Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

THE FIGURES OF BEAUTY

David Macfarlane

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the marble mountains of Carrara, Italy comes a sensuous, heartbreaking novel about art, beauty, and the choices we make that define us for life.

A young man travels to Paris in 1968, where a series of unlikely events take him to a tiny village in Italyand the one great love of his life. A marble merchant meets a couple on their honeymoon, introducing them to the sensual beauty of the Carrara region. An Italian woman arrives in Canada to find the father she never knew. A terrible accident in a marble quarry changes the course of a young boy's life and, ultimately, sets in motion each of these stories, which Macfarlane masterfully shapes into a magnificent whole. Oliver Hughson falls in love with wild, bohemian Anna over the course of one glorious summer in Italy. Bound by a sense of responsibility to his adoptive parents back home in Canada he leaves her, an act he will regret for the rest of his life. Narrated by the daughter Oliver never knew he had, The Figures of Beauty is a love story of mythic proportions. Through luck, fate, and great good fortune, Oliver found the one place and the one woman he should never have left. This is the story of him trying to find his way back. DAVID MACFARLANE's first book, The Danger Tree, won the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Non-Fiction, and his novel, Summer Gone, was nominated for the Giller Prize and won the Chapters/Books in Canada first novel prize. He has won numerous National Magazine Awards and a National Newspaper Award. Told through the distance of time and place and imbued with a lifetime of research and passion, The Figures of Beauty is an exquisite saga that explores the lives of two parallel communities and the love, passion, family, industry and beauty that intertwines their fates with the exquisite white marble of Carrara. Bruce Westwood insists that this is one of the most remarkable books he has ever read. This is an absolutely beautiful, fresh, and honest novel.

Available products
Book Published by Canada: HarperCollins

Comments

A complex, densely written and dreamlike narrative . A moving tale of love, fate and regret. Read more...

"The Figures of Beauty is an ambitious, meticulously researched work, spanning continents and centuries." - The Montreal Gazette

Vulkan

"A very poignant meditation on regret about lives half-lived... Sub-textually, The Figures of Beauty is also an aesthetic treatise of the human impulse to make beauty, to create art. And Macfarlane tells this story in a deeply affecting way. One learns a great deal about marble and Michelangelo and the way artists work. At one point Teresa notes, 'My mother believes that art is a spirit, not a museum of objects, and that the work of the truly great. . . becomes part of what mankind is. . .' I think Macfarlane believes that too, and Figures of Beauty fits perfectly into that matrix."

"A fitting tribute to the beautiful potency of marble, its stillness in motion."

A meditation on the degree to which we mortals really lack much control over our lives Sub-textually, Figures of Beauty is also an aesthetic treatise of the human impulse to make beauty, to create art. And Macfarlane tells this story in a deeply affecting way.

Editions de la Pleine Lune

Macfarlane sculpts several disparate tales into a smooth, rock-solid whole. His ambitions are high, but in a language as rich as the fruits of the scenic landscapes in which he situates his characters and their stories, he pulls off a far grander narrative with skill and intrigue. - Vancouver Weekly