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The Anatomy Lesson (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) - Softcover

Siegal, Nina

 
9780804169233: The Anatomy Lesson (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804169233 ISBN 13: 9780804169233
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

A single day in Amsterdam, 1632. The Surgeons’ Guild has commissioned a young artist named Rembrandt to paint Dr. Nicolaes Tulp as he performs a medical dissection. In the swirl of anticipation and intrigue surrounding the event, we meet an extraordinary constellation of men and women whose lives hinge, in some way, on Dr. Tulp’s anatomy lesson. There is Aris the Kid, the condemned coat thief whose body is to be used for the dissection; Flora, his pregnant lover; Jan Fetchet, the curio dealer who acquires corpses for the doctor’s work; the great René Descartes, who will attend the dissection in his quest to understand where the human soul resides; and the Dutch master himself, who feels a shade uneasy about this assignment.
       As the story builds to its dramatic conclusion, circumstances conspire to produce a famous painting—and an immortal painter. Vividly rendered, masterfully written, The Anatomy Lesson is a story of mind and body, death and love—and redemptive power of art.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nina Siegal received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her BA from Cornell. She is the author of two novels, A Little Trouble With the Facts and The Anatomy Lesson, and is the recipient of many fellowships, grants, and awards, including the Jack Leggett Fellowship from Iowa, a Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing, and MacDowell Colony Fellowships. She has covered fine art and culture for The New York Times, Bloomberg News, the International Herald Tribune, W, Art in America, and many other publications.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

A single day in Amsterdam, 1632. The Surgeons' Guild has commissioned a young artist named Rembrandt to paint Dr. Nicolaes Tulp as he performs a medical dissection. In the swirl of anticipation and intrigue surrounding the event, we meet an extraordinary constellation of men and women whose lives hinge, in some way, on Dr. Tulp's anatomy lesson. There is Aris the Kid, the condemned coat thief whose body is to be used for the dissection; Flora, his pregnant lover; Jan Fetchet, the curio dealer who acquires corpses for the doctor's work; the great René Descartes, who will attend the dissection in his quest to understand where the human soul resides; and the Dutch master himself, who feels a shade uneasy about this assignment.

As the story builds to its dramatic conclusion, circumstances conspire to produce a famous painting-and an immortal painter. Vividly rendered, masterfully written, The Anatomy Lesson is a story of mind and body, death and love-and redemptive power of art.

Aus dem Klappentext

Set in one day in 1632, The Anatomy Lesson is a stunning portrayal of Golden Age Amsterdam and a brilliantly imagined back-story to Rembrandt's first great work of art. Told from several points of view, ranging from a curio dealer who collects bodies for the city's chief anatomist to philosopher Rene Descartes, the novel opens on the morning of the medical dissection that is to be recorded by the twenty-six-year-old artist from Leiden who has yet to attach his famous signature to a painting.

As the story builds to its dramatic and inevitable conclusion, the events that transpire throughout the day sway Rembrandt to make fundamental changes to his initial composition. These changes will remain mysteries for centuries until a young art historian closely examines the painting in the twenty-first century, and makes surprising discoveries about the painter, his process, and his genius for capturing enduring truths about human nature in a single moment.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I
Hanging Day

THE BODY

At the first toll of the Westerkerk bell Adriaen Adriaenszoon bolts awake in a dank stone jail inside Amsterdam’s town hall. He is shivering and sweating at the same time. Shivering because winter gnaws through his meager leather jerkin, sweating because of the nightmare out of which he’s just awakened.

What he remembers is no more than an assemblage of symbols—­a dog, a wall made of doors, an old woman with a pail full of sand—­but fear is pounding through him insistently, demanding he return to sleep to see out the dream. There is the promise of solace through one of those doors, and a bed to lie on, something tells him. But his eyes will not close again. His other senses are already registering the day.

Horse’s hooves tromp in the puddles somewhere nearby. There’s a whinny and the sound of clacking steel on cobblestones. The street, which he can see only through the tiny window, is glistening from last night’s downpour. The air smells of mineral soil, sweat, and piss.

He crosses himself before remembering where he is, then glances around nervously in hopes that no guards have seen this. He presses his callused palm through his coarse hair and slumps against the cold wall. There’s only his cell mate, Joep van de Gheyn, the fishmonger killer, still asleep on the plank against his own wall. Aris wipes his sweat from his brow with his left hand, then rubs the stump over its bloody bandages, stifling the throbbing of the limb, which pulses with every heartbeat. “That’s all right now. Easy there,” he says, massaging the limb.

Hearing the bells ringing out the final chimes of the morning hour, he slaps himself to full wakefulness. This is his last day living. Each time the bells ring he’s one step closer to the gallows.

#

Outside, there’s a festive feeling in the frigid air. Damp and cold as it is, with clouds that hang so low they form a ceiling over the city’s tile rooftops, there’s still a raw excitement that pulses like a current through Amsterdam’s quiet canals and byways. Some would call it bloodlust.

