Blue Nude

Feb 07, 2013 Kathleen Hulser rated it 4 of 5 stars

A model sculpts the air with her body. Unlikely subject for novel-length treatment, but in the hands of a poet, the relationship between body and absence, pose and pencil is elegant philosophy. The model, an Israeli raised on a kibbutz who is scarred by her army service, maps her new identity in the empty spaces defined by her stances. "Hers was the art of remaining present even as she disappeared. Inhabiting her body and dreaming her way out of it." The artist, a nachgeboren, from Germany is al...more

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May 10, 2011 Barry Willdorf rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Barry by: Tamim Ansary

The Blue Nude: A Waste of a Good Writer’s Talent.

Elizabeth Rosner has a way with words. Her descriptions of people and places are lavish and colorful. You get the picture. Unfortunately, the picture she has painted isof characters who never seem to develop or progress. Although they age and move about, they remain flotsam in a world where they can neither cope or take any control. They remain essentially as powerless as that they were in their teens and seem to have learned nothing from their e...more The Blue Nude: A Waste of a Good Writer’s Talent.

Elizabeth Rosner has a way with words. Her descriptions of people and places are lavish and colorful. You get the picture. Unfortunately, the picture she has painted isof characters who never seem to develop or progress. Although they age and move about, they remain flotsam in a world where they can neither cope or take any control. They remain essentially as powerless as that they were in their teens and seem to have learned nothing from their experiences,

This is a story about people who are unable to sustain relationships. They just have them because the opportunities arise. There is almost no meaningful dialogue between the characters. And sadly, the most interesting of the characters, the sister of Danzig, the artist, and the Yossi, teenage lover of Marev, the artists’ model, are never really portrayed for the reader. We are left to twist in the wind, wondering why Yossi abandoned Marev for the daughter of a rabbi and why he stayed in the army, particularly when he was marrying the daughter of a rabbi. And as a reader, I wanted to know more about what motivated Danzig’s sister to commit suicide. What was she thinking? Why was there no other way out for this apparently beautiful and talented woman? We get none of that beside hints and observations of Danzig. So these stories are really opportunities lost.

Instead, for unfathomable reasons, the author decided to spend her energies on failed relationships that tell us nothing special about the protagonists, other than that they make poor and self-destructive choices. And when not engaged in stories of relationships going nowhere, the novel touches on the near-cliché of the German post-war generation’s guilt and the Jewish post-war residual distrust of Germans. This thread approaches stereotype and never really delivers any epiphanies.

It is sad to see an author’s skill wasted, but that is what happened here. There is no real story — nothing to learn, unless one wants to find out something about painting in oil or the techniques of artists models. The ending is predictable and disappointing. This is a tale of troubled people who will go on being losers. Who cares?
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Jan 01, 2011 Literary Feline rated it 3 of 5 stars

I have never had the feeling of finishing a book and wanting to start over again right away and read it again cover to cover. Someone wrote that about Blue Nude, and so I set aside my reservations about the book and dived right in. I wanted to love it. I wanted to love the writing and the flow of the story. I wanted to love the characters. I did like Merav quite a bit. I wasn't sold on Danzig. And while that isn't always a problem, it was in this case. I never really connected with him. As the s...more I have never had the feeling of finishing a book and wanting to start over again right away and read it again cover to cover. Someone wrote that about Blue Nude, and so I set aside my reservations about the book and dived right in. I wanted to love it. I wanted to love the writing and the flow of the story. I wanted to love the characters. I did like Merav quite a bit. I wasn't sold on Danzig. And while that isn't always a problem, it was in this case. I never really connected with him. As the story progressed and more about his past was revealed, I did develop a sympathy for him. Even more so for his sister, Margot, who I came to love.

This is a difficult book to describe. It is at once a novel about two people struggling to reconcile their pasts and find peace within themselves and a novel about World War II, particularly the aftermath of the war and how it touched those who came directly after. Merav's grandmother had been a survivor of the Holocaust, eventually fleeing to Israel where Merav was born andraised. Danzig's father had been a German officer during the war, creating a shadow that would plague Danzig and his sister for the rest of their lives.

