The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani

In a series of expressionist vignettes, Velibor Colic'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 Hebuterne (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 Colic is translated from the French by Celia Hawkesworth and published by Pushkin Press. Velibor Colic (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.

The life of the modernist painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was chaotic and tragically brief. Spanning the last months of Modigliani's life, this evocative novel conjures up the strange workings of the painter's troubled - and often drug-fuelled - mind, and the manner in which his eccentricity expressed itself in his art. Colic's evocative novel captures the full essence of Modigliani's Bohemian lifestyle, and the colourful visitors who came and went through his Paris studio: among them his lover, Jeanne Hébuterne, and the prostitutes who occasionally modelled for him; and succeeds in conveying something of the intense artistic life of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century.