Picture This

Joseph Heller hardly ever wrote a fairly good book; he wrote mediocre ones and excellent ones. This one is of the latter sort. A cynical, acerbic, and hilarious, look on art (and art criticism), classical Greece, wars, empire-building, democracy and more ... incuding human nature itself.

Well it took me a couple of goes but I made it through this book. It's an interesting concept and has many excellent soundbites and quotable passages, but it also somehow manages to be quite boring as a whole. Most of the information about Rembrandt and Aristotle is fairly unedifying.

Joseph Heller is the author of my favourite book, Catch 22. But his other novels are of variable quality. None, with the exception of Closing Time, have come even close to matching the brilliance of Catch 22. Using Rembrandt's painting Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer as its thread, in Picture This, Heller recites details from the lives of the Dutch painter, Aristotle, Plato and Socrates and uses them to highlight flaws in democratic theory and human nature. But this novel, though ambitious in scope and objective, fails to satisfy as a book. The considerable research that must have gone into it, and the occasional flashes of Heller's sardonic wit, unfortunately aren't enough to overcome the fact this book is poorly structured and show more lacks a coherent storyline. Ultimately, it feels more like a series of essays than a novel. show less

Underrated later book of Heller, very nice ironic comparison of Dutch, Classical Greek and Ancient Greek society and economy using an imaginative perspective from Rembrandt's painting of Aristotle contemplating Homer.

A good premise for a short story; it just didn't translate well into a full-length novel. Too many side-trips into ancient Greek wars -- information that I found distracting (and not particularly edifying) in coming to know Aristotle.

An interesting approach to seemingly unconnected periods of history. I sometimes wondered of its historical accuracy.