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The Forgery of Venus: A Novel by Michael Gruber
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The Forgery of Venus: A Novel

by Michael Gruber

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Showing 1-5 of 29 (next | show all)
The plot of Michael Gruber's The Forgery of Venus seems a bit convoluted, but I found it to be a very satisfying read. When talented painter Chaz Wilmot gets involved in a dangerous, but financially lucrative plot to forge a famous painting by a Spanish master, his life and his sanity are at risk. The story begins with Chaz mysteriously delivering a CD to an old college classmate, and then disappearing. On the CD are hours of recordings of Chaz, telling a story that becomes stranger by the minute. As his classmate begins to listen to Chaz's tale, he begins to wonder whether Chaz has lost his mind. Chaz, a very talented painter, has never made much of his talent. When Chaz agrees to participate in a psychological drug study, he begins to hallucinate that he is living the life of a famous Spanish painter, Velazquez, who lived in the 1600s. A shady European art dealer gets wind of Chaz's hallucinations and offers him a job he can't refuse forging a famous Velazquez painting. Soon, Chaz is consumed with the painting and begins having difficulty telling reality from his hallucinations.

I probably picked this book up because it seems to have a lot of the elements I like in a suspense novel: art, Nazi art theft, and history. But Gruber also incorporates some unique features that made this one stand out from the others. I loved how the story was written as if it was a transcription from a recording. It sounds just the way someone (who is slightly nuts) might tell a story verbally. Gruber also transitioned Chaz from the present into his hallucinations so seamlessly, it takes a second to realize what is happening, which makes it seem so real. And his descriptions of Velazquez's life are so vivid. I also found myself stopping and trying to figure out what was real and what was just a hallucination, which also made it seem more realistic. The one disappointment was that we don't really know how or why Chaz seemed to inhabit Velazquez's life, which I thought was one of the most intriguing aspects of the story. ( )
  mabs | Feb 3, 2010 |
Fabulously entertaining.
About the forgery of a lost Velazquez and the artist eventually going mad. Very smartly written ( )
  JUANCORTIZ | Jan 29, 2010 |
Rec'd this as part of LT's Early Reviewers in Feb 2008 or so. Over the past few years, I have picked up this book on numerous occasions to read and review. After several nudges about needing to review it, I am throwing in the towel. I've never connected with the characters or story, so it is my decision to move on and tackle the next book in the pile.
  marcinyc | Jan 2, 2010 |
I have read a number of Gruber's books and have found them quite engaging. This book, however, was a real challenge to read. It was way too convoluted. Needed a good editor. ( )
  andyg227 | Nov 2, 2009 |
This review refers to an unabridged audio edition of the book.

I found this in my library right before a recent trip, and thought it sounded like something I would love...art, history, intrigue. My trip was approximately 12 hours of driving, and I am afraid that this book made it seem twice as long.

What a disappointment. No character in this book engaged me. I didn't like them, I didn't dislike them...I just didn't care about them, or what happened to them. I felt the author just repeated the same passages in slightly different settings over and over (and over) again. Even the historical flashbacks to another painter in another time were disappointing. I did not feel transported, and I did not feel that I learned anything about the time period.

Interestingly, when I clicked on "will I like this book" on LibraryThing, it suggested that, "yes, you will love it." My general reading interests completely fit the profile of someone who would, indeed, enjoy this book. Obviously, profiling has its limits. ( )
  nancnn2 | Oct 13, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 29 (next | show all)
This is the kind of book that could easily become ludicrous and boring if it had been written by an author less talented than Gruber. His richly developed characters and engaging prose keep the story crisp and believable.
 
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Epigraph
So with the faulty image as a start
We come at length to analyse and name
The Luminous darkness in the depths of art:
The timelessness that holds us is the same
As that of the transcendent sexual glance
And art grows brilliant in the light it sheds,
Direct or not, on the inhabitants
Of our imagination and our beds.
--Robert Conquest, "The Rokeby Venus"
Dedication
For E. W. N.
First words
"I'll lay a bet," said Sancho, "that before long there won't be a tavern, roadside inn, hostelry, or barber's shop where the story of our doings won't be painted up; but I'd like it painted by the had of a better painter than painted these."
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0060874481, Hardcover)

Chaz Wilmot is a painter born outside his time. He possesses a virtuosic command of the techniques of the old masters. He can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough—artists whose works sell for millions—but this style of painting is no longer popular, and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. So Wilmot makes his living cranking out parodies for ads and magazine covers. A break comes when an art dealer obtains for him a commission to restore a Venetian palace fresco by the eighteenth-century master Tiepolo, for a disreputable Italian businessman. Once there, Wilmot discovers that it is not a restoration but a re-creation, indeed a forgery. At first skeptical of the job, he then throws himself into the creative challenge and does the job brilliantly. No one can tell the modern work from something done more than two hundred years ago.

This feat attracts the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present who becomes Wilmot's friend and patron. Wilmot is suddenly working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years, but his burst of creative activity is accompanied by strange interludes: Without warning, he finds himself reliving moments from his past—not as memories but as if they are happening all over again. Soon, it is no longer his own past he's revisiting; he believes he can travel back to the seventeenth century, where he lived as the Spanish artist Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez, one of the most famous painters in history. Wilmot begins to fantasize that as Velázquez, he has created a masterpiece, a stunning portrait of a nude. When the painting actually turns up, he doesn't know if he painted it or if he imagined the whole thing.

Little by little, Wilmot enters a mirror house of illusions and hallucinations that propels him into a secret world of gangsters, greed, and murder, with his mystery patron at the center of it all, either as the mastermind behind a plot to forge a painting worth hundreds of millions, or as the man who will save Wilmot from obscurity and madness.

In Chaz Wilmot, we meet the rarest breed of literary hero, one for whom the reader feels almost personally responsible. By turns brutally honest and self-deceptive, scornful of the world while yearning to make his mark on it, Wilmot comes astonishingly alive for the reader, and his perilous journey toward the truth becomes our own.

The Forgery of Venus, a blend of erudition, unflagging narrative brio, and emotional depth, brings us inexorably toward the intersection where genius and insanity collide. Miraculously inventive, this book cements Gruber's reputation as one of the most imaginative and gifted writers of our time.

(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:34:52 -0500)

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