk it being broken.

I read this slowly, silently. At times I searched for information on Bucharest and Iasi, but mostly, I was transfixed by Poiana, the nonexistent hometown of Safta and Augustin, a man and woman who were raised in the same household, until war and class separated them (but this search kept leading me to a ski resort in Romania??). The story is silent about intricate war details and at times the sprinkle of information is so subtle, you would need to know some background information (for example, if you've never read about the Russian invasions, you'd be a bit clueless). Even then, what I reached for the most, what I found some profundity within, was the intuitive silence of the deaf painter as seen more clearly through Safta, the woman closest to his heart and to his past. What I reached for, was the silence that is survival.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in Romania in the aftermath of the Second World War and with the country under communist rule, this is a book which tells a harsh and sometimes bleak story in lyrical, quiet prose.

Safta and Augustin, the deaf-mute painter of the title, are brought up together as children, she the daughter of the house, he the cook's son. The book follows a dual narrative of the past in the run-up to, and course of, the war; and the present set in the 1950s when Safta and Augustin re-meet.

This isn't a busy, page-turning, action-filled novel - it's muted and restrained and depicts both its horrors and its evocation of a lost, golden past in an understated way. Almost the whole of the book is `told' to us rather than shown, so there is very little direct speech throughout the novel - perhaps itself a comment on the silent world of Augustin - and it took me a little while to settle into the rhythm of the book. Once settled, however, the prose becomes almost mesmeric in its ability to draw the reader in and keep her captured. I liked that this doesn't follow a conventional romance narrative, the relationships are far more subtle and nuanced than that.

Relatively recent changes in Europe have opened up viewpoints of the war, allowing us to experience it from Eastern rather than just a Western European perspective: if you enjoyed this, then you might also like The Beautiful Truth which engages with the Polish war experience, also told in beautifully lyrical and moving prose.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can only imagine that the editor who described this book as being 'as intense and submerging as rain' was being a bit too clever for their own good, because it really is about as immersive as a light shower. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't enjoy it much either. The writing is fine, but there were no parts I felt like marking out as especially significant or beautiful. And that's the problem; the whole book is dominated by this odd sense of flatness that make it quite dull to read.

The novel revolves around the life of Augustin, a boy who is born deaf in early twentieth-century Romania, not long before the Second World War. He lives with a relatively wealthy family in a big country house, but his inability to hear means that he is sidelined, partly by accident and partly by design: he never learns to talk, to read or write, or to communicate in any definable way. But he does learn to draw, and though he never really becomes known as an artist, his drawings and little sculptures become a way of understanding the experiences of his past through work in the present.

All of this is fine as a conceit. But never once did I feel like Augustin had the kind of special kind of artistic insight that the book insists he must have. Too often the author takes an overly literal approach to his art; he's plonked down in a location, there's a couple of paragraphs of pretty but workmanlike description of what he drew, and we're expected to extrapolate from this...what? That art is good and here are some things that are beautiful and this poor boy who cannot hear and the bad soviets want to repress him but he understands -- what? What? It's just not enough.

And this same weird sense of insufficiency extends to pretty much everything else about the book. The other characters are hardly there; Adriana and Safta are basically interchangeable; nobody changes, nobody develops; the whole book is plagued by a peculiarly English sense of paralysis (and not in a good way). It's a pre-war country house novel transplanted to a guidebook version of foreign climes. You never get the sense of this book truly existing in Romanian culture, and if I wanted to be really cruel I'd go so far as to suggest that Augustin's deafness is an excuse for the author not to involve themselves with that, preferring instead just to look on and describe another silent sequence of pleasant farmyards and/or horrible concentration camps. Such is light and shade in modern literature.

It's the third book I've read as part of my attempt to read the shortlist for the 2012 Orange Prize, and it was easily the most disappointing so far; I didn't like 'The Song of Achilles' much, but at least it had a rollicking plot and might be pleasing to fans of the genre. But this is just hopelessly dull. It's tempting to see its nomination as another result of a compromise decision between the judges: it's a not-unpleasant book, and will probably do well as an unchallenging and somewhat anaemic read for the poolside this summer, but it's surely nothing like the best book published in the last year.

