In a series of expressionist vignettes, Velibor Čolić's The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani paints a compelling portrait of a chaotic and tragically brief career, cut short by drugs and disease.
Consisting of a series of vignettes, set mostly in the painter's studio and peopled by his wife Jeanne Hébuterne (who threw herself from an apartment-building the day after Modigliani's death), the prostitutes who were his occasional models and several Bohemian visitors, the novel spans the last months of Modigliani's life, evoking the strange workings of the painter's troubled and often drug-fuelled mind and its expression in his paintings, ultimately succeeding in conveying something of the intense artistic life of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani by Velibor Čolić is translated from the French by Celia Hawkesworth and published by Pushkin Press.
Velibor Čolić (b. 1964) was born in Bosnia. Since 1992 he has lived in France as a writer and freelance music journalist. His novel The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani has been translated into French, Italian and German, and adapted as a radio play.
