TOKYO | Fri Jan 18, 2013 9:29am EST

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Vancouver neighborhood of men who drink fig-infused martinis and eat fiddleheads on skewers faces a crisis when a beer-swilling, barbecue-loving truck driver moves in. An Olympic mascot marmot kidnaps a young boy from his parents.

These are just a few of the tales in "Better Living Through Plastic Explosives," a book of short stories by Canadian author Zsuzsi Gartner that brings to life a dark, satiric Vancouver set just a few years into the future.

"I would say it is a portrait of Vancouver, my Vancouver," said Gartner, who was short-listed for Canada's Giller Prize for the collection, published recently in the United States. "I've created my own kind of mythology, set in the near future, of how I view the city itself.

"I map different psychic and demographic spaces, but telling the stories I like to tell, which are dark satire."

In one, "The Adopted Chinese Daughters' Rebellion," Canadian parents push adopted offspring into Buddhism and feng shui, while the girls just want to be Canadian. "Once, We Were Swedes" features IKEA product names as a loving, erotic language.

Typical in many ways is "The Summer of the Flesh Eater," the tale of a cultural collision between the vegan locavores of one particular Vancouver cul-de-sac and the truck-driving carnivore who arrives in their midst, serving up huge slabs of meat he describes as "bodacious."

Like many of her tales, Gartner said, it began with a concept - the idea of the difficulty of being a man in the 21st century, combined with the idea of evolution and Darwin's theories, part of another project.

"Then the idea of devolution instead of evolution, what if we started devolving instead of evolving?" she said.

"Those things I was interested in came together and I found a narrative for them. Here's a cosy little setup, a classic story scenario - you know, 'At the Door Knocks a Stranger.' Equilibrium is disturbed. The out of towner, the lost brother, the guy who doesn't fit in."

The story also shares with several others in the book its location on a cul-de-sac, which Gartner said is her equivalent of Agatha Christie's isolated house or train on which all of the action takes place.

"The demographics of Vancouver are important if you're trying to understand the book... It's the fabric of what goes on here," she said. "When you isolate a microcosm of a population on a cul-de-sac and put a microscope on them, you have a bit of a petri dish."

As a satirist, though, she said she has run into difficulties, noting that some of the unreal or otherworldly things she has written have come true, such as reality TV.

"The world has become so self-satirizing. You open the paper or go online, and it's really hard to satirize a world - not just a society but a world - that's become so self-satirizing," she said.

"So I push things slightly into the future. I thought that if I project it three to five years ahead, and make up stuff that's a little otherworldly, then I can keep one step ahead of things."

(Reporting by Elaine Lies, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Glasgow-born artist Paul Emsley poses next to hisoil painting of Britain's Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, the first commisioned portrait of her, at the National Portrait Gallery in central London, January 11, 2013.

LONDON | Fri Jan 11, 2013 7:53am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - The first official portrait of Britain's Duchess of Cambridge, popularly known by her former name Kate Middleton, was unveiled in London on Friday, and opinion was sharply divided over an image many deemed unflattering.

The 31-year-old, who as a glamorous future queen is one of the world's most photographed women, is portrayed in the large canvas with a faint smile, long, copper-tinted hair and shadow under her eyes.

Award-winning artist Paul Emsley, surrounded by a scrum of international news crews at the National Portrait Gallery where the work was revealed, described the duchess as a "wonderful subject" and "generous as a person.

"The brief was that it should be a portrait which in some way expressed her natural self rather than her official self," he said.

"When you meet her, that really is appropriate. She really is that kind of a person. She's so nice to be with and it's genuine and I felt if the painting can convey something of that then it will have succeeded."

National Portrait Gallery staff said the duchess and her husband Prince William visited earlier on Friday and were "very pleased" with the outcome of a painting based on photographs taken at two sittings in May and June last year.

"Her family are also very pleased," Emsley said. "To me that's the ultimate test in a way, because they know her better than anyone else."

WIDESPREAD CRITICISM

Public reaction was less positive, however, with views on Twitter and newspaper websites overwhelmingly negative.

Many comments focused on how the image had aged the duchess, herself a graduate in art history, while others took the artist to task for portraying her smiling slightly.

One Daily Mail reader from Canada summed up broader opinion in an unnamed comment.

"OMG, how awful! Rather than being overly flattering as many royal portraits are, this one is the extreme opposite. She's barely recognizable! Poor Kate, forced to say she's 'thrilled' when in all likelihood, she is as horrified as the rest of us."

Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak called the portrait "pretty ordinary ... He (Emsley) made her look older than she is and her eyes don't sparkle in the way that they do and there's something rather dour about the face."

Glasgow-born Emsley, whose previous commissions included former South African President Nelson Mandela, knew he would be in the public eye when taking on a subject of the duchess's stature as a royal and global celebrity.

"It's probably the most important portrait I'll ever do, and when you realize that, you do start to think rather carefully about what you're doing perhaps more than you usually do, and that made me more cautious than I normally am."

The duchess has recently been in the headlines after spending four days in hospital being treated for acute morning sickness having announced she was pregnant.

The National Portrait Gallery commissioned the painting of its patron, and it was given to the gallery by Hugh Leggatt through the Art Fund.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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LONDON | Wed Aug 8, 2012 11:51am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - An impressionist portrait by French painter Edouard Manet will stay in Britain after an eight-month campaign raised nearly 8 million pounds ($12 million) to buy it.

The "Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus" will be on display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which launched the campaign to stop it going abroad.

The painting was sold to a foreign buyer last year for 28.35 million pounds. However the British government placed an export bar on the work which allowed it to be bought by a British public institution for a quarter of its market value.

"The public's response to the campaign for the Manet has been overwhelming," said Ashmolean Director Christopher Brown.

"This is one of the most important pictures of the 19th century which has been in Britain since its sale following the artist's death in 1884," he added in a statement.

The campaign saw donations from more than 1,000 members of the public, trusts and foundations, along with 5.9 million pounds from the Heritage Lottery Fund and 850,000 pounds from the Art Fund charity.

Manet painted the portrait of musician Fanny Claus, his wife Suzanne Leenhoff's closest friend, in 1868.

The painting will be lent to public museums and galleries as part of a nationwide tour next year.

(Editing by Steve Addison)

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