You might also like

Availability alert

More about Bold Ventures

• Book details
• Synopsis
• Trending among others

You get 52 loyalty points

Book synopsis

A spellbinding new talent explores the dark side of creativity through the stories of thirteen tragic architects'What a sensible, intelligent and beautiful book' Stefan Hertmans, author of War and TurpentineIn thirteen chapters, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects - architects who either killed themselves or are rumoured to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire built in seventeenth-century France to a theatre that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC., and an eerily sinking swimming pool in her hometown of Turnhout. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Charles Darwin to art history, stories from her own life and popular culture, patterns gradually come into focus, as Van den Broeck asks: what is that strange life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? Threaded through each story, and in prose of great essayistic subtlety, Van den Broeck meditates on the question of suicide - what Albert Camus called the 'one truly serious philosophical problem' - in relation to creativity and public disgrace.The result is a profoundly idiosyncratic book, breaking new ground in literary non-fiction, as well as providing solace and consolation - and a note of caution - to anyone who has ever risked their hand at a creative act.

Book details

• Full title: Bold Ventures
• Subtitle: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy
• Author: Charlotte Van den Broeck
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardback
• Number of pages: 304
• EAN: 9781784743987
• ISBN: 1784743984
• ID: 38463482
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing
• Weight: 416 g
• Dimensions: 145 × 223 × 33 mm
• Date of publishing: 05. May 2022

---

---

---