Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Upside-Down World

By: Benjamin Moser
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting—casually at first, and then more and more obsessively—the country's great museums.

Beyond the sainted Rembrandt—who harbored a startling darkness—and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp.

Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art, anyway—and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail?

The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we've never seen them before. And it's a highly personal coming-of-age-story, twenty years in the making: a revealing self-portrait by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

©2023 Benjamin Moser (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Last Light cover art
The Da Vinci Women cover art
Salvador Dalí cover art
Hilma af Klint cover art
Austin Osman Spare (Revised & Expanded Edition) cover art
Rembrandt Is in the Wind cover art
Broad Strokes cover art
Fierce Poise cover art
Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 cover art
Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World cover art

What listeners say about The Upside-Down World

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.