Journal Entry 1 by catsalive from Rooty Hill, New South Wales Australia on Sunday, November 27, 2011

Amazon.co.uk Review
Set on the bleak and windy island of Houat near the coast of Brittany, The Portrait describes the retreat into isolation of the painter Henry MacAlpine, who has performed a Gauguin-like cutting off of his previous life, leaving a successful career in London (not to mention rich patrons and enthusiastic gallery owners) behind him for a more spartan existence in this unvisited spot. Several years pass, and the reclusive MacAlpine is called upon by the first person he has seen from his old life in four years. This is the art critic William Nasmyth, whose approbation (or otherwise) can make or destroy an artist's career. He has come, he says, to sit for a portrait. What follows is a remarkable battle of wills between two very driven individuals; a psychological duel that has echoes of the mordant writing in the early plays of Harold Pinter. The other analogy that springs to mind for Pears’ compelling and disturbing novel is the Ingmar Bergman film Persona, similarly set on a remote island, which also treats of a personality shift between two strong-willed individuals. During the course of the sitting, the real subject of the novel becomes clear through the conversation of the two men: this is a scarifying narrative of thwarted desire, cruelty, suicide and even murder. This spare and economical novel exerts a grip from the first paragraph, and its two main protagonists are drawn with assiduously observed detail. 

Journal Entry 2 by catsalive at Crown Hotel/Upstairs Library Bar in Sydney, New South Wales Australia on Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Released 5 mos ago (12/13/2011 UTC) at Crown Hotel/Upstairs Library Bar in Sydney, New South Wales Australia

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

At meetup. 

Journal Entry 3 by tqd at Sydney, New South Wales Australia on Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Thanks Cats! I've previously read "An Instance of the Fingerpost" by Iain Pears, and really liked it. Hoping for the same from this, and I'm also heartened that it's significantly thinner than "Fingerpost". :)

Onto toppling Mt TBR it goes...