Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn - July 2012

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Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn - July 2012

Post by Clare Bookclub Mod » Sat Jun 30, 2012 12:30 pm

I had a look at the returns trolley to see if there was anything interesting and straight away I found Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn and turning to the back cover discovered she has written Daisy Bates in the Desert. I read that non-fiction book some years ago and loved the way it was written and am thrilled to have rediscovered this author just now! I'm not surprised that her two novels The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions were both shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted a serious illness which left him stone deaf. In this extraordinary book Julia Blackburn follows Goya through the remaining thirty-five years of his life. It was a time of political turmoil, of war, violence and confusion, and Goya transformed what he saw happening in the world around him into his visionary paintings, drawings and etchings. These were also years of tenderness for Goya, of intimate relationships with the Duchess of Alba and with Leocadia, his mistress, who was with him to the end.

'Julia Blackburn has an extraordinary talent for thinking herself into other worlds..Reading her books you experience the uncanny sensation that you have always known these places. So vivid are her conjurings of lives lived elsewhere or long ago, you begin to suspect she sees ghosts.' Marina Benjamin, Standard

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