Danzig is a painter and art instructor. Merav is a nude model who poses for Danzig's class and awakes in him a spark of inspiration that has long been missing.

The writing was smooth and lyrical. There were several times, especially during Merav's sections when I felt the words roll over and through me, lingering and full of feeling. I also liked the format of the story--the nonlinear narratives and jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, time period to time period. I was especially drawn to the sections of the book set in the past, particularly Merav's heartbreak and Danzig's own tragic childhood.

The war left behind many scars, as war often does. The Germans were left with much blood on their hands and how does a child reconcile that, once caught up in the fervor of nationalism? Can she? Rosner paints a vivid picture of the inner struggle of one family, while at the same time capturing the ingrained fear and mistrust of a people victimized, tortured and murdered at the hands of Germans. Danzig and Margot's story is directly tied to World War II, however Merav's is more indirectly impacted. It was an interesting juxtaposition.

Unfortunately, I never felt the book came together in a way I could truly appreciate. I know the characters found some of what they were looking for in the end, but I am not quite sure how they got there. I finished the novel feeling like I missed something important.
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Oct 11, 2010 Maia added it

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, germany

Part of my 'understanding Germany' list of books--though it barely qualifies, since it's written by an American. The story is the relationship between a post-WWII German artist (that generation for whom the historical implications of Nazism are still nascent and still half hidden, unlike years later) and what the writer positions as his 'muse', though for me the word doesn't really convey the connection. This girl is, a tad too conveniently, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors: she the link...more Part of my 'understanding Germany' list of books--though it barely qualifies, since it's written by an American. The story is the relationship between a post-WWII German artist (that generation for whom the historical implications of Nazism are still nascent and still half hidden, unlike years later) and what the writer positions as his 'muse', though for me the word doesn't really convey the connection. This girl is, a tad too conveniently, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors: she the link between the two, innocent as it is or should be, posits one against the other and vice-versa. Said link is the elephant in the room, and it is not an elephant that can be easily ignored.

As always with these stories, the moral underpinning is: How far does collective guilt go? How far SHOULD it go? If your grandparents were Nazis and my grandparents were concentration-camp Jews, are you my enemy and am I your victim? Or none of the above? And as always, I'm fascinated by the moral interplay--and its continual correlation to love, power, desire and self-awareness (or lack thereof). One could take and juxtapose almost the same paradigm to so many different situations: the post-segregation South in the US, for example. And I happened to have experienced a little of it, in my own life, so it rings true.

Which brings me to the deepest, most complex, troubling and possibly painful aspect of collective guilt: how does it finally vanish or, if not, how does it get passed down the generations? An evil grandfather so easily corrupts his child who, as a parent, in turn corrupts the children who follow. The human psyche is fragile and quite readily malleable: it will believe pretty much anything at the right age and under the right set of circumstances, or brainwashing.

Once, when I was a teen, I fell in love with a sexy 'older man' (25!) who was--in hindsight--obviously unsuitable. My father has horrified but had brought me up to know my own mind. The possibility that 'my own mind' would lead me straight to an asshole, though, horrified him even more. He did everything he could to dissuade without coming right out with it--or forbidding me, which would of course have made it worse--and only lost it when time passed and nothing worked. So one day, unable to bear it any longer, he sat me down and told me that this young man's family were known Nazis (they were), dictatorship collaborators (also) and anti-Semites (ditto). 'I'm not Jewish," I said, confused. 'Your mother's father's father was Jewish, and that's enough for an anti-Semite,' my dad said. 'One day in the middle of a fight he'll lose control and call you a fucking Jew.' I was horrified--but at my dad, whom at that moment I saw as old-fashioned and outdated. However, only a few weeks later, this guy and I indeed had an awful fight and he did indeed 'lose control' and call me a 'fucking Jew.'

And this is exactly what 'Blue Nude' reminded me of as I read it.