[Violet wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

I began to enjoy this book more once I started to read it as a fable. Only then did I cease to be irritated by its relentless whispered pretensions of oracular wisdom. It begins brilliantly. The first chapter is fabulously crafted, inspired writing and had me eagerly looking forward to reading all Georgina Hardy’s novels. Almost as if I had discovered a new Michael Ondaatje. Not sure what happened then. The tension of the first chapter punctured, almost as if an apprentice took over, and the writing began to drift off into a self-conscious lyrical anonymity. It’s a narrative of whispers and evasions. Sustaining the implication something very profound is buried beneath its soil. But ultimately I was disappointed to discover it provides only rather clichéd truths about heritage, deracination and war. You won’t get an insightful or even a particularly convincing portrayal of a deaf mute (his lack of speech remained for me little more than a narrative device to sustain the novel’s tactic of evasion), you never quite believe in the mystic revelatory nature of the boy’s drawings – give a child some crayons and they all draw houses and figures that aspire to harmony and security - and you won’t get a convincing portrayal of wartime or post-war Rumania ( the novel could have been set in virtually any European country). Sad to say you won’t even get a poignant ill-starred love story because once again convenient plot devices tyrannise over credible psychological ebb and flow when the girl’s mother takes it upon herself to belligerently intercept the boy’s letters, acting on a primitive kind of reasoning that she will remain mute about. It might be clever if the gesture didn’t seem so forced and out of character. These plot devices begin to grate as if beneath the often fine and evocative prose we’re being duped into following a rudimentary join the dots drawing. Read it as a fable though and you can just about accept the implausible sorcery of the denouement and overlook its pretensions as an insight into the speechless disenfranchisements of war.

[Aaron (Typographical Era) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of the first two-thirds of Georgina Harding’s third novel Painter of Silence seem to be a test with regards to just how much boredom a reader will endure before giving up and moving on to the next book. Only three major characters are fleshed out, nothing of note really happens to them, and the story that ties everything together hinges primarily on a protagonist named Augustin who can’t speak or hear, but can express himself solely by way of his supposedly evocative drawings. The problem is, for all of Harding’s over descriptive prose relating to the creation of his artwork (he sits, he draws, he cuts, he shapes) there is very little text to suggest that the pieces he designs are in any way moving. Functional yes, they certainly serve to help Augustin make sense of his world, but beyond that the artistic beauty of the gift the man supposedly possesses just never materializes.

His lack of speech doesn’t help matters much either.

READ MORE:
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[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The synopsis of the book is fairly well done and I won't rehash it here. I will suggest that a reader will certainly increase their level of enjoyment/ understanding if they are well taught in Soviet Union events and pre and post war Romania.All I had to go on was a few battles and the gulags.

The atmosphere of the story was haunting and darker than I would have anticipated,but it kept me turning the pages. Much of this darkness seems to seep from and surround Augustin. Many characters, time and time again, in the story mention that there is something off about him. I was waiting for a murderous rampage or some other type of shocking event. When an author chooses to have a deaf mute character only tell a story in pictures, there are going to be lots of "reading between the lines."

While I wasn't completely blown away by this book, I had a desire to follow the story right until the end.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Post World War II Romania is under the brutal Stalinist regime; an unnamed man wakes up in hospital deaf, mute and unable to communicate. A young nurse, Safta, recognises him and brings him a pencil and paper so he can draw. Slowly and painstakingly, memories appear on the page, not just his memories but Safta’s too as they grew up together. But his world has remained the same size and Safta’s has expanded to embrace languages and society.