The streets echo with silence, hollow and expectant, like an empty tankard waiting to be filled. As dawn starts to creep across the water and the wharves from the swampy eastern marshlands, workers from the docks arrive with wood planks to build the hangman’s scaffold. They drop the boards like pieces of a coffin on the square and the hammering begins. Nearby, vendors are setting up their stalls to sell delftware, wool mittens, or fresh-­baked bread to all who’ll come to gawp.

Tacked to the town hall door is the justice day schedule:

• R. Pijnaker, age fifteen, will receive a birching for willfully stealing from a tavern keeper’s till.

• Brothel madam S. Zeedijk shall be beaten upon her neck with a rolling pin for general lewdness, moral corruption, and running a house of debauchery.

• Three burglary conspirators, R. Tolbeit, A. Schellekamp, and F. Knipsheer, to be flogged and branded with the Amsterdam A on their chests before being banished from the city for their brazen attempt to break into a diamond cutter’s shop.

• A confined convict H. Peeters shall be whipped and marked with burning spears for his violation of confinement and other evil acts before his lifelong imprisonment is renewed.

• German convict E. Eisenstein caught smoking in the rasp house and, when scolded, cursed and spit at his jailors, shall have an ear sliced off. He will return to the rasp house to work the twelve-­blade saws cutting brazilwood for the dye works until his hands are as good as his ears.

• The hanging of J. v. d. Gheyn, the notorious murderer of good fishmonger Joris van Dungeon.

• The hanging of A. Adriaensz, alias Aris Kindt, evildoer and recalcitrant thief.

Adriaen Adriaensz, Adriaen, son of Adriaen of Leiden, alias Aris Kindt, Hans Kindt, or Arend Kint: he’s used different names in different towns where he was arrested, then banished, then arrested again. Arend was his father’s nickname for him, meaning “eagle.” These days he goes by Aris, which means nothing. It was others who tacked on “Kindt” or “The Kid” years ago, on account of his small stature and since he was still lithe and smooth-­skinned when he committed his first crimes.

#

Aris draws his jerkin tighter, clinging to it with his one hand making a fist over his heart. His nightmare has already fragmented into shapes—­the terrible slimness of a starving dog’s back, a room of doors leading onto still other doors, his own hands painted gold, clutching a goose feather pillow. A goose feather pillow.

Beside him, snoring, is Joep van de Gheyn, the fishmonger killer. By profession he is a tailor—­a fact that Aris finds secretly ironic, since he has spent much of his own adult life stealing fine coats from tailors’ shops. Still asleep like a babe in his mother’s arms, the tailor has his hands pressed together in prayer under his pulpy jowls, his left foot kicking an invisible attacker.

Idiot, thinks Aris.

Still sitting, he extends his foot out toward his cell mate and nudges Joep in the ribs, not gently. “Sleep when you’re dead,” he says.

The cell mate’s eyes open, and without knowing that he’s just been victim of a minor assault, he comes coughing out of sleep. His hacking continues until he sits up straight, only to emit two consecutive sneezes. He pulls a dirty rag out of his pocket and blows his nose profusely.

“Well, then,” he says, blinking his eyes to daylight.

The two convicts sit in their small cell, neither one fully awake. In the idle haze of this first hour of the last day of his own life, Aris thinks: A pillow? Has he ever laid his head on a goose feather pillow?

Flora, comes the answer. When she’d mended him those months after he’d got that beating in the tavern. Flora. There she was, her proud, sturdy shoulders, the catlike curve of her neck, that com­forting broad backside. She had cradled his bruised head and placed a pillow underneath, hadn’t she?

Flora. Would Flora be out there?


THE HANDS

The tolling of the Westerkerk bell can be heard more distinctly at the stately canal-­side mansion belonging to Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, who is pacing across the checkered marble floor of his sitting room. He is preparing himself to recite the speech he intends to give tonight, his wife, Margaretha, as his test audience. She is propped up in a high-­backed wooden chair in front of him, with an enormous swath of damask silk she’s embroidering in her lap, her hands motionless, waiting.

How lovely to have the new church so close by their home, she thinks, though she doesn’t always love the half-hour bell. What she does love is when the organist plays something special at the hour, like her favorite, Sweelinck. She would like to go and see that carillon some afternoon soon if Nicolaes could be persuaded to join her. The churchwarden from the Westerkerk has invited them personally, because of her husband’s position, of course, but he hasn’t yet accepted. Of late, he has been so preoccupied with politicking that he has no time for any leisure activities. Tomorrow will be election day at last, and tonight he has the opportunity to convince the city’s current burghermasters and aldermen that he is sufficiently learned and stoical to be elevated beyond a mere magistrate.

She hopes her husband will accept the warden’s offer. It is a rare thing that such a grand church should be erected so close to their...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804169233
ISBN 13 
9780804169233
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
SC
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/

CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41
Madrid
Madrid
Spanien