THE UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD : MEETINGS WITH THE DUTCH MASTERS

Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town Benjamin Moser found himself visitingcasually at first and then more and more obsessivelythe country''s great museums.Beyond the sainted Rembrandtwho harbored a startling darknessand the mysterious Vermeer whose true subject it turned out was lurking in plain sight Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp.Year after year as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they too were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art anywayand what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist and what does it mean to fail?The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions and to turn them on their heads: to look and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we''ve never seen them before. And it''s a highly personal coming-of-age-story twenty years in the making: a revealing self-portrait by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.