Communist Romania wouldn’t be the easiest place to live and author Georgina Harding builds this wonderfully artistic scene with real beauty but also despair and hopelessness. This took a little time to become accustomed with; the overuse of similes really made for a rough start in reading this book. It really felt like the word ‘like’ appeared on every second line, but when I started to get further into the novel I did find myself being swept away in this artistic world.

The unnamed name protagonist (who we eventually find out is Augustin) slowly pieces together his world through his art and we as readers are on this journey with him. Finding out. as he has, that he is the son of the Safta’s family cook and the special bond the two formed growing up together. I do not think Augustin is a mute, he just doesn’t speak, but this does not mean that he cannot communicate; each detailed drawing he produces proves this.

There was something unnatural about the plot that really didn’t sit well with me; the whole book Augustin communicates via drawings yet there is this feeling like you find out more about this character than you possibly can via a drawing. Is this pure speculation from the author? Or is there something I am missing? While it wasn’t a big concern, that really did end up bothering me about this book. I just felt like that whole part of the book was a little contrived, yet it really did not effect my enjoyment of the book as this was an afterthought.

This book was really well written, I do not like to use the word Readable but I think that does cover my thoughts on the style. I really liked the way this book ended up feeling like a piece of art with all the little details and yet it still managed to capture the mental and physical burdens of the characters living in this post-war town. I found myself drifting into the story as it floats along and I had to pull myself out so I could pay more attention; it’s a rare feeling and if I wasn’t trying to read critically I would have happily floated through this novel.

While the fact that this book wasn’t linear it never really got confusing, you get little memories and slowly it starts to reveal the bigger picture. While this could get frustrating I never felt as though this was the case with Painter of Silence. Sure, I could talk about how some parts of this novel felt forced and artificial, but I will be honest, none of that ended up bothering me.

You can try to pick apart this novel as much as you like but you will still be left with this beautiful piece of art. I really did enjoy the experience of reading Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding; it is one of those novels that will stick with you and you cannot help but remember its fond memories. It’s a lyrical journey worth taking, even if it is a little unrealistic; just enjoy the ride.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set postwar in Iași, a city in Romania, Painter of Silence traces the story of Augustin, a deaf-mute, who has found his way across a war-ravaged landscape to give a message to Safta, his childhood friend since their days on the Valeanu family estate at Poiana. This period of Romania’s history included the collectivization of agriculture, forced nationalisations of private property and a reign of terror to eliminate all forms of opposition, real or imagined. There can be few books which so vividly convey the drabness and deprivation of such Soviet satellite states under Stalin … never having been to Romania myself and having seen reports only about the toxic reign of Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965- 1989), I was unprepared to discover from Wikipedia that post-Communist Iași is considered the cultural and academic capital of Romania. It is a tourist’s paradise for those interested in art, architecture and history. Painter of Silence shows the reader a different Iași indeed.

Augustin is able to communicate only by drawing, and he has no papers, no identity. While his silent presence renders him almost invisible in some contexts, Safta must conceal their previous relationship because it would betray her as a member of a privileged class now subject to suspicion, harassment and worse. Although he can’t explain what has happened to him or why he has come, Augustin needs to be nursed back to physical and mental health and then discreetly found a home somewhere. In an overcrowded city where refugees cram into collectivized housing, an extra resident – even one so unobtrusive as Augustin – causes problems beyond the obvious. Already the people show signs of the paranoia and jealousy so well documented in Anna Funder’s Stasiland…

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/05/04/pa...

