| The Forgery of Venus (Unabridged) |  | Author: Michael Gruber
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Fascinating July 2, 2008
This is my second Michael Gruber novel, after "The Book of Air and Shadows." Both books are first rate. Literally, it's a book about art fraud, but it's also about reality and illusion, sanity and insanity. I couldn't put it down. I love to get lost in a book like that. Many great twists and turns.
A Novel with Sprezzatura June 29, 2008
In recent years there have been alot of novels about art and even more about drug induced ststes. The Forgery of Venus has both in spades. Read it anyway. If Art History was a favorite course and you can enjoy an afternoon at the Metropolitan, then you will appreciate this book. Michael Gruber seems to touch on every important theme of concern to artists: originality, authenticity, diversions, greed and more. He is equally knowledgeable about technical things- at times I felt I was getting lessons in how 17th century painters thought, prepared and worked. And there is considerable insight into the present day art world and its values.
For the most part, I dislike novels that force a major character to contest his sanity because the bad guys have doped him silly. (Novelistic flaws can be disguised if the reader is confused as to what's really happening.) However, the drug induced episodes in this novel tie into the plot and are elucidated with great skill. They provide a window into the past and are quite revealing of consciousness. The drug is salvinorin, a powerful naturally occurring hallucinogin that native shamans in Mexico use to inspire out of body trips to past generations. That characteristic is useful if you need to become Velazquez and restore/create/forge a lost work. Salvinorin remains unrestricted- its chemical composition is unlike the better known brain scramblers.
This book is nothing like that other best seller about art. The Da Vinci Code was a paint by numbers novel; The Forgery of Venus has sprezzatura. The prose is not overly ornate, but it is well crafted. The author has a penchant for using unusual forms of fairly common words: eg. parodically, pasticheur and charism. Thus he discovers a number of thoughtful insights about art and the human condition. This is the best contemporary novel I've read in a long time and certainly the best ever about painting.
 A Painter's Read June 27, 2008
The Forgery of Venus is a carefully and elegantly constructed novel that does a brilliant job of revealing a painter's life. The book pulls you in very early on to characters that feel like people you know, particularly if you originate from the northeast. Gruber's prose are sumptuous without being the slightest bit tedious. He moves in an out of plot twists with ease without losing the reader.
If you are an artist, particularly a painter, this book is a kind of pornography of the craft. Gruber's detailed and deeply researched descriptions of masterly technique are engrossing. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the arts and especially those who are practitioners.
Art forgery thriller rivets the reader June 24, 2008
Gruber's literary thrillers transport the reader into detailed realms entirely apart from ordinary life - worlds of passionate scholarship, pivotal moments in history, monumental avarice - where the stakes are as sophisticated as they are deadly.
From shamanism to Shakespeare - and now the art world - Gruber's meticulous research and considerable writing skills bring his intricate and rather fantastic plots to life.
The narrator of this sixth book (like the narrator of 2007's, "The Book of Air and Shadows") is a flawed, apparently doomed character, but in this book Gruber does not need to switch points of view to get other perspectives. Instead, his narrator, Chaz Wilmot, simply, literally, becomes the 17th century Spanish painter Diego Velazquez.
The story opens with a prologue - commercial artist Chaz declares to an old college friend that the Velazquez' "Venus" about to be auctioned for record millions is a fake, a forgery, a Chaz Wilmot in fact. Painted in 1650. He presents a CD, in which, he says, he explains everything. This CD - the story of his life - is the heart of the book.
After college Wilmot did not live up to his initial promise. Like his famous father, he became a commercial artist in an increasingly digitalized world with less and less use for traditional illustrators. He had plenty of talent, but was held back by some inner resistance to selling his paintings. This part is never really clear. But no matter.
He makes a good living despite this flaw, but not good enough. His young son has a lung disease which is expected to kill him by his early teens if not sooner. Treatments are cripplingly expensive and now there's a clinic in Switzerland offering a new, experimental treatment which might actually cure him - for a price.
Meanwhile Chaz enters a drug experiment run by another old friend who is testing the effects of Salvinorin A on creativity (this is a real drug, Gruber tells us in a postscript - legal too - but you won't want to try it at home). He has a vivid flashback to his father's funeral then goes home and paints. The next five days are the most productive he's ever had; "total focus, total pleasure in the work." He can't wait for his next dose. Another flashback, more productivity.
But then things get scarier - he finds himself in the body of a boy in a foreign country a long time ago - Velazquez. And next time he's Velazquez the apprentice, already better than his teacher. And then he's painting at the Spanish court.
Chaz cannot get enough of this stuff. He becomes irritable and erratic and steals extra doses. He's dropped from the study, but it no longer matters. He no longer has control over his own identity and slips in and out of being Velazquez in the 1600s and Chaz in New York. His personal life begins to fall apart, but his art has never been better.
Then Mark, his gallery owning friend, offers him a very lucrative job - the restoration of a Tiepolo ceiling in a Venetian palazzo. It's more a re-creation than a restoration and the lines between forgery and original art become more difficult to define as Chaz is pulled deeper into the schemes of a wealthy, sophisticated art dealer, the son of a Nazi art dealer/thief.
Velazquez' life continues to intertwine with Chaz' in increasingly intense ways although he's no longer taking the drug. And Velazquez is tortured by incomprehensible dreams of a hellish place, which Chaz recognizes as New York while Chaz can no longer determine which of his own memories are real and which are delusion.
Still, in the grip of creation, he is magnificent. Gruber brings an excitement to the painter's vision and work that is totally captivating. The reader begins to see with the eyes of a painter even as the painter can no longer tell whose eyes he sees through. It's a marvelous, creepy sensation that makes the heart beat at least as fast as the increasing danger and convolutions of the plot. (Many readers will also want to run to a museum - or the internet - to look at Velazquez' paintings with their new eyes.)
Gruber immerses the reader in his knowledge of the art world and the fascinating, exacting, highly sophisticated techniques of old master forgeries. His exploration of identity and its connection to memory entangles the mind amid plot surprises that are as bizarre and repellant as they are satisfying. There are a lot of contradictions and blurry lines here and Gruber clever storytelling and rich, descriptive prose style makes it all work.
Sterling suspense with a twist June 16, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
When Chaz Wilmot attends a party hosted by another Columbia alum, he meets up with a former college roommate and gives him a CD with an incredible story on it. Before he does this he admits to the old friend that the Velazquez they're looking at and admiring is, in fact a fake. Chaz admits that he painted it; in 1650.
So begins a story that becomes so engrossing that the reader is hard pressed to put the book down. Chaz is an artist that can paint in almost any style required. He can duplicate Leonardo, Van Gogh, or any other highly valued artist. His talent though isn't popular today. The art world has basically passed him by. And this is the root of his problem. Chaz is so full of a talent that the world no longer values. As such, Chaz is relegated to doing advertising copy or art for contemporary magazines. Not being that stable in the first place he is driven to drug use and he is, at the beginning The Forgery of Venus, spiraling down to a life he wasn't meant to live.
Enter another college roommate, a successful research MD studying the roots of creativity. Chaz is asked to participate in a clinical study and he agrees. What begins as a benign medical study soon turns into trips into the past that further stretch Chaz' grip on reality. Are they real or imagined? Add to this the chance to go to Italy and recreate a damaged fresco and you have quite a story.
Michael Gruber is a superb writer that spins stories that grab the reader. His reputation as a spinner of tales is well deserved. Coming on the heels of The Book of Air and Shadows, the Forgery of Venus is sure to add to Gruber's reputation.
Peace.
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