One Day, in the South Seas

Running parallel to Gauguin’s road to paradise lost is the tale of another incredible character — of his grandmother, the Peruvian-French revolutionary Flora Tristan, a trade unionist who dreamt of a brave new world where workers would have rights, women wouldn’t be shackled to marriage and slaves would be free.

Though they never met, there is a bizarre similarity in the lives of grandmother and grandson — not least in the way they drove themselves to death: Flora at 41, Gauguin at 55. Both spurned their bourgeois existence to find true meaning in their lives. At great cost. Especially Gauguin, who indulged in sexual excesses with, among others, 14-year-olds, was stricken by syphilis and spent the last few months of his life, blind and dazed. His grandmother would stray only once — for her lady love Olympia; he would “be struck by lightning” seeing Edouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’ and realise that art was his calling.

But despite the rich cast of characters — Gauguin is surrounded by the likes of Van Gogh, Manet, Pissaro, while his grandmother is once visited by Karl Marx, no less — the tale enthralls only in parts. The grandmother’s story starts to sound familiar — Madame Tristan arrives in a town, is flayed by some, welcomed by others as she urges them to read her book, The Workers’ Union. Their lives are dramatic, but not Llosa’s narrative, which reads like a biography. Though he tries to embellish it by switching to the second person from the third, by getting into the minds of the two chief characters: “With regard to what really mattered — beauty and art — your life story was already at an end.” It doesn’t quite work.

What definitely works is the description of Gauguin’s paintings and their creation. You will feel like revisiting his oeuvre again. As fact blurs into fiction, these lines about ‘The Vision after the Sermon’ (where a group of peasant woman witness Jacob grappling with an angel) stay with you: ‘‘The true miracle of the painting wasn’t the apparition of biblical characters in real life…. It was the insolent colours… the vermillion of the earth… the ultramarine blue of the angel…. The miracle was that you had managed to vanquish prosaic realism by creating a new reality on the canvas, where the objective and the subjective, the real and the supernatural, were mingled, indivisible. Well done, Paul! Your first masterpiece!”