[Shomeret · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book because I am interested in deaf protagonists, but I consider The Painter of Silence a failure in portraying a deaf character. I don't think the author thought through how Augustin communicates. Images can be subjective, and weren't always a reliable means of communication for him. So it's not sufficient to say that he communicates through drawings and paintings. Safta is supposed to be able to communicate with him by other means, and it's never really specified how she does it. Harding tries to show us his thoughts at times, but how can his thoughts be in fluent spoken language when he was born deaf and has never learned more than a few spoken words? His thoughts should be impossible to translate into spoken language. Augustin is not fully realized. I don't know how he would communicate with other deaf people. He learned fingerspelling, but how is that useful without a significant amount of spoken language vocabulary? He never learned any variety of sign language. From a realistic standpoint, he would be cut off from the deaf community.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a sense that Georgina Harding’s novel Painter of Silence is whispering some essential pieces of wisdom that require all of our attention to absorb. Maybe it is just because Harding’s character Augustin is deaf and mute, interacts with the world in every way but sound. Even without voice, though, Augustin has a story to tell and, while terrified, he is also determined to tell it, particularly to the one person he thinks might ‘hear’ it. She is Safta, the little girl of his childhood who, while the daughter of the manor lord, made a connection with the peasant Augustin – mostly through his drawings – that has lasted him a lifetime. Safta’s shock at finding Augustin collapsed at the door of the hospital where she works is quickly replaced by memories of her own and a desire to experience, through Augustin, all that has been lost. Set in 1950s Romania, Harding articulates a profound sense of the rents of war and of early Communism, the human impact of national conduct.

[Anamaria · Rating 4 out of 5]

O descoperire minunata si foarte interesanta acest roman. Romanul este construit in jurul vietii unui tanar nascut surdo-mut si a celor cu care viata lui se intersecteaza. O poveste de viata scrisa frumos, care m-a plimbat in timp, intr-un sat moldovenesc pitoresc, dar si in Iasi. Viata la conac este privita in timpuri diferite, inainte, in timpul si dupa cel de-al Doilea Razboi Mondial, mai ales prin ochii tanarului. Este foarte interesanta perceptia acestuia asupra celorlalti locuitori ai conacului, asupra vietii lor, a lumii, a peisajului care il inconjoara, a evenimentelor istorice si care se petrec in viata lui. Este trist si realist felul in care el este perceput si marginalizat de societate, dar absolut minunate sunt iubirea, intelegerea si devotamentul pe care le primeste de la anumite persoane din viata lui.
Un roman care nu ne spune doar o poveste, ci ne face sa ne gandim la viata, la bunatate si toleranta, la iubirea de oameni. Un roman care prezinta viata asa cum este ea, fara cosmetizari, cu tot vartejul ei, in care se impletesc frumosul si uratul, evenimente pe care omul nu le poate controla, consecintele acestora, viata si moartea, bucuria si tristetea, cu un final ce aduce speranta.

[Penny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a novel set in Romania around the early half of the 20th century. We follow a young boy who is severely deaf and therefore mute. The story flashes from the 'present' (in the novel which is just after the war) to the childhood of Tino the young boy and his life as he grows up.

There are lots of shifts of narrative, points of view and timelines which would sometimes throw me. The writing is brilliant and poetic, this woman can set a scene and draw you in.

so why 3 stars? Well, I am quite a strict marker so others may rate it higher. For me the whole thing was a glorious tableau shrouded in mist and secrecy. The characters are formed and relevant but somehow distant. Difficult things happen to them but I wasnt really moved by their plight. At times I couldnt understand why I was being told a particular part of the plot - what relevance it had to whatever came before - yet it is evocative and stunning in places.

It's a glorious painting of a house you can just glimpse through the mist!! (and the gloom never quite clears enough to see the whole.)

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A small fable of life just before, then a good bit after, the war, in Romania. Some lovely (if not exceptional) writing and a good sense of place on an estate - and a bit less so in Iasi afterwards. There is a nice range of village characters but all are rather thin, including the two principles (the boy is treated like an idiot savant) and the story, despite the inevitable richness (and horror) of wartime, is also a bit sparse. It wraps up exceedingly tidily and the interesting angle on the looming unpleasantness of life in communist Romania fades out.

Harding has a particular way of telling a story: setting a scene with some detail, then going past the main event and looking back on it. This is happening with the novel (we get pre-war and post-war more or less together, rather ably and clearly and then a rush to show through the boy's pictures what happened to him) but also with little episodes throughout. It's confidently done but it does take some of the drive out of the book, which is consistently sort of melancholy and wispy.

