Book #110: Painter of Silence

Book #110: Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding

August 21, 2014

Well, I am back in the full swing of things at work. School starts next Tuesday, and this week I’ve attended meetings (oh so many meetings, and more to come tomorrow), and have had time to set my classroom back up and continue outlining curriculum. Some of the language arts specific meetings that I’ve attended have given me some insight into how I might approach the teaching of certain novels, at least, and I’ll continue to read potential picks as part of this “challenge” as well as my planning.

Okay, so I must say that I hate the title of this book. Mainly because the character that it refers to, Augustin, is not a painter at all, though he is an artist of sorts. Augustin was born deaf in the 1920s in Romania. His mother was an unmarried cook at a large manor house, and he grows up alongside the wealthy children. Safta, the oldest child and only daughter of the prominent family, is his friend in earlier childhood, though they grow apart in later years. I do wonder if they would have grown apart if he weren’t deaf; as children, she seemed to find a way around that in communicating with him. There is some half-hearted attempts, by the children’s governess, to teach Augustin to sigh and to speak, but she thinks its impossible and so he never really learns to communicate. Except through his drawings…although only Safta is able to derive much meaning from them, and that’s only years later, after the war and the Communist takeover of Romania, when they’re reunited.

I found the setting to be very interesting, although I did have to look up some supplementary information in order to put the whole thing into context. Romania waffled during World War II, the same way that Italy did in World War I, I guess. First they were neutral; then a coup brought in a new government that supported the Nazis; then another coup by the king brought them on the Allies’ side; then yet another coup after the war brought it under the power of the USSR. The story mainly takes place after the war, though the reader does see Safta and Augustin’s memories of before and during the war itself.

I thought Augustin was a fascinating character with his artwork. While he drew rooms and landscapes of places that he’d been and remembered or was at right at that moment with realistic skill, he would sometimes include fantastic elements. And it was years before he drew a realistic-looking person. Instead, he created paper cutouts of people; the way it was described, they kind of sounded like Terrance and Philip fromSouth Park, with the rectangular bodies and whatnot. I thought maybe this was because of Augustin’s disconnect from other people, being deaf in a time and place where there were not many resources for deaf people. The people closest to him, even Safta, just assumed that there was so much that he couldn’t possibly understand due to his disability. But as the book continues on, you see that this is not the case.

I personally did not feel totally connected with the characters. I found myself always wanting to know more, see more, especially with Safta. I realize that from Augustin’s perspective, some things about his experiences during and after the war are going to be a bit unclear, because of his being deaf, of course. But I still don’t totally get how Safta’s miscarriage led to her wanting to be a nurse, and to stay in Romania when she had the chance to escape to England with her family. She expresses disgust, when she first begins attending college and attending social gatherings in Bucharest, at the decadence and vapidity of people in her social class. But what triggered this, really? The man she loved, Andrei, was just as privileged as she was. Had he been a Communist or a sympathizer or something, and had passed his beliefs on to her, then I might get it. I almost feel like Safta is pro-Communist, that she feels proud of the little that she has now…almost. And yet…I can’t be too sure, because I just don’t know this character.

How Augustin goes from a Communist work camp back to the manor is unclear. The book starts with him leaving his home village, with some information written down by the local priest, and traveling to find Safta. His reason for this is that he has to tell her, somehow, about Andrei’s death, though you don’t really figure this out until closer to the end of the book. He uses his drawings to communicate these ideas with her; he can’t read or write, he can’t sign or speak, so that’s the only form of communication that he has. For the first time, it seems, his pictures have a clear meaning to them.

I liked the end of the book, and I found the details about Safta and Augustin’s lives to be very interesting…and I really wanted more of that. I always have an appreciation for books that put me in a time and place that I don’t know much about. Books about World War II are abundant, of course, but mainly you get the perspective of Holocaust victims. Which is a good thing, of course. I mean, it’s important to honor those experiences. But there was more going on during the war, and in this case, it seems that the Russians were causing more trouble for the characters in this book than the Nazis themselves; the words “Nazi,” “Holocaust,” and “Hitler” are never even referenced. I’ll admit that there’s much that I don’t know about the USSR, and I would really like to read more books set in that time and place.