Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels

Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels
Toby Ferris

Sure to be hailed alongside H is for Hawk and The Hare with Amber Eyes, an exceptional work that is at once an astonishing journey across countries and continents, an immersive examination of a great artist’s work, and a moving and intimate memoir. At the age of 42, his father not long dead and his young sons growing fast, Toby Ferris set off on a seemingly quixotic mission to track down each of the 42 surviving paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who, at the age of 42, had been approaching the end of his own short life. Over the next five years Ferris would travel to 22 galleries in 19 cities in 12 countries across 2 continents: Budapest to San Diego, Detroit to Naples, Berlin to Madrid, ticking off his Bruegels as he went. The results of his journeying are a revelation: Bruegel’s panels, their landscapes teeming with robust life, become a lens through which Ferris takes stock of the world, informing everything from mortality, fatherhood, and contemporary life, to the bombing of Rotterdam, the extinction of North American megafauna, and how to ward off bears in the forest. Short Life in a Strange World is a dazzlingly original hybrid of art criticism, philosophical reflection and poignant memoir, a book about one man’s obsession with Bruegel’s short life in a strange if familiar world, and the precisely-detailed yet cosmos-encompassing works in ink and oil which sprang from it. And it begins with the story of a boy who fell from the sky.

Short Life in a Strange World

Birth to Death in 42 Panels

Toby Ferris

Copyright (#ulink_64493b9d-c716-5c78-99ef-6d345cbc9594)

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Toby Ferris 2020

Toby Ferris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008340964

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008340971

Version: 2019-11-06

Dedication (#ulink_3e6fdcd4-6796-5e3e-a3f2-d59f0d637345)

For Simon, Frank and Sid,

and in memory of Robert Henry

Contents

Cover (#u6006781a-3cc3-5c85-9aa2-e4134af60a2b)

Title Page (#u8821265b-f5ef-52d2-a262-e9eb101ed8a2)

Copyright (#u773cc1be-61d4-516e-a9e9-7f9901e7a59b)

Dedication (#ucd4be190-0e90-53e7-9c15-0ff55db2e05e)

The Panels (#u63b267b9-2a56-56c0-8168-8e603de59acc)

I Flight (#u50ac154b-5fa1-512b-819a-9bffa3b9b109)

II Census (#u3fd5d81e-cf78-53d9-b37e-a542cc80bff7)

III Fire (#u6f77520a-9612-5195-b3d5-3d1e0d3a721e)

IV Massacre (#litres_trial_promo)

V Grey (#litres_trial_promo)

VI Beggar (#litres_trial_promo)

VII Cold (#litres_trial_promo)

VIII Bear (#litres_trial_promo)

IX Technique (#litres_trial_promo)

X Gallows (#litres_trial_promo)

XI Singularity (#litres_trial_promo)

XII Crowd (#litres_trial_promo)

XIII Home (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

List of illustrations (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

The Panels (#ulink_23a6cc99-d71a-5a16-8d36-faf6ceaa513f)

I Flight (#ulink_88786171-8c97-5297-9d6a-1db54635e6a3)

‘… the boy a frolic courage caught To fly at random …’

Arthur Golding, translating Ovid