'The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block. His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father’s death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. The police are investigating.
'None of it makes any sense. Martin sets off to Palermo in search of answers about his father’s activities, while Evie moves into Noah’s apartment, waiting to learn where her life might take her. Retracing their father’s steps in their own way, neither of his children can see the path ahead.
'Gail Jones’s mesmerising new novel tells a story about parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns that life makes. The Death of Noah Glass is about love and art, about grief and happiness, about memory and the mystery of time.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Writing Disability in Australia:
| Type of disability | Blindness, hearing impairment. |
| Type of character | Secondary. |
| Point of view | Third person. |
'I think it’s fair to say that each year the selected novels on the Miles Franklin shortlist manifest the zeitgeist, reflecting on some of the issues that are troubling society.' (Introduction)
'This is a novel of subtle shades and nuances, overflowing with references to literature, art and cinema published by text Publishing.'
'Gail Jones is an academic and novelist currently based in the Society and Writing Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She often depicts a world that stretches continents and references other cultural forms, from cinema, to music, to visual art. Jones has been the winner of the Colin Roderick Award and Nita Kibble Award, and was long-listed for the Orange, Man Booker, and Prix Femina Etranger. We caught up to speak about her new novel, The Death of Noah Glass, which was released by Text Publishing on April 2nd.'
Source: Magazine blurb.
'In Gail Jones’ 2018 novel about the life and death of Noah Glass, his ‘vocation’ as an art historian begins when, as a small boy growing up in the remote north of Western Australia, he opens a book about the Great Art Museums of the World. It translates him miraculously from the Mars-orange landscape of the outback to the rarefied, Prussian-blue world of Piero della Francesca: it was a ‘window to elsewhere’ and ‘other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages’. The significance of this moment is confirmed twenty years later when, as a student in London, Noah discovers Piero’s The Nativity (c. 1470-5) hanging in the National Gallery: ‘Noah walked around the National Gallery, taking meticulous notes, registering line by line his self-improvement’. These are instances of what Peter Wagner calls intermediality: the intertextual use of one medium, such as painting, in another medium, such as prose fiction.' (Introduction)
[Review] The Death of Noah Glass
Melbourne
:
Bad Producer Productions
,
2018
14402350
2018
single work
review
'The Death of Noah Glass addresses grief, loneliness, and the secrets that are so common within families and between generations. Noah Glass, the eponymous protagonist, did not really know his parents or his deceased wife. This is his story. It is also the story of his children, Martin and Evie, who attempt to find meaning (and perhaps themselves) after his death.'(Introduction)
'This is a novel of subtle shades and nuances, overflowing with references to literature, art and cinema published by text Publishing.'
'In all of Gail Jones’s writing, words bump up against images from art and cinema – visual keys to convey what narrative may not. Her working-class childhood in rural and remote Western Australia had offered little in the way of literature, but visually there was much to fire her imagination. She remembers the pearl-diving industry of coastal Broome, especially the mother shells that shone like moonlight.' (Introduction)
'Noah Glass is dead, his fully clothed body discovered floating face down in the swimming pool of his Sydney apartment block, early one morning. Born in Perth in 1946, father of two adult children, widower, Christian, art historian, and specialist in the painting of fifteenth-century artist Piero della Francesca, Noah has just returned from a trip to Palermo. There he celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday, experienced intimations of mortality, fell precipitately in love, and agreed, for the sake of the beloved, to commit a crime. Even before the funeral, the police are in touch with Noah’s son: a valuable work of art has been stolen and Noah is implicated in its disappearance.' (Introduction)
'Australian novelist Gail Jones is no great spinner of yarns or master of mood and atmosphere, but she does have a unique feeling for the fascinations of the fragmentary. Her books brim with literary allusions, historical anecdotes, references to scholarly oddities and intriguing quotations, and when all else fails she can always charm with the glitter of so many carefully arranged details and luminous curiosities.' (Introduction)
'In Gail Jones’ 2018 novel about the life and death of Noah Glass, his ‘vocation’ as an art historian begins when, as a small boy growing up in the remote north of Western Australia, he opens a book about the Great Art Museums of the World. It translates him miraculously from the Mars-orange landscape of the outback to the rarefied, Prussian-blue world of Piero della Francesca: it was a ‘window to elsewhere’ and ‘other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages’. The significance of this moment is confirmed twenty years later when, as a student in London, Noah discovers Piero’s The Nativity (c. 1470-5) hanging in the National Gallery: ‘Noah walked around the National Gallery, taking meticulous notes, registering line by line his self-improvement’. These are instances of what Peter Wagner calls intermediality: the intertextual use of one medium, such as painting, in another medium, such as prose fiction.' (Introduction)
'Gail Jones is an academic and novelist currently based in the Society and Writing Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She often depicts a world that stretches continents and references other cultural forms, from cinema, to music, to visual art. Jones has been the winner of the Colin Roderick Award and Nita Kibble Award, and was long-listed for the Orange, Man Booker, and Prix Femina Etranger. We caught up to speak about her new novel, The Death of Noah Glass, which was released by Text Publishing on April 2nd.'
Source: Magazine blurb.
