Review Excerpt:

**A finalist for the 24th Annual Northern California Book Award**

Praise for The Painting

“Nina Schuyler is one of those writers who can make you skip dessert so you can get back to your book. She weaves a tale with consummate skill. She is a major talent.” -- Dick Cavett

“Lovely and haunting, Nina Schuyler's debut novel, The Painting traverses two distinct worlds -- along with the characters who resonate with each careful stroke of the brush.”
--Gail Tsukiyama, author of Samurai’s Garden and Women of the Silk

“Nina Schuyler writes with grace and assurance about Japan in the 1860s and Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. She understands the workings of love and desire as they translate across cultures and time frames, indeed worlds. It is rare to find such generosity and vision in a first novel. “The Painting” brilliantly transcends this category and should establish Nina Schuyler as one of the most gifted writers of her generation.”
--Maxine Chernoff, author, A Boy in Winter

Reviews for The Painting

San Francisco Chronicle: The Year’s Finest: Best Books of 2004
The Painting by Nina Schuyler (Algonquin Books; 299 pages; $23.95): According to the tenets of Buddhism, life is suffering, and suffering arises inexorably from desire, from the act of wanting. In Nina Schuyler's meditative first novel, "The Painting," the interplay between want and need not only creates the thematic backbone of the book but also drives the story itself -- the tale of the struggles of a young female painter living in Meiji-era Japan, and the life of the illegitimate daughter of a well-heeled Parisian during the Franco-Prussian War. Each of her characters is afflicted with his or her own particular form of suffering, and each, in turn, is likewise afflicted with the hope of bringing that suffering to an end.

MSNBC
Nina Schuyler makes a fearless debut with “The Painting” (Algonquin Books, $24). Not only does Schuyler take on characters in 1869 Japan, she creates a parallel story of characters in 1870 France. And what’s more, each of the separate stories is equally compelling.
The Japanese storyline tells of Hayashi, a potter and government official who’s been disfigured, and his wife Ayoshi, a painter who pines for her former lover. Meanwhile, in France, Jorgen is a Dane who was paid by a Frenchman to take his place in the Franco-Prussian war. Natalia is the woman who helps him recover from his injuries and who longs to be a soldier herself. The two stories are connected by one of Ayoshi’s paintings, which Jorgen stumbles upon, thinking it's one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen.
There’s a lot going on here and amazingly enough, Schuyler manages to hold it together. Her use of multiple viewpoints within each section can be a bit dizzying — every character gets a say within this novel — but it’s hard not to admire the chutzpah it takes to even attempt that kind of complex narrative. Though the characters from the Japan sections never interact with the characters from the France sections, the stories themselves do mesh together thematically. Ayoshi and Jorgen long for love and have secrets in their pasts, while Hayashi and Natalia both strive to be noble and yet question what it means to serve one’s country. A surprisingly good debut from a promising new writer.

AsianWeek
First and foremost: This is one of the best books I’ve read this year in spite of the historical improbability laid out at the novel’s end. Ayoshi, a woman artist in 1869 Japan, paints in order to remember her lost lover. She hides one of her paintings in a shipment of pottery her husband sends to France, where an ex-soldier unpacks the far-flung riches in a Paris on the verge of defeat during the Franco-Prussian War. So begins the tenuous relationship between two love stories, half a world apart. You won’t be able to put it down.

San Francisco magazine: “A Sensual Palette”
I hope that all the people who made The Confessions of Max Tivoli a local bestseller will look at Nina Schuyler’s first novel. What helped make Andrew Sean Greer’s book so popular (and aided our belief in a narrator who aged backward) was a loving evocation of San Francisco in a much earlier day. Schuyler, who teaches writing at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, goes Greer one better by writing parallel stories, each set in 1870—one in Japan just emerging from feudalism; the other in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.
There’s nothing dry or arcane about either tale. Schuyler revels in colors, scents, and sounds; her descriptions are as textured as the images Ayoshi, her sorrowing Japanese wife, paints of her lost love. (“Her mind skips across the blues, like a flat stone on water. A brush made from the tail of her father’s horse dips into a pool of bruise blue and prances across the white sheet of paper.”) In one excellent scene, Jorgen, a badly wounded soldier now laboring for a profiteer in gloomy mansion, is astounded to see a tree bearing all its branches, its leaves reflecting the gold and purple evening sky. Paris has been besieged for months, and most of its trees have been axed for firewood. He thinks of the painting beneath his bed, “te ouple standing underneath a magnificent old tree and the branches splintering the light. The leaves, a dark red-purple.” Ayoshi—whose husband is a potter, favored by the harsh new government because of his exports to the West—impulsively hid this painting by wrapping it around a ceramic bowl sent to France.
More than a plot devise, the painting, with its tender, vivid rendering of subtle details, slowly softens Jorgen’s bitterness and guilt, helps him care for the world again. Meanwhile, Ayoshi, her husband, and a young Buddhist monk contend with the violent forces hauling Japan into the modern age. The books wears its scholarship well: the carrier pigeons with their silk-tied messages, Japan’s flimsy wooden shops and teahouses, the starving Frenchwomen who fought in that ancient war are integral to the stories, not a weary researcher’s extraneous particulars. Beyond the well-paced unfolding of the plots—and it is impossible to predict how either will end—the novel immerses a reader in worlds far removed from our own, my favorite form of escapism.

Daily Yomiuri
…. So what we have here is a first novel ambitiously plotting two stories thousands of miles apart. The historical background gives color to the actions and preoccupations of the characters, trapped in events they cannot change, and affected by change they mostly do not understand. The descriptions of early Meiji era life give a human face to a period sometimes oversimplified in primers on early modern Japan. This, combined with Schuyler’s sharp attention to detail, makes The Painting an engrossing read.

Rocky Mountain News: Great debuts from 2004
In today's world, big names sell. So what becomes of first-time authors with stunning stories, but no marketable names to peddle? Often, their books quickly fade away, making barely a ripple in the publishing ocean. The losers, of course, are readers, who miss out on stories of unquestionable merit. The Painting By Nina Schuyler (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 320 pages, $23.95). • Plot in a nutshell: A young Japanese woman paints the memories of her lost lover and then wraps the painting around one of her husband's ceramic bowls bound for Europe. The painting is discovered by a young soldier-turned-clerk disabled in the 19th-century war between France and Prussia. The painting's glowing life and beauty completely transform his bleak existence. • Sample of prose: "He sets the painting on the bed and lights another lantern. His heart beats faster. There is the green of the hill and her lacquer black hair, her ivory complexion and the shading on her face. So much more vibrant than the last time he looked. A wonderful spring day, look at the yellow flowers all around them, it must have just rained, everything shiny and full color."
Author reminds me of: Kawabata Yasunari with her intriguing view of reality, ability to depict the almost insurmountable emotional distances between women and men and her use of nature to complement human actions and emotions.
Best reason to read: For Schuyler's stylistic versatility. The author's richly imagined Japanese sections resemble Japanese art with their delicate strokes and her darker rendering of the wounded soldier's story would do Dostoevsky proud.

Library Journal
Every so often you start a novel that you can't put down; Schuyler's debut is such a book. The book has everything--believable and interesting characters, fascinating social commentary, and a lively pace.

Booksense: “May We Also Recommend” list for October
These intertwining stories blend seamlessly and give the reader glimpses both of Paris as Prussia invades and of Japan during the Meiji Restoration. A great first novel about two women and one painting that changes men’s lives forever (and a great selection for book groups). – Chris Vietmeier, St. Helens Book Shop, St. Helens, OR

Booklist
Art is both seductress and salve in this iridescent first novel set in late-nineteenth-century Japan and France. Desperately unhappy in her arranged marriage, young, beautiful Ayoshi retreats to her studio, where she paints erotic watercolors of a former lover. The vibrant portraits are worlds away from the colorless life she shares with her husband, Hiyashi, a government official and potter who sells his wares overseas. Ayoshi secretly wraps one of her creations around a ceramic vase bound for Europe, where it is discovered by Jorgen, a Paris merchandise shop employee who lost his leg--and his idealism--fighting in the Franco-Prussian war. The radiant image gradually transforms the jaded young Dane, prompting him to pursue brave, blue-eyed Natalia, who is determined to become a soldier. Schuyler laces her lean, lyrical prose with nuanced images of nature: the morning's "faint peach glow," " a twig of cherry blossoms, its pale pink flowers, delicate, like a newborn." A cast of secondary characters, many with their own dark secrets, adds depth and dimension to this engrossing debut.

