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Loading... Headlongby Michael Frayn
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  ffortsa | Dec 24, 2009 |  One of my absolute favorite books. You may have to be an art historian to love it, but it's so sharp and funny, with a snappy comic plot, that many Frayn fans should like it. If you've ever studied art history, especially in London, the Breughel bits will be fascinating. I highly recommend looking up his paintings while reading this. I sometimes find academic farce a bit twee for my taste, but Headlong avoided that trap. (  ) FinnTiger | Nov 16, 2009 | Writing this a few weeks after I finished reading this, I struggle to remember much about it which I guess says a lot. I enjoyed the art history asides but the plot was flim-flam and annoying. Just not a great experience for me. (  ) samsheep | Sep 10, 2009 | Well, fast-paced is a relative term I suppose. In the world of art-history this must indeed be fast-paced. Boring, it wasn’t though. I had my doubts at first since the style of writing is very dry and detail-rich. Witty though. Very sharp observations and a somewhat skewed point of view made it easy to slog through the detail about Breugel and the time in which he lived. The Internet is a great thing – I was able to find and see the very paintings described by the author. Pretty cool. In the end, Martin is convinced he has a genuine Breugel and heads off with it and its owner’s wife as well. The wife just wants away, not Martin and on the way they have a car crash. The painting burns. Luckily, but not for Martin, two other paintings are left behind and they turn out to be genuine masterpieces and worth millions of pounds. It won’t help Martin pay back the bank though. And it won’t help the erstwhile wife either. The money only helps the loutish man in the end. Bookmarque | Jun 12, 2009 | Smashing I noticed this book on the front table at my favorite London bookstore, Hatchards, years ago. Years later I bought it at my local library and only, just now, read it. What a rollicking story involving Tony and Laura Churt, their art and Martin Clay and his wife Kate and daughter Tilda. At first a drama between the four primary personalities, an art history fueled detective story and ultimately a cautionary tale that ends with the thud of the brokenness that results from an obsession laced scam by Martin to sell one of Tony’s art pieces (an alleged long lost Dutch Master) before Tony realizes its value. But then Tony has his own hidden agenda as well. And so we see the consequences of this obsession and the cost that this has on personal relationships. Worth the read. (  ) ggarfield | Jun 6, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0312267460, Paperback)With its sumptuous surfaces and alluring sense of gravitas, classic Dutch painting has fascinated writers for centuries. It's easy to see why. Giant religious representations and gaudy classical scenes already have the weight of literature behind them. But an enigmatic portrait or dimly lit interior seems like a virtual incubator for narrative, and now Michael Frayn joins the Netherlandish fray in Headlong, which features a Bruegel canvas in the starring role.The other star of the novel is youngish art historian Martin Clay (a Hugh Grant character gone to fat), who identifies the lost Bruegel in a tumbledown country home. The picture elicits an immediate shock of recognition: Already, somewhere in those first few instants, something has begun to stir inside me. In my head, in the pit of my stomach. It's as if the sun's emerging from the clouds, and the world's changing in front of my eyes, from grey to golden. I can feel the warmth of the sunlight spreading over my skin, passing like a wave of beneficence through my entire body.The sight of this masterwork glimmering through the "grimy pane of time" fires up Martin's customarily dilettantish intellect, and he decides to secure it for the nation--and make himself a fortune--without revealing its true value to the owner. Much double-dealing, bamboozling, and suppressed hysteria ensue as he and the owner try to outfox each other. Yet the heart of the novel is Martin's search for the meaning of the painting that has become his "triumph and torment and downfall." Bouncing from gallery to museum to library, he delivers an extended (and entertaining) lesson on iconography and landscape. As Martin's obsession takes hold, the pace of the novel also accelerates into a breathless rush of action, comic anguish, and scholarly speculation. Not surprisingly, some of Martin's machinations go haywire, which leads to a certain amount of irritating slapstick--shady deals in underground parking lots, art treasures being tipped into the back of a filthy Land Rover, and so forth. But even if he makes his plot work overtime, Frayn is superb in the quest for the meaning of art, not to mention the lure of money and intellectual reputation. And for that alone, Headlong deserves to be called picture perfect. --Eithne Farry (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
Seeing a painting he thinks is worth a small fortune (or maybe a large one) in a neighbor's house, our hero schemes to get it for himself as he avoids his own work and tries to win back his increasingly disenchanted wife. A note from a prior reader states that 'this is a book caught between two worlds: part of it wants to be a comic romp, and part of it wants to be an art history lesson'. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer.