USE YOUR HANDS

How Maylis de Kerangal turns work into writing.

- LAUREN OYLER

At the beginning of Maylis de Kerangal's novel "Painting Time," which was published in French in 2018 and in English in 2021, the central character, Paula Karst, is having drinks with two former classmates from the Institut de Peinture, in Brussels. All working trompe-l'oeil painters, the trio are both jazzed and trepidatious about the reunion; the intensity of their training, almost ten years before, bonded them as friends and cemented them as competitors. (And, O.K., possibly as lovers.) Possessed by a "desirable madness" for their craft, they should be spending the evening working, or resting in order to work more. But something draws them together. Paula, who has just painted a film set in Moscow, is entreated to "describe your exploits" first:

Instead of panoramic impressions and sweeping narration, instead of a chronological account, she begins by describing the details of Anna Karenina's sitting room, which she had to finish painting by candlelight after a power failure plunged the sets into darkness the night before the very first day of filming; she begins slowly, as though her words escort the image in a simultaneous translation, as though language is what allows us to see, and makes the rooms appear, the cornices and doors, the woodwork, the shape of the wainscoting and outline of the baseboards, the delicacy of the stucco, and from there, the very particular treatment of the shadows that had to stretch out across the walls; she lists with precision the range of colors-celadon, pale blue, gold, China White and bit by bit she gathers speed, forehead high and cheeks flaming, launching into the story of that long night of painting, that mad crunch.