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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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.
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In this newly reprinted Italian classic by Natalia Ginzburg, originally published in Italy in 1961, Elsa, an unmarried young woman of twenty-seven, becomes the primary narrator/commentator on her own life, the lives of her family, and the social scene which they all share in a small, unnamed town in Italy during and after World War II. As the only first person speaker in the novel, Elsa guides the action in three chapters, giving personal insights and a sense of honest reality to the day-to-day lives of which she is part. Four other chapters, concentrating on the points of view of other characters, emerge from her parents’ generation – their prewar lives illustrating where they have started and their postwar lives revealing the effects that fascism, socialism, communism, and the partisanship of wartime have made on their domestic lives, family, and friendships. Unusual to the point of being unique, or almost unique, Voices in the Evening deals with the growth of fascism in Italy, World War II, and the postwar conditions – big, complex subjects – but these issues become almost peripheral to the everyday gossip and personal stories on which the main characters and the community depend for their daily lives. The issue of moving from their local towns and cities for parts of the war and its aftermath is treated almost casually, with more attention paid to love stories and their complications, gossip, and personal tales than to the big subject of Italy during the war. By changing the focus so dramatically, the author is able to gain some dark humor while developing a creeping horror of the way in which these people allow their personal issues to camouflage the dramatic changes taking place in their lives and throughout the country.
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WHEREABOUTS does not identify any particular country as its setting, though it is presumably set in Italy. Author Jhumpa Lahiri is far more interested in the emotional reactions of the main character, a forty-six-year-old professor of writing, as she responds to the events affecting her. She is an independent woman, never married, though she has had serious relationships, and she cares about all aspects of her life. Choosing to tell her story by recreating brief episodes that take place in ordinary locations familiar to us all, the narrator frees herself from the necessity of co-ordinating the events of a plot in order by date. Dividing the novel into forty-six short episodes, some only a paragraph long, the narrator talks about her life – On the Street, In the Bookstore, In the Pool, In the Sun, At the Cash Register, At the Coffee Bar, etc. Strikingly, she reveals three episodes from “In My Head.” These talk about solitude as her “trade,” about the unraveling of time and the fact that sometimes she just cannot get up and out of the house, and eventually about her childhood at school when she hated recess though her friends were euphoric. Eventually, she learns that she has won a fellowship which will require her to leave her apartment, her community, her family, and her friends and move to another country for the duration. Readers will enjoy looking back at their experience with this woman, evaluating how ready she might be to leave and take on a new life, whether she is capable of finding some kind of personal fulfillment, and if she is capable of forming genuine, caring new relationships. She and her life will be challenging, no matter what she decides.
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This superb historical novel focuses on the power of words to change lives. In 1923, Curon, situated near the head of the Adige River, about ten kilometers from the meeting point of Switzerland, Austria, and Italy, is part of an autonomous Italian province in the northern mountains. The hardworking farmers and herders of Curon do not speak Italian, however – they have always been German speakers. When Mussolini becomes prime minister, Italian suddenly becomes the required language for the entire area, and the requirement is rigidly enforced. The fascists have occupied the schools, town halls, post offices and courts throughout the area, and “nothing is ours anymore.” Most importantly, the Italians under Mussolini now plan “to get the [Curon] dam project going again,” taking advantage of the river’s current to produce energy. The dam, as planned, will drown their farms, churches, workshops, and pastures, but it will allow the fascists to turn Bolzano and Merano, the two largest cities in the province, farther along the river, into industrial centers. The building of the dam takes over a year, and affects the entire community. “Slowly, inexorably, [the water] rose halfway up the bell tower, which from then on looked out over the rippled surface of the water like the torso of a castaway.” Author Marco Balzano has created a gem of a novel which deals with essential themes related to power, compromise, and choices and the ways people address the future – with words or with actions, or both.
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