And yet, the novel has not entirely convinced me, which is why I haven't yet decided how many stars to give it.
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Sep 20, 2010 April rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction

BLUE NUDE BY Elizabeth Rosner is a historical fiction set in San Francisco and Point Reyes in the 21st century. It is well written and fast paced. It has secrets, truths coming to light, sexy art work, muse, artist, failed relationships, a former Israili soldier, a German Nazi descendent, despair, fear, hope, World War II, Holocaust story, guilt, and forgiveness. A German washed up artist and a former Israili soldier/model learn redemption, reconciliation and forgiveness together. Merav, the for...more

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Dec 07, 2009 Charles Matthews rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review originally ran in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A German artist and an Israeli model meet in a San Francisco classroom. That's the set-up for Berkeley writer Elizabeth Rosner's novel Blue Nude, which tracks the growing fascination that each has with the other.

Both are stuck on the peripheries of their careers. Danzig, a 58-year-old painter who once had considerable success, is blocked creatively and supports himself by teaching. Merav, who is half his age, studied to be an artist, bu...more This review originally ran in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A German artist and an Israeli model meet in a San Francisco classroom. That's the set-up for Berkeley writer Elizabeth Rosner's novel Blue Nude, which tracks the growing fascination that each has with the other.

Both are stuck on the peripheries of their careers. Danzig, a 58-year-old painter who once had considerable success, is blocked creatively and supports himself by teaching. Merav, who is half his age, studied to be an artist, but now works as a life model.

And both have chosen exile because of traumatic events. The death of a childhood friend and former lover in a terrorist attack impelled Merav to leave Israel. She packed "as little as possible in order to arrive in a new country without much memory of anything." Danzig's alienation from Germany began with a terrible loss in his childhood and was made worse by the ongoing battles with his father, a former Nazi, who opposed his art studies. Danzig felt a "desperate need to place an ocean and then a continent between himself and his past, his father and the Fatherland." He, too, believes that he "can forget anything and everything, a series of doors closed and locked behind him."

But the history of the countries they left keeps those doors from staying shut. When Merav learns that he's German, "she isn't sure she can manage to stay in the room. She's stunned by this almost primal response, her coiled readiness for flight." Later she will recall, "The poses she took in the first session were all in the shape of fear: a woman turning away from something threatening; a body in flight; the curled up shape of self-defense, protecting the heart, the belly." Danzig is not at all blind to this. When he learns her name, he reflects, "It is of course an Israeli name, so she is Jewish, as he had guessed. No wonder she will not look him in the eye." And so they begin a wary dance toward acceptance of each other.

The risk of a premise like this one is that the novel can devolve either into sentimental melodrama, a kind of beauty-and-beast romance, or into a moralizing fable, in which the characters wear labels like Fear and Guilt as they move toward Reconciliation. Rosner is too good a writer to fall into either trap, and she avoids them here largely because of her sensitive and complex portrait of Merav, whose delicate balance of vulnerability and strength Rosner captures in her reflections on Merav's work as a nude model: "Anatomy is more than bones and muscles. Her body is an abstraction, a narrative designing itself in the air." When Merav poses, "She is unveiled down to bare skin, exposed that far, but the world inside her body, the universe of dream and sensation that lives beneath her bones stays covered. All of that belongs only to her."

Merav's attitude toward Danzig is shaped by the experience of her grandmother, Esther, which is told in the novel's prologue: Esther survived the Nazis because a Dutch farmer hid her in his barn; a German soldier discovered her there, but let her go because he was so struck by her beauty. Merav imagines how her mother and grandmother would protest about her posing for Danzig. She "silently talks back to them. Hadn't Esther once grudgingly admitted it was possible there had been a few good Germans? That soldier – wasn't he deserving of credit for saving her life? It's just there were never enough of the good ones, Esther would retort." The suspense of the novel hinges on Merav's trust that Danzig is one of the good ones.

