Synopsis
Know Scumbler in his poignant, hilarious life. Get mad at him and even cry with him. Here's Don Quixote, Santa Claus, and Faust rolled into one "thick shadow" of a man. A joyous sixty-year-old American street painter lives on the Left Bank in Paris, making a living by creating rentable apartments out of the most unlikely spaces. Mostly, however, he paints with utter delight in the creative act and discovers remarkable characters along his path: craftsmen, students, prostitutes and motorcyclists. He scumbles and fails. He digs twisting tunnels under Paris streets and builds nests: nature nests, rats' nests, birds' nests. He collects clocks and designs his own life from the "inside." Wanting to be true beyond honesty, visible past seeing to being, Scumbler scrambles, tumbles, rumbles, rambles through the ecstatic pleasure of creation and the pangs of ordinary existence.
Reviews
"Scumbler is about the pleasure of creation and the pangs of ordinary existence. It's prose is as exuberant as its subject matter...Better than Birdy. "
Doris Grumbach, Chicago Tribune
"A fascinating excursion into the mind of an artist. "
George Core, Washington Post
"It radiates glorious truth."
Lloyd Sachs, Chicago Sun-Times
"A marvelously vital novel about the power of the imagination to create and re-create life."
Valerie Miner, Los Angeles Times
Reader Reviews
“Well worth a read!”, January 15, 2000
Reviewer: Gill Robinson (Australia)
William Wharton has written an in depth portrait of an artist with a zest for life but with the inevitable frustration and depression of coping with an aging body. This book left me with a strong image of the man and his Parisian surroundings. I am sure many men would relate to this book and it helped me, a woman, understand the emotions that can affect elderly men. Maybe it was my shortcomings but I found the short verse lines, which intersperse the narrative, not always helpful and often blocking the flow of the story. Overall another William Wharton delightful novel - I am a fan!