<![CDATA[The Forgery of Venus: A Novel]]>

false <![CDATA[The Forgery of Venus: A Novel]]> 2641587 5 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. 2666323 1 4 2008 The Forgery of Venus: A Novel total:339|5:51|4:139|3:107|2:33|1:9| 339 1207 565 132 4 2 false false Mon Mar 03 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Mar 03 14:02:05 -0800 2008 Mon Mar 03 14:03:58 -0800 2008
Having just finished this book, I searched around for reviews of this novel and observed that people either really liked this book or they really disliked it. I'm in the middle somewhere. On one hand, books ...more...]]> 4 1 false true Thu Sep 18 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Sep 18 09:20:48 -0700 2008 Thu Sep 18 09:42:24 -0700 2008 1
concept: Charles Wilmot Jr. gifted painter with serious personality flaws and gift for self- destruction gets involved in a complicated scenario during which he both begins to go mad, imagining himself to be the famous painter Velasquez and also being hired/ ...more...]]> 5 1 false true Sat Jul 12 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sat Jul 12 09:54:18 -0700 2008 Sat Jul 12 10:05:56 -0700 2008
The Forgery of Venus takes the reader to the New York art scene, and immerges him into a world whose boundaries have been lost by drugs and self pity. The protagonist, ...more...]]> 0 1 false false Thu Feb 05 09:56:51 -0800 2009 Thu Feb 05 09:56:51 -0800 2009 Although critics still make the inevitable and easy comparisons to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, any time a book comes out in the burgeoning genre of the "literary thriller," Gruber��so critics might argue with good cause��delivers a more compelling (or, at the least, a more imaginative...

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Here's a man who never writes the same book twice. The first of his I read was The Witch's Boy, a modern fairy tale.

Then I read Tropic of Night, which has mainly to do with voodoo in Miami (I'm leaving out a lot of important details, but it was e...more...]]> 5 1 false false Fri Feb 29 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Feb 23 22:27:13 -0800 2008 Fri Feb 29 22:52:03 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 1 false false Sun Jan 25 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Jan 11 11:00:04 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 26 10:22:17 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun May 17 18:16:43 -0700 2009 Sun May 17 18:24:30 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Sun Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Nov 11 14:09:05 -0800 2008 Tue Nov 11 18:49:38 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Thu Feb 05 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Apr 03 18:15:08 -0700 2009 Fri Apr 03 18:15:32 -0700 2009 more...]]> 1 0 false false Fri May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 06 08:57:50 -0700 2009 Fri May 01 11:43:44 -0700 2009 The Forgery of Venus lacks a compelling story. Its characters are largely shallow and uninteresting; its plot is overly-complicated; the pacing suffers from an overabundance of exposition. While I'm sure Gruber had the best of intentions, his poor technical ...more...]]> 3 0 false false Wed Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Mar 13 09:34:08 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 01 15:52:09 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Jun 14 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 08 19:59:17 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 14 17:54:55 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Jun 17 14:22:42 -0700 2009 Wed Jun 17 14:26:26 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Fri Dec 05 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Dec 06 15:04:12 -0800 2008 Sun Dec 07 10:47:51 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 1 false false Mon Apr 21 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Jan 04 14:10:42 -0800 2009 Sun Jan 04 14:20:07 -0800 2009 3 0 false false Sun May 17 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun May 17 13:20:53 -0700 2009 Sun May 17 13:26:24 -0700 2009
Based on the little I read about it, I was expecting a very different book. Words like "thriller", "suspense", and "mystery" are bandied about on the Amazon review snippets, but they don't really app...more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Apr 28 08:57:24 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 28 09:07:06 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 2 false false Thu Mar 19 11:34:46 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 02 11:40:57 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false true Sun Aug 10 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Aug 10 22:44:47 -0700 2008 Sun Aug 10 23:02:13 -0700 2008
This was an enjoyable piece of fiction.

Chaz, a talented old-master style present-day painter can't stand the commodification of the art world so never makes a painting to sell within it--and instead opts to paint for magazines and other...more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=2641587