Two of Danzig's former models became his mistresses, and he was a cad in his treatment of them, so we have reason to feel concern for Merav when she agrees to pose for him alone in his studio in Point Reyes. But the working out of the novel's central tension would be more compelling if Rosner had been able to make Danzig come off the page the way Merav does. He's set up too mechanically as the stereotypical cold and authoritarian German, who enjoys the fact that his students "jumped at the sound of his voice," and who overhears them calling him "The Kaiser." Rosner seems unable to make the kind of intimate imaginative connection with Danzig that she does with Merav. This is crucially evident when, in telling his story, she departs from his point of view – which she never does when telling Merav's story – to see events through the eyes of Danzig's sister, Margot, whose fate is the supposed key to his character.

Rosner's critically praised first novel, The Speed of Light, also dealt with the heavy weight that the past can impose on survivors. In that respect, it was more successful than Blue Nude, whose story is too frail to hold up the larger themes – the tragic history, the struggle to heal and to reconcile – that intrude upon it. But the grace of this novel is less in its totality than in its details, the insights and illuminations that abundantly reveal the author's intelligence and compassion. This is a writer whose promise here exceeds her achievement, but that promise is splendid.
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Oct 15, 2010 Diane rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: a-favorite-read

Did you ever read a book that was so good, that you read it twice, back to back? Such was the case for me with Blue Nude, by Elizabeth Rosner. A short novel, just 200 pages, but a fantastic book that completely wowed me.

The story is about two artists -- initially strangers whose lives, past and present intersect after a chance meeting. Danzig is a 58 year old German-born painter. He was born days after WWII to a cold and abusive father and a submissive mother. Danzig and his sister Margot were w...more Did you ever read a book that was so good, that you read it twice, back to back? Such was the case for me with Blue Nude, by Elizabeth Rosner. A short novel, just 200 pages, but a fantastic book that completely wowed me.

The story is about two artists -- initially strangers whose lives, past and present intersect after a chance meeting. Danzig is a 58 year old German-born painter. He was born days after WWII to a cold and abusive father and a submissive mother. Danzig and his sister Margot were witness to the cruelties of their father, who although never fully revealed, appeared to play a significant role in the elimination of the Jews during the war. To cope with the ways of his demanding father, at an early age, Danzig found comfort in painting and art.

"Still, his father always found ways of tormenting him, made sure he was given jobs to do before he was allowed to eat his meal or play or read a book. He was inspected for cleanliness in the mornings before going to school, and he was sent to bed without food if he ever left a job half finished--or worse, if he had said he had done something when actually he hadn't"........................."He was on his own, and his father was the enemy, and it was all very clear and without alteration."

After tragedy strikes, and only unhappy memories remain, Danzig leaves Germany for America. He moves to San Francisco to pursue a career in art. He works as an art professor at the Art Institute in San Francisco.

Merav, is a young, Israeli born woman who makes a living as a nude model. When she finds work posing for Danzig's art class, she is careful not to speak fearing that Danzig will pick up on her accent, as she has with his. Merav, too, has had her share of tragedy, and years later the nightmares still haunt her. There is an unspoken interest by the two that keeps them connected. She feels at peace while posing for Danzig's class. For Danzig, in Merav he finds his creativeness returning after 5+ years. He asks her to pose for him privately in his studio. Merav is totally in her comfort zone when posing for art students........

"She felt like a swallow, dipping and soaring at twilight. She felt her body touched without being touched".

"Sometimes Merav thinks that modeling is one of the ways her physical life resembles that of her childhood on the kibbutz."

With out giving too much of the story away, I'll just say that I was completely taken by this story. The writing is beautiful, the characters so well fleshed out; I felt deeply for both of them. A redemptive story about the power of the human spirit as each individual tries to cope with the demons of their past. Blue Nude, is a story you will not easily forget.

Originally published in hardcover by Ballantine in May 2006 and reissued in 2010 in paperback by Gallery Books (Simon & Schuster). I can't believe that this wonderful book has not received more accolades. Do yourself a favor and read this book, you will be glad you did.(less)

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Oct 19, 2010 Shannon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

A story about a mean, cold, difficult-to-like German artist named Danzig who teaches at an art institute. He doesn't like the students and he's bitter that he hasn't created any art in many years because he needs a muse. He meets a beautiful nude model (Merav) who is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. The story jumps back in time to tell about their histories.

