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Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting-casually at first, and then more and more obsessively-the country's great museums.
Beyond the sainted Rembrandt-who harbored a startling darkness-and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp.
Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art, anyway-and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail?
“The Upside-Down World” is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we've never seen them before. And it's a highly personal coming-of-age-story, twenty years in the making: a revealing self-portrait by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.
Beyond the sainted Rembrandt-who harbored a startling darkness-and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp.
Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art, anyway-and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail?
“The Upside-Down World” is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we've never seen them before. And it's a highly personal coming-of-age-story, twenty years in the making: a revealing self-portrait by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.
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Reviews
Paul Boehmer's thoughtful, well-paced narration encourages close listening to this beautifully written personal memoir and guide to the seventeenth-century Dutch master painters. When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Benjamin Moser relocated to the Netherlands, he sought to understand his place in a foreign country by delving into the lives and work of Rembrandt, Fabritius, Lievens, Vermeer, ter Borc
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