An aesthetic and existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter
In Maylis de Kerangal’s A World Within Reach, we are introduced to the burgeoning young artist Paula Karst, who is enrolled at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels. Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she’s painting—replicating a wood’s essence or a marble’s wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art.
With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula’s apprenticeship, punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand finale: at a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the world’s most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human cultural expression.
An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, A World Within Reach is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.
Release date:
April 20, 2021
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
240
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Now let’s talk a little about the rue du Métal. Let us see Paula arriving in front of Number 30 bis that September day in 2007, stepping back onto the sidewalk to cast her eyes up and take in the façade—this is an important moment. What stands there, in this street in Brussels at the edge of the quartier Saint-Gilles (just a street, an insignificant street, a street mended like an old woolen sock), is a fairy-tale house: crimson, venerable, at once fantastical and folded away. And already, thinks Paula, whose cervical vertebrae hurt from holding her head so far back, already it’s a house of painting, a house whose façade seems to have been lifted from a canvas by a Dutch master: bourgeois brick, rows of gables, rich metal hinges at the windows, a monumental door, elaborate metalwork, and wisteria that entwines around the building like a jeweled belt. Then, exactly as though she were stepping into a fairy tale, Paula pulls the handle and the bell emits a cracked ring, the door opens, and she steps inside the Institut de Peinture; she disappears into the decor.
* * *
Paula is twenty, has a maroon Adidas bag slung over her shoulder, a sketch pad under her arm, and sunglasses on her face behind which she hides her strabismus, so that the lobby she’s walking through now becomes darker and darker through her lenses, dark but fabulous, thick, unplaceable. Scents of temples and construction sites. The air, teeming with suspended particles of dust, takes on the thickness of fog in places, the heaviness of incense, and the smallest movement, the lightest breath, creates thousands of microscopic whirlwinds. She makes out a door on the left, a stairwell, and the opening of a hallway at the far end on the right. She begins to wait.
She puts down her things and lets her eyes trail over the room, across the floor, the ceiling, and the walls. She wonders where she’s landed: on every side, and becoming more and more clear as the seconds pass and her eyes adjust to the dimness, the walls show a sampling of large marble facing and wood panelling, fluted columns, capitals with acanthus leaves, and a window open to the branch of a cherry tree in flower, a chickadee, a delicate sky. Suddenly she steps over her bag and walks toward the marble slabs—Breche Violet, she will later learn—placing her hand flat against the surface. But instead of the cold touch of stone, it’s the texture of paint she feels. She leans in close: it really is a picture. Amazed, she turns to the woodwork and repeats the motions, stepping back and then leaning in closer, touching it, as though she were playing at making the initial illusion disappear and then reappear, moving along the wall, growing more and more stirred up as she passes the stone columns, the sculpted arches, the capitals and the moldings, the stucco; she reaches the window, ready to lean out, certain that another world stands right there, just past the casement, within reach—and at every point her fumbling only reveals more painting. Even so, she stops once she’s in front of the chickadee paused on its branch, reaches her arm out to the rosy dawn, opens her hand to slide her fingers between the bird’s feathers, and tilts an ear to the foliage.
* * *
The appointment time, which she checks on her phone, suddenly seems as cryptic as the secret code of a safe—four impenetrable, solitary numbers, disconnected from earthly temporality. A light vertigo comes over Paula as she stares at them, her head spins, inside and outside get mixed up, she doesn’t know anymore how to catch hold of the present. But at the appointed time, the door swings open silently and Paula steps over the threshold of a huge room bathed in stained-glass light.