So, it's all rather nice but ultimately not very satisfying. I wonder if it wouldn't have had more impact as a long story.

Also - he's not a painter! But I guess Drawer of Silence wouldn't work. And there's an editing problem where for a few times the town of Iasi is called Valeanu (which isn't a town but the girl's last name).

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. The book is written beautifully, and there are many lines that make you think and ponder about life and your place in it. However, for me, it had an underlying tone of bleakness and desolation. I wanted to know what happened, but for whole sections of the book, I felt like I was driving through a war zone, looking at ruins. Meanwhile, there was a light at the end of the tunnel but I just wanted to put my foot on the gas so I could get there. I am still pondering the last page and what the author intended to leave the reader with at the end. I feel like the book was ultimately hopeful, but there was a fair amount of misery to slog through to get there.

Having said that, if I had read this book while in a very happy place, I may have really loved it. Often, I don't think it's the books we choose as much as it is choosing the right book for our mood at the time. I am in a place where I am looking for comfort. Not finding that in my new, prescribed gluten and dairy free diet, I am seeking it between the pages of a book. Although there were a few light moments here, they were mostly flickers.

Overall, a decent read, beautifully written, and unique in that one of the main characters was a deaf mute. I felt the characters were deftly drawn and the scenes brought to life by the author.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first became aware of this novel when it was long listed for the Orange prize and the title intrigued me. I first started reading it and wasn't sure whether I was going to like it or not. Yet the concept f a deaf mute communicating by drawing pictures interested me. So glad I kept reading because this turned out to be a very understated quiet gem of a book. It is a book set before and after the communist takeover of Romania and the deaf mute was the cook's son on an estate in the countryside. There are no big flashy scenes, not a lot of blood or outright atrocities, but rather an introspective look at the changes Communism brought to so many lives. There are deaths, tragedies and separations, but there is also determination and at the end, hope. The book has a melancholy tone; the two main characters and life on the estate are portrayed poignantly, but it is most of all a novel of regret and change, of memories and loss and trying to find a way forward. I really enjoyed reading this story.

[Ashley Rangel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok maybe I haven't given it enough of a chance but I cant get myself to want to stick this out. The writing style, for the most part, is lacking something for me. Sometimes I like how she's writing and then other times it seems all over the place and a little redundant. But maybe I feel irritated because if I really listen to myself think often enough it's inevitable that my thoughts are all over the place and not really sure of themselves (and in those cases its about people and unless you really know someone there are so many variables as to why they are the way they are and do the things they do that its understandable to not be sure. Right?!?) and that irritates me and this book simply reminds me of that. Doesn't look like I'll read this Til the end.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book centres around a young deaf boy, who is also unable to speak, the illegitimate son of a woman who works as a servant in a large country house in Rumania, and the young Daughter of the house who befriends him.
The story starts just before WW2, and continues into the post war communist regime.
I enjoyed it....it was unusual, atmospheric, has some memorable characters, and taught me a lot about what happened in Rumania during and after the war,

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely moving - why do some books just reach out and get you? I had to stop reading this on the aeroplane on Thursday and then as I was finishing it yesterday, I was sobbing! The images that the book conjured stayed with me all day. What more can you ask of a book but to be completely transported to another time and place

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Painter of Silence is set in Romania before, during and after the second world war. The book's present follows Augustin, a deaf mute who is found, undernourished and seriously ill, on the steps of Bucharest's hospital. He is nursed back to health by Safta, a nurse who knew him when they were children growing up in a small rural village. She cares for Augustin, and arranges a place for him to go to when he is eventually released from hospital.

We also learn of Safta and Augustin's childhood. Safta was the daughter of the local squire and grew up on a large estate. Augustin was the son of their cook, but the two children were close in age and formed a special relationship.