Danzig is difficult to love in the beginning. He might be mean and cold because he is angry at himself or his past, but worst of...more

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Sep 16, 2010 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

From my book review blog Rundpinne . These are my words and opinions and belong solely to me.

"Beautiful, poetic and written in a lyrical manner, Blue Nude by Elizabeth Rosner is an astonishingly brilliant novel about love, loss, and healing. Danzig is a German-born painter struggling day-to-day teaching others to paint, while he himself cannot. Will Merav, an Israeli born model who arrives in his class to pose, become the muse he has been looking for to reconnect, heal and resume painting? Both...more

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Apr 03, 2011 Sara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, traumatically-beautiful

I bought this on a whim from a clearance bin at Books-A-Million. I didn't have high expectations - in fact, I was unsure if it qualified as romance or fiction.

That being said, I was pleasantly surprised, especially by the lyrical, sometimes uncomfortable nature of the prose. That is how I prefer my "literary" fiction prose, after all. It flowed and swept across continents, reminding us of the discomfort of broken ideas and broken hearts, of old prejudices and new ones, of war and pain and creati...more

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Nov 07, 2011 Ida rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was simply amazing. Rosen has a way with words. She has spectacular mastery over imagery and manages to sculpt each sentence carefully and lovingly, but naturally and forcefully at the same time. The subject matter is poignant as well. Danzig, a German painter, meets Merav, an Israeli artist and art model. No, they don't fall in love despite their differences, and no, it isn't simple. Inner struggles are revealed, but only to us, the readers. The characters remain distant and shielded....more

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Oct 13, 2011 Pauline rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: romance

Liked it mostly because of the lyrical descriptions of art. painting and the creative experience.

BLURB:Once a prominent painter, Danzig now shares his wisdom and technique with students at San Francisco’s Art Institute—yet his own canvases remain empty. When he meets Israeli-born Merav, the beautiful new model for his class, he senses she may reignite his artistic passion. Merav moved to California to escape the danger and violence of the Middle East, yet she cannot outrun her fears about the pa...more

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Oct 11, 2010 Once Upon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Danzig is a 58 year old washed up German artist who teaches his techniques at an art institute in San Francisco. Merav is young and a former Israili soldier turned model moves to California to forget about her past. She ends up filling a substitute position and ends up in Danzig’s art class as the muse. They are both trying to forget about there past it’s what brings them together.

It is a well written and fast paced novel. It has sexy art work, secrets, failed relationships, hope, World War II,...more

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Aug 02, 2010 Carla Ford rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Survivors of tragedy must see everything forever after through different eyes, and this book starkly demonstrated this. The two main characters, Danzig and Merav, have both suffered the loss of loved ones through war,Merav directly and Danzig indirectly. Both are emotionally and artistically stunted, neither character generated much warmth of feeling in the reader, and maybe that was intentional on the part of the author. The overriding feeling in the novel was one of stark emotion, and maybe be...more

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Dec 01, 2010 Harriet rated it 5 of 5 stars

Such a moving work of fiction! It explores, with gentle yet intense clarity, the ways in which two characters' personal histories emerge out of a haunting silence into the safe space created through their work together. A fierce German artist and the beautiful, young Israeli artist who has become his model negotiate a charged landscape of grief, fury, and despair, to see whether transformation is possible in the quiet, powerful realm of artistic creation. I am a huge fan of Elizabeth Rosner's wr...more

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May 29, 2011 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: female-authors, middle-east, north-america, europe, warfare

Sometimes here in the US we forget what constant warfare in Europe did to the populace, their children born during the war, and after. It's easy to acknowledge the scale of things such as the Holocaust, and not have to think about the repercussions for your family and their children and their children's children.

This book brings that back home, by having as main characters an older German artist (born just after the war) and an Israeli model (two generations after the war). A sexy, hypnotic, and...more

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Jan 22, 2012 Stephanie Salerno rated it 2 of 5 stars

Liked the attempt that was made to tell the story in a backward manner with flