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| The Tattoo Artist: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Jill Ciment
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
Buy New: $0.30
You Save: $22.70 (99%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 948058
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 0375423257
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375423253
ASIN: 0375423257
Publication Date: August 23, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Jill Ciment’s writing has been called “luminous . . . sad, affecting” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) and “rich in observation and insight” (Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times).
Now in her new novel, her third, Jill Ciment turns her eye to a painter’s world in the early years of the twentieth century and tells the story of an American woman, an acclaimed artist who’s been stranded on an island for thirty years.
The novel opens in New York in the 1970s. Sara Ehrenreich has returned to New York to much fanfare—Life magazine has arranged for her return and is doing a big feature on her. Sara had been living on a remote speck in the South Pacific for three decades, and she has returned to the city of her childhood and early adulthood, a city made totally different by thirty years of technological and social change.
As Sara experiences all of the sensations of entering a new world, the novel flashes back to tell the story of her life, of herself at eighteen, a Lower East Side shopgirl meeting the man who changes the course of her life—Philip Ehrenreich, a banker’s son and revolutionary, an avant-garde artist who
hasn’t made art in years.
Philip introduces Sara to everything from Dada to Marx, from free love to automatic drawing, from trayf to absinthe. Philip sees her art as his chance to create by proxy. They fall in love, marry, and form a collaboration, and by the late 1920s, she takes her place among a small group of famous American Modernists.
As the Depression hits and his family money and her corps of collectors vanish, Philip and Sara are forced to embrace the proletarian life that he had romanticized and that she had fled. In desperation, they sell what is left of his prized collection of Oceanic masks, and their lives are forever altered when one of Philip’s patrons hires him to collect masks in the South Seas.
Sara and Philip book passage on a Japanese ship that drops them off on Ta’un’uu, an island famous both for its masks and its full-body tattooing. The ship that was to pick them up never returns, bewilderment turns into panic, then resignation, and, finally, to a peace neither husband nor wife has known before. When the Second World War breaks out months later and Philip and half the men of the island are killed by Japanese soldiers, Sara turns to her painting for salvation. She learns the art of tattooing and begins the painting that will be her masterpiece—the tattooing of her own body.
A beautifully written novel, powerful in its portrayal of the world it creates and the ideas it is taken up with—ideas of immortality through art, and of the here-and-now-ness of life and experience.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Perfect for Book Groups: moving and thought-provoking September 12, 2005
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
Jill Ciment's new novel "The Tattoo Artist" is deceptively slender. Although it is only 207 pages long, it is stuffed with events, history, fascinating characters and important ideas. For these reasons, book groups will have a great time talking about this novel, especially the ending.
As someone who reads novels almost exclusively and who has read almost all of Ciment's work, I think she makes a leap with this book that is similar to the one made by novelist Andrea Barrett in her marvelous book "Ship Fever," which won the National Book Award. Ciment has pushed herself to a whole new level as a writer here. As usual, her prose is spare and taut, and that works very effectively in the service of her tale about a "primitive" society. I couldn't put this book down, and I can't stop thinking about it.
Like it was written on me with a needle January 27, 2006
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
It's been several months since I read this book, and I still can't forget it. One of my favorite books of last year, and all time. This not a typical novel written in the typical authorial voice generated by writer workshops and popular weekly magazines. This story about art, love, and tattoos explores the mysteries inherent in each, without falling into pat themes or regurgitated meaning. Not a retelling of myth, it works on a mythological level and I was transformed by it, as if I had not just read about tattoos but gotten one. And in a way I have, that's how strongly I feel about this book, it's not just something I read, it's something I experienced.
Mesmerizing novel July 6, 2006
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Exquisite writing that reminded me of Fugitive Pieces. I wish I could have read it in one sitting because it is consuming and transporting. As other reviewers mentioned, Ciment presents a unique vision in this novel. Not so much an exploration of the themes of art, home, cultural dislocation, but a dream of them. Hard to imagine being unmoved.
Bravo! March 26, 2006
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
I have never read any of Jill Ciment's other books, but I plan to now.
I can vividly picture Sara and Phillip's tattoo's in my mind's eye. I can imagine the island they lived on and the people Sara lived amoungst.
I was more entralled by Sara's story once her and Phillip got to their destination, though her descriptions of her "union girl" and starving artist days were wonderful too.
 Images flew to my mind April 11, 2006
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
What is home? What is culture? How adaptable are we - at what point can we no longer adapt? What is beauty and what is art - imagine a beach full of living drawings, standing side by side in welcome.
I love how the cover of this book is sparse as opposed to the story which filled my mind with amazing images - images that moved and a still life of moments to be remembered,pain, sorrow, joy and tenderness.
As other reviewers have mentioned, this is a book that will stay with the reader for a long time.
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