The central idea behind the story is Augustin's detachment from the rest of the world. He is a talented artist, and uses pictures to make sense of the world around him, but he is very withdrawn and makes little attempt to communicate with friends and family. He will experience extreme hardship and the events of the war and later Soviet occupation will affect him profoundly.

There is a palpable melancholy in the writing, and a detachment that mirrors Augustin's own. Things move extremely slowly and I have to admit I did get a little bored, particularly during the first half. It improves towards the end, when we find out exactly what Augustin has suffered in the years he spent away from Safta, but even here the reader is set at a distance and I found it hard to get emotionally involved.

If only there had been a little more going on, perhaps an interesting twist or at least a little more involvement with our characters, this could have been a great book. More of Augustin's thoughts would have helped; these passages were interesting but too few to really give the reader a sense of who he was. And Safta is another mystery; we never really understand how she feels about anything. The end of the book was quite surprising, but again it lacked punch or something that might make it memorable.

I liked Painter of Silence for the mood it created, but it didn't have the wow factor I was hoping for in an Orange shortlisted novel.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up because the title intrigued me. The painter of the title is Augustin, who is deaf and mute. We first meet him when he arrives in the Romanian city of Iași, in the early 50s, a time of Stalinist oppression. Augustin (Tinu) makes his way to a hospital, where his childhood companion Safta is working.

The writing is quite beautiful and verging on the poetic.

How complete the blackness must be when a deaf man closes his eyes.

Tinu is the fatherless son of the cook on a rich estate, where Safta is the daughter of the Lord of the manor. Then after one long hot summer, where Safta falls in love with the Lagonda driving lothario Andrei, war is declared and nothing will be the same again.

Tinu can only communicate with humans through his drawings, he has more skill communicating with horses and helps look after the Lippanzer on the estate. His drawings are also a means of trying to understand his world, which for an introverted deaf mute in such challenging times is not easy. He carefully stitches his drawings together into albums.

Painter of Silence moves between the two worlds shared by Safta and Augustin: the country idyll of Poiana, a “place that light passed through“, and the austere desolation of postwar Iasi with its “used-up sky“, where property has been reallocated and several families now live cramped together with minimal privacy. There is also the chaos and internment camps of the war.

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 mute protagonist profound questions of identity and attachment, of the inadequacy of language and the baffling inconsistencies of humankind.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hauntingly beautiful novel, set in pre and post war Romania. Augustin is a deaf mute boy, born to the cook at the ‘big house,’ and Safta is the first born child of the family who live there. The two are born six months apart and, despite their different status, have an immediate understanding and sympathy with each other. The book begins after the war, when Augustin arrives in the city to look for Safta and is found, emaciated and delirious, on the hospital steps. Safta is a nurse and recognises him at once, although she is careful not to admit to this fact. For Romania is a country of fear, repression and informers and it is best to guard your secrets.

The story switches from past to present, as we learn of life in Poiana, the country house where Safta grows up with her brothers. There are love affairs, the ties of land and family and, above all, art. Augustin uses his talent as an artist to portray his feelings and so, when Safta meets him again so many years later, she brings him paper and pencil. The war has scattered the inhabitants of Poiana and changed their futures forever. However, Safta is determined to find a safe haven for Augustin, now that he has returned to her. It is fair to say that not much happens in this book. Reading it is almost like looking through a book of photographs. You feel removed from events, viewing everything from a distance, but the pictures the text makes are both evocative and memorable.

Rated 3.5

[Deanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written book, haunting in places, Augustin's isolation as a result of his inability to hear or speak. His knowledge of events which he wants to impart and can only do so by his drawings, and the sense of his frustration when others don't understand.
There's also the sense of the state of things in Romania at the end of the war, with neighbours informing on each other.
Travelled to Romania years ago when I was 12, and can still remember that we tipped the waitresses in coffee, also bought coffee for them at the dollar shop. Mum refused to take more than what the coffee cost in the shop, though there were people who went to make money selling jeans etc.