San Francisco Chronicle
According to the tenets of Buddhism, life is suffering, and suffering arises inexorably from desire, from the act of wanting. In Nina Schuyler's meditative first novel, "The Painting," the interplay between want and need not only creates the thematic backbone of the book but also drives the story itself. Each of her characters is afflicted with his or her own particular form of suffering, and each, in turn, is likewise afflicted with the hope of bringing that suffering to an end.
"The Painting" moves back and forth between two disparate story lines connected, somewhat flimsily, by a single painting. Although the painting fails to link the separate plots beyond a superficial connection, and the breadth of Schuyler's talent would seem capable of more, she does deliver two richly imagined worlds. What does bring the stories into alignment and makes them resonate with satisfying counterpoint are the struggles of the characters, their discontent within their respective, shattering worlds.
The story that opens the novel follows Ayoshi, a young painter dissatisfied with her arranged marriage. It takes place during the Meiji restoration when Japan, after centuries of closed borders, is enduring a forced Westernization at the hands of its ruling elite. The government has outlawed the practice of Zen Buddhism, favoring instead the "pure" Japanese religion of Shintoism, and its tactics in suppressing Buddhism are efficiently brutal. Ayoshi's husband, Hayashi, a potter, finds himself torn between the promising financial returns of the Western market and his deep appreciation of the Buddhist faith. Ayoshi, meanwhile, is lost to him, stuck in her memories of a former lover and a former life. She inhabits this past directly through her artwork, finding solace by hiding in what was once hers. It is her painting of her former lover that bridges the two stories.
The other story, set during the Franco-Prussian War, concerns Natalia, the illegitimate daughter of a well-heeled Parisian. Her brother, Pierre, is a businessman whose support of the war is directly attributable to its black market prices, and thus to the fattening of his wallet. Natalia helps a young Danish soldier named Jorgen, who has lost his leg defending France, find work in her brother's business.
Much of this story revolves around Jorgen's recovering from his war experience and his growing affection for Natalia, but Natalia's disgust with Pierre's greed and her innocent faith in the world's potential provide the more stirring conflict. The historical backdrop of both story lines is rooted in the violent degeneration of the traditional worlds in which both women live. This dismantling is mirrored in their personal lives as they struggle to make a space for themselves in an increasingly fraying social fabric. Schuyler seems equally comfortable in both backdrops, and her ability in imagining both Natalia and Ayoshi with such skill allows the turbulence of 19th century France and Japan to become more than a snapshot of political upheaval. Instead, we witness the women's inner worlds come undone.
To burden the book with the moniker of a "feminist novel" would be reductive. But the portrait the book paints of its two heroines is an empowering one. Both women live under the hard customs of patriarchal societies, and both find themselves unfulfilled within the strict confines of their respective worlds. Ayoshi is an artist more than she could ever be a wife, and Natalia refuses the hand of numerous suitors, choosing instead to join the war effort and fight for the freedom of France.
Thankfully, Schuyler is not interested in polemics. In fact, what makes her characters inspiring is the doubt that they carry about their decisions. They wrestle with their own refusals to be pigeonholed. They struggle most deeply with understanding what they actually want. Their bravery, in effect, arises not from courage so much as from dissatisfaction. They fight because they don't know what else to do.
"The Painting," which owes much of its beauty to its sentences, opens with a haiku by Basho, "Clouds come from time to time -- and bring to men a chance to rest from looking at the moon." It is a fitting epigraph, not simply because the book chooses the storm clouds of social unrest as its setting but also because its central characters refuse to relinquish hope despite the onslaught of history. Instead, they grapple with their ambivalence, believing that somehow and at some point, they'll find an answer.
Schuyler most likely agrees with the Zen monks that life is suffering, but she refuses to deprecate human desire.

San Francisco Chronicle: Our Editors Recommend:
The Painting by Nina Schuyler (Algonquin Books; 299 pages; $23.95): According to the tenets of Buddhism, life is suffering, and suffering arises inexorably from desire, from the act of wanting. In Nina Schuyler's meditative first novel, "The Painting," the interplay between want and need not only creates the thematic backbone of the book but also drives the story itself -- the tale of the struggles of a young female painter living in Meiji-era Japan, and the life of the illegitimate daughter of a well-heeled Parisian during the Franco-Prussian War. Each of her characters is afflicted with his or her own particular form of suffering, and each, in turn, is likewise afflicted with the hope of bringing that suffering to an end.

SF Weekly
Lost romance always sounds so much better in books. In real life it involves sleepless nights, embarrassing sniveling, and phone calls made while praying that the receiver doesn't have Caller ID. But in Nina Schuyler's transcendent novel The Painting, a young Japanese woman escapes from the pain of her loveless arranged marriage by painting a remembered scene from a past passion on mulberry paper, then disposing of it by wrapping her work around a pot that's en route to France. There the pot is unpacked at a Paris gift shop by the disconsolate and wounded Jorgen, whose life suddenly becomes inextricably entwined with that of the painter, Ayoshi, as well as that of Hayashi, her well-meaning and lonely husband, and Natalia, the woman who shows Jorgen how to echo the painting with a love of his own.

Palo Alto Weekly
The Painting by Nina Schuyler is a lyrically written novel set in 19th century Tokyo and Paris. In the story, a young Japanese woman in an arranged marriage secretly makes a painting of two lovers which she then sends to Paris, where it becomes the obsession of a wounded war veteran.
Historical Novels Review
This unusual novel succeeds because its characters come across as authentic and human. The worlds they live in are grim—starvation and the threat of defeat in France, government oppression and religious persecution in Japan—so obviously they cannot remain unaffected by outside events. But the author shows change deftly, plausibly, with the power of love as a backdrop. Despite its setting of war and destruction, The Painting provides hope for a future where life will go on.