Lucy Steeds. Photograph: Paul Stuart
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Lucy Steeds. Photograph: Paul Stuart
Review
The Artist by Lucy Steeds audiobook review – a sensory feast in Provence
A reclusive artist is the reluctant subject of a journalist’s attention in a rich world of scents, scenery and secrets
When a British journalist named Joseph Adelaide tracks down a reclusive artist to his remote farmhouse in the south of France, his plan is to interview him for a magazine profile. Edouard Tartuffe is a revered painter who was taught by Cézanne and is known on the Parisian art scene as the “Master of Light”. But then he retreated from the limelight amid rumours of a feud with his former mentor.
Tartuffe – known as Tata – now lives with his 27-year-old niece, Ettie, and is blind in one eye. Joseph quickly learns that Tata also has an explosive temper and rules the household with an iron fist. On meeting Joseph, he barks that he will not be giving an interview but that his guest can stay on one condition: that he model for him for a new portrait.
Lucy Steeds’s evocative novel is set over a summer in Provence in 1920 where the landscape shimmers, the cicadas hum and “sunlight radiates from the yellow fields”. Steeds’ book is as much a sensory as literary experience as the listener is immersed in the heady smell of turpentine and the pungent stink of still life fruit and fish arrangements deliberately left to rot in the Provençal heat.
The reader is Tanya Reynolds, who imbues the mystery of the brutish Tata and his withdrawal from the world with atmosphere and slow-burning tension. Joseph believes the key to understanding this once-towering artist lies with the quiet, contemplative Ettie, who has lived with her uncle since childhood and is harbouring secrets of her own. Available via John Murray, 11hr 3min
Further listening
Sanctuary
Marina Warner, William Collins, 12hr 56min
A moving essay series on the places we choose to live. Subtitled Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, Warner’s book explores the concept of human refuge and shelter from the ancient world to the present day. Read by the author.
Am I Having Fun Now?
Suzi Ruffell, Bluebird, 8hr 54min
The standup comic and podcaster’s book is part memoir about growing up as a working-class queer woman and part self-help manual on how to navigate life, from education and employment to parenthood, as an anxious person.
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