[Stephanie Pieck · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Painter of Silence" was lovely. The precise descriptions of people, places, ways of life, and of course color sweep the reader along and shed light on a particular time (perhaps 1950) in Rumania, a corner of the world that doesn't get mention here in America except if it's to discuss the problems the country has had recently with AIDS orphans and trafficked young women.
Shifting between present and past, and cycling among the perspectives and remembrances of various characters, "The Painter of Silence" tells the story of Augustin, a deaf boy who is also mute. The son of a cook to a wealthy family, Augustin begins his childhood running around the house and grounds with the other children. As the years pass, he becomes the object of a variety of schemes and notions which are only heightened because he doesn't speak and therefore would seem not to have any real participation in them. First, the landowner's wife takes it into her head that he should be educated along with her three children. The German governess charged with doing this fails to get him to speak or to write. Whether this is because Augustin doesn't want to or because the her methods are cruel and impatient is open to question. By this time, the boy is already drawing, and his pictures have captured people's attention. There is no doubt that when the governess threatens to take away his drawing tools, this is cruel. The lady of the house decides that, if he can draw, perhaps he can find a place for himself where this talent could be put to good use.
Without consulting the boy's mother, she takes Augustin to a monastery famous for the quality of the painted icons it produces. Augustin is enthralled, first by the long car journey, then by the decorations within the monastery. He is flooded with images of heaven and hell. With no guidance to process them, these images come back to haunt him during the overnight stay in the monastery's guesthouse. His terror is only reinforced when they attend a mass the next morning. The church is so crowded that it is a literal sea of humanity. Caught between all these people, his head clouded by the smoke of so many candles and so much incense, and then seeing the priest come seemingly out of a wall, dressed in all black and with a stern face ... well, Augustin does the only thing he can think of: he runs.
This book reminded me a bit of "Anna Karenina," with its scenes of agriculture as it was practiced by the peasants of the Russian sphere and their relationship to landowners. It also had echoes of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." It vividly showed how people project what they want to onto the seemingly blank slate of a non-hearing, non-speaking human being. Though Safta, the landowner's daughter, is guilty of just such projections, she is also the only person to think of what Augustin might want for himself. The book opens with Augustin walking into a city after a long train journey, searching for someone. That someone turns out to be Safta. Though he hasn't seen her in many years, she is the one person he believes who can help him. The book, like a kaleidoscope, is a series of circling images and stories as the two of them reconnect with each other.
Augustin's drawings almost become a character in and of themselves. They symbolize his possibility of expression, but their misinterpretation also leads to some of the most heart-breaking events in Augustin's story. And in the end, they are the only way he knows to communicate the vital things he must convey to Safta.
I loved this book. It was well-paced and the characters were well-drawn. I wish it was longer because I wanted to prolong my own absorption in the world the author had created. But I know that it was perfectly proportioned just as it is; any longer, and the delicate balance and symmetry would have been upset. Even to hope for a sequel is being too greedy.
Still, I'll admit to being greedy. Short of that, I'll salute this book as a true gem of a tale. After all, the beauty of gems isn't always in their shimmer or their smoothness. Often, the beauty is revealed in the flaws. Augustin and Safta and the other characters in "Painter of Silence" are all flawed, all human, and as such, all the more recognizable to us as ourselves.

