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Category Archive for 'Corsica'

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.

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In this big, entertaining can’t-put-it-downer set in Corsica, best-selling French author Michel Bussi tells the story surrounding a terrible car accident which claimed the lives of three people in 1989 – the mother, father, and adored older brother of fifteen-year-old Clotilde Idrissi. Though she was injured, Clotilde survived the accident when the car her father was driving careened off a cliff, but she was so traumatized in the accident’s aftermath that she has never set foot on Corsica since then. Now, twenty-seven years have passed, and Clotilde has finally returned to the island from France with her husband Franck and her teenage daughter Valentine (Valou), hoping to resolve her residual fears and her questions about the accident. The exotic setting on Corsica, one of the eighteen regions of France, adds to the excitement, revealing a society more like that of Sicily and or Sardinia than to Paris, its people honoring family traditions and histories that go back many generations. Many exciting mysteries unfold in this novel which is great fun but could have been condensed a bit. See full review.

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