Author Daniel Silva plays a game with the reader here, unlike anything I have noticed in his past novels. Here, art restorer Gabriel Allon changes from the Allon we have known in the past, becoming quite a different person. Instead of maintaining his honesty and sense of honor, in which he has always prided himself, he joins the large group of art fraudsters and their financiers throughout the western world and begins to create fraudulent “masterpieces” by the “greatest painters” of the western world. He becomes almost totally dissociated from his wife and children in Venice and leads a separate life of crime, surrounded by some of his own fraudulent “masterpieces” which appear throughout Europe and New York. He is so effective at creating these that he can produce one new “old masterpiece” painting every three or four days – each one so “authentic,” even in the craquelure – the little cracks in the paint and varnish which ancient paintings have – that no one can tell that they are newly created. The extent of the unregulated art fraud business comes into full play here, as Allon works among the crooks.
Read Full Post »
I readily admit that I have found Patrick Modiano to be the most fascinating author I have ever experienced, and I have read most, if not all, of his books in print in English. His unique upbringing in post-war France, essentially without parents or real stand-ins for them, his search for his identity through his writing, and his honesty as he approaches life make each book, which he calls a novel here, a unique experience for the reader as much as it must have been for the author. By the time I finished reading, I felt as if I had actually lived through the life of the narrator in a way I have never experienced before – feeling his feelings, recognizing his surprises with him, and puzzling with him when some of the events and characters appear with little to no connection or context. As the novel opens, the main character, Jean Eyben, is twenty years old and he has just received a case file regarding Noelle Lefebvre, a young woman who is missing. Jean is working for the Hutte Detective Agency, and his “case file” consists of “a single sheet in a sky blue folder that has faded with time…turned almost white.” In episodes back and forth over the next thirty years, Eyben searches for this woman and the people who may have known her.
Read Full Post »
Rusty Redburn, the narrator who directs the traffic of this exciting and busy book, never expects, when she goes to Hollywood in the early 1940s, that she will end up as a spy for Columbia Pictures. Harry Cohn, President of Columbia, wants to keep tabs on every aspect of the life of “Rita Hayworth” (Margarita Carmen Cansino), his shy and most mistrustful star. As author Jerome Charyn traces the real life of this glamorous film star, he is able to convey the male dominated film business and its demeaning of its female stars. Two of Rita’s five marriages – to Orson Welles (1943 – 1947) and to Prince Aly Khan (1949 – 1953) – are keys to understanding Rita Hayworth, and author Jerome Charyn presents them with sympathy for Rita and a broad knowledge of Hollywood, Rita’s films, the men with whom she starred in films, her lovers, and the film world milieu of the mid-1940s and 1950s. Rita Hayworth had roles in twenty-four films between 1940, when she was twenty-two, and 1958, when she had her fortieth birthday. Her two last appearances were in 1971, on the Carol Burnett Show and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
Read Full Post »
In one of the most unusual international novels to be released this year, Korean author Kwon Yeo-sun, reports a murder, its possible motives, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding this death. The facts of the death are far less important to the author and, ultimately, the reader, however, than the inner lives of the main characters themselves, and how and why they view as they do the death of a beautiful girl in her late teens. Three characters narrate the story of Kim Hae-on, the innocent school-age victim of a bloody murder sixteen years ago, a crime that has never brought resolution to the main characters or a conclusion. As a result, this is the story of a murder, but it is not a classic “murder mystery.” Instead, it intensely examines episodes from the lives of the main characters over the sixteen years since Hae-on’s death, leaving the reader to draw conclusions.
Read Full Post »
Wildly imaginative, humorous, and structurally complex, Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman takes place a few decades from now as the worst disasters of climate change have already begun. Thousands of life forms have become extinct, and in order to live and work, society has needed new economies, complete with “extinction credits,” overseen by corporations. Countries have changed or canceled borders. In what used to be Europe, scientists have set up new economies on floating islands, with free market research centers and biobanks to preserve life, both human and animal, even when that life exists only on the cellular level. With an overlay of dark humor and irony throughout, author Ned Beauman presents two young people involved in animal research and the international effects of their discoveries. His overall mood, however, is one of sadness, presented with such realism that the story line requires two epilogues to resolve.
Read Full Post »