[Ernie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harding is a new writer to me and I am impressed with her evocation of that lost rural life encapsulated by that European summer of 1939, not in the England of Brideshead Revisited but on a rural estate in Romania. Here the master is an Anglophile who sends his sons to England for an education and his daughter Esta to Paris. The sons escape the war but Esta, after severe personal conflict refuses to accompany either her lover or the rest of the family when they leave, as she has broken with family traditions and trained as a nurse and feels that her place is to remain in Bucharest.
When earlier, the cook had a child, his deafness went undiagnosed so he remained mute although he was educated with Esta and the other children by the governess in the attic of the wooden villa until she gave up and left him to his compulsive drawing and his love of working with the horses. His name Augustin remains a constant reminder of that summer August as Harding describes his detailed drawings as his only means of communication.
Esta was the first to notice his artistic talent and they remain close for the rest of the novel which moves in time through the war and the communist revolution in Romania but holding these events to remote memories. Accordingly, this is a gently told story using several points of view, focusing on Esta’s devotion to Augustin and using his drawing to place the horrors of war and the communist state at a considerable remove, as if to acknowledge that words would be impossible to convey the losses that the characters suffered. When after the war and the famine Esta finds him, aged and emaciated and without papers in her Bucharest hospital, there is a different kind of fear that causes her to pass him off as the son of her room mate. The mystery of what happened to Augustin and her lover Andrei during the war is intriguingly revealed in the drawings. Harding achieves that gentle pace of narration and the pastoral calm without longeurs by driving the narrative interest through the force of her characterisation. Not much happens in the present and the past is mediated through memories and the word descriptions of the mostly black and white pencil drawings. I highly recommend this fascinating story that would be quite accessible for students in years 11 and 12.

[martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was left for me by a good friend and I thank her for that as I would probably not have read it otherwise. I was stuck in the verbosity of Hugo's Les Misérables and decided to take something "simpler" on holiday with me. I read it straight through so it didn't have a chance to fill all my quiet holiday moments!

I did enjoy the book and especially Harding's use of simple but evocative language. Unlike others I didn't find it flat and grey, more a verbal reflection of Augustin's world which lacks the colour of sound - and later, in wartime and dictatorship, lacks much visual colour too. I especially liked the section where Augustin notes the confusing changes during the war and after. Being illiterate and deaf he has no way of knowing what is happening so simply experiences the ebb and flow of armies as a bewildering sequence of unpleasant and strange events. Those passages tell more about the inanity and meaningless wastefulness of war than any eloquent pacifist lecture could ever do.

I also found it moving that he sees his pictures not primarily as a way to communicate his needs or wishes, instead they help him bring order to his chaotic, ever- changing world - and also to help Safta experience something which gives her "closure" of a kind. Augustin's is in some ways our narrator - the confidence in his deafness helps other characters speak of their inner thoughts, hopes and fears.

Wartime Moldavia is a world away from our modern Western European experience but there is so much that makes it relevant for us here. The settings are foreign, the history is uniquely Rumanian but the story speaks to us all of love, hope, despair, suffering and sacrifice. Universal issues.

My one regret. The ending is, as others have noted, just a little too tidy but I can't deny that I was kind of hoping it might be that way.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a classic example of a beautifully written book that didn’t deliver on its promise. We have two primary characters in Romania after the Second World War who allude to how they suffered without actually telling of real suffering; that is to say, they witnessed a lot but comparatively little happened to them. It’s the same with the other characters after the war, suffering under the new Communist regime. As for before the war, not much out of the ordinary here either with its characters and their stories. Life is never what we thought it would be, no matter how well or poorly you start off; it just happens to you. Not exactly a world-shaking revelation, nor anything new in literature, but here it seems that everyone is more observer of others’ suffering than a participant. Finally, it ends with what I hate most in literature, an unbelievable coincidence that ties up all loose ends in a neat bow and makes this feel like a Hallmark television special. Everyone’s anguished but they all feel better at the end – cut to fade.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to be honest, I was a little bit disappointed by this book. When I read the description of it I thought that it was going to be really interesting and a gripping read. Following the story of Safta and Augustin, this story travels through the memories through the use of drawings done by Augustin. What I found disappointing was that much of the story felt a bit like back story to the events that were going to roll out. Once I got to about 80% completed I started to get gripped by the story and wanted to know what had happened, but for the most part I found this book exceptionally hard work to read. I'm not sure how much of that is from the fact that this book was preceded by A Song of Achilles which has to be one of the best I've read all year.

I think this book had a good concept that when it was executed well towards the end was really good and gripping, but this book failed to grab me throughout.