Title : A Youth in the Shadow of the Light - Jean-Marie Rouart - Book

Summary :

A youth marked by contradictions: this is the autobiographical novel of a poor young man in a rich family, allergic to painting and living amidst the paintings of Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Degas that form his daily framework. Unhappy and gloomy, wandering among the memories of these painters of light, cultivating a neurosis of failure in the face of artists rendered static by glory, he feels threatened by the dark wing of madness. This melancholy throws him into the arms of psychoanalysts who see him as prime prey. Failure in love, socially, academically, and the temptation of suicide, Rouart hides nothing of his painful secrets from us. It is through the figure of an early 19th-century painter, Léopold Robert, melancholic, suicidal, in love with a Princess Bonaparte who mocks him—in whom he has recognized his double—that the writer leads us on a quest for his origins. Questioning the mystery of a destiny that everything led to failure, he paints a fresco of the great family of Impressionism that he observes from the wings and from the studio. The author of this vagabond novel - we go from island to island, from Venice to Samos, then to Ibiza - seeks in the story of his adventures the lost keys to his love life and the path to the labyrinth: this unconscious that from his deprived youth where he almost sank brought him back to the light. That of painting, that of Impressionism.

• EAN: 9782070759309
• Used book
• Book in good condition
• The book matches the photo