A woman is there, behind a desk. Paula doesn’t immediately distinguish her from the surroundings, she seems to be so much a part of them, to belong to them, fitted into space like the last piece of a puzzle. She’s bent over a notebook, turning the pages with a slow hand, and she lifts her head to rest her gaze on Paula with the sureness of a trapeze artist landing on a narrow platform. We can see her clearly now, we receive full-on this face, neutral as a mask, and this poise—nothing strains, nothing wobbles. Economy and rigor emanate from this body, and Paula quickly feels ungainly, slovenly. The woman’s blouse seems sculpted to her body, like a decorative panel, a breastplate, and her turtleneck, at once setting and pedestal, exhibits her head like an Elizabethan ruff, emphasizing the paleness of the skin, the curve of the jaw, the strong chin. She may be only a meter away from Paula, but her voice seems to arrive from far away, from within the walls, and carries with it an echo when she says, without preamble: Miss Karst, becoming a decorative painter requires learning depth of observation and a mastery of the stroke; in other words, developing one’s eye (at this moment Paula remembers that she is still wearing her sunglasses)—and hand—the woman opens a palm, marking her words. Silence. The air is dry, metallic, frenetic, as though the room had been rubbed with chiffon and now electrostatic forces fill it to the brim. Paula is sitting still on her chair, back straight, neck stiff. Maybe it’s over already, she thinks, maybe it’s all been said, nothing more to add, the eye and the hand, there you go, that’s it, I understand, I’ll get up and go. But the woman continues in her deep voice—a voice of supple bronze that seems to be forming in her thorax and not in her throat—trompe-l’œil is the meeting of a painting and a gaze, conceived for a particular point of view, and defined by the effect it is supposed to produce. Students at the Institut have access to archival documents and samples taken from nature for their work, but the most important parts of the training are the in-studio demonstrations, the benefit of learning by example. Her words are so perfectly strung, slow, weighted, each sentence imbued with a strike so clear, each intonation so serene, that Paula grows agitated, as though the scene were surreal, as though she had stepped onto a proscenium to take the place waiting for her, to take on her role. The voice again: we teach traditional painting techniques, oil painting, watercolor, and our method consists—at this point the woman slows down, suspends her sentence, takes it up again after a moment, abrupt—our method consists of an intensive practical training. Attendance is mandatory, absence will result in being thrown out of the Institut and each project must be handed in on time. A lock of black hair, escaped from a quick chignon, disrupts her face now: the Institut’s reputation is based upon the painting of woods and marbles. We delve into the very matter of nature, exploring its form in order to grasp its structure. Forests, undergrowth, soil, rifts, chasms—it entails patient work of appropriation (a dumbstruck Paula concentrates on the movement of the hands that twist and turn in the air—she holds to them, because everything else is going over her head). Any questions? The desk that separates them is a jumble of papers where the Institut’s administration stretches out in piles beneath a dusting of iron. Between the crumpled invoices and the boxes of invitations, Paula glimpses the sketch of an impressive diving suit on the back of a kraft envelope and stutters an inaudible syllable, preparing to open her drawing folder, when the woman stops her: close it—an eloquent gesture with the flat of her hand. Pink and gold rays filtering in through the windows carve translucent diagonal lines through the space, creating aureoles on the oak wainscotting—chef-d’œuvre of trompe-l’œil—and on the faded carpet, on Paula’s hair, which changes color, and on her face, where astonishment now creates a whole other light.
The current program—the voice has risen a notch, the eyes shine, aniline black, lacquered—lasts from October to March, the six months considered off-peak for house painters. Starting from the first week, we paint wood. Oaks, which are by no means the easiest, and also elm, for example, or ash, Macassar ebony, Congo mahogany, the crown of the poplar, the pear tree, the walnut—whatever species I judge important to know how to paint. In mid-November, we start on marble. Carrara, Grand Antique, Labrador, Henriette Blonde, Fleur de Pêcher, Red Griotte—and here again I will decide in due course—the enumeration of these names is more than just a table of contents, and the woman takes a visible pleasure in pronouncing them; her voice undulates through the room like a shamanic chant, and Paula understands nothing but the rhythm. In mid-January, it’s the semi-precious stones, lapis and citrine, topaz and jade, amethyst, clear quartz; in February, drawing: perspective first, then moldings and friezes, ceilings and patinas. In March, we do gilding and silver plating, stenciling and commercial lettering, and then, finally, the diploma. All this is fairly dense, fairly substantial. Still speaking, she steps out from behind the desk and moves slowly toward the door, places a hand on the handle, indicating to Paula, who is thrown off guard, that the interview has come to an end, all while holding out a list of the required materials in the other hand. Don’t forget to get a smock. Then, just when she’s turning back to her desk, she changes her mind and whips around: one last thing—in the beginning, turpentine can cause dizziness and nausea, all the more so because we work standing up. You’ll see, it’s all quite physical.
* * *
Back on the sidewalk, the pale September sky blinds Paula and she squints and stumbles, just like every time she comes out of a movie theater and finds herself back in real life. The scene that just took place—the lobby, the wait, the interview—extends and changes shape as she walks down the rue du Métal, enfolded in the echo of the woods, marbles, and gemstones, the marvelous names. There is more to this world, she muses, more ways of seeing it and speaking of it. Her step lengthens and the sidewalk beneath her feet seems to speed up and carry her along like a moving walkway in an airport terminal. She heads toward the trees with leaves turning brown, there, on the square, and at the same moment, a flight of crows rushes into formation at the top of the street behind her. Paula pivots, alerted by the sound. The birds plunge in her direction—perhaps a dozen of them and some with a wingspan of nearly a meter, the sound of their croaking reverberating down the street, a wild, unreadable flight, only a haruspex trained in the best temples of antiquity could see in it a manifestation of the gods, could decipher in it an omen. The flock comes nearer, swells, fans out from one façade to the next along the street which has become a massive aviary, and Paula dives instinctually between two cars, crouches down with outstretched fingers covering the top of her head, sure that the crows are going to peck her with their beaks, their claws, shining like the skin of an orange, and hooked, hard, hard as wood. She feels them pass above her head, feels the disturbance in the air, waits, and then slowly stands again. Something hits her on the back of the head just then, a little tap, a flick, and she sways forward, catches herself against the side of a car, and looks around—but there’s nothing there, it’s over, the birds have disappeared, silence has returned and the sky is empty over the rue du Métal.
* * *
Paula catches her breath and starts walking again. Around her, the cobbled street, the rooftops, the low buildings—all of it is shiny, sharp, revived, as though the energies buried in the stones had been whipped up. She blinks and touches the spot on her head where she was hit, says to herself, I’m alive, and starts to run, cutting across the square on the diagonal, gaining the opening to the metro nestled against the side of the Église Saint-Gilles, reaches the Bruxelles-Midi station, an aisle seat in a jam-packed Thalys hurtling toward Paris, the glass roof of the Gare du Nord beaten by a storm, the stairwell in the building on rue de Paradis, the old Roux-Combaluzier elevator, the family apartment that she rushes straight through, her room where she tosses her bag and sketch pad on the floor and then heads back along the hallway toward the kitchen, where her parents, Guillaume and Marie Karst, are making dinner together as they do every evening—beets with vinaigrette, shepherd’s pie, crème caramel—and it seems that something has taken shape within her, an intuition has firmed up, because we hear her announcing: okay, it’s decided, I’m going to the Institut on the rue du Métal to study decorative painting. Silence. Her parents don’t put down their graters, their knives, their peelers, but slow a little and then grow tense: decorative painting? Well then. They both turn toward their daughter at the same time, flustered: so you’re finished being an artist?
Paula looks out the window. She’s been dawdling for two years, she knows it. There was the dullness of the bac, then enrollment in legal studies in Nanterre, on the pretext that it could lead to anything and she would have time to find her way, a wasted year. She was quickly out of her depth in a difficult, dense curriculum, at once meticulous and technical, horrified by the cramming—at the end of the winter, she discovered an artistic sensibility and switched streams the next September to take a foundation course for art school. The Karst parents had been silent witnesses to this movement, hoping for the solid ground of a vocation, but their daughter had turned out once again to be indecisive and something of a follower, choosing the film option so she could stay close to the boy she was in love with, beginning several documentaries only to abandon them (including a rather promising one about a grain of sand filmed through a microscope); and at the end of the year, the art school entry exams (it had to be admitted) had yielded nothing.
The parents begin to pace between the stove and the sink. Decorative painting. It sounds less magical and more arts and crafts—you want to do decor? Relieved at the thought that their daughter is enrolling in a solid training course, through which she will be more likely to find work, they are ready to believe in her again. But disappointed, too, without really understanding why. Surprised by Paula’s aplomb as she sprawls on a wicker chair, bites into a crust of bread, and declares: I’m going to learn the techniques of trompe-l’œil, the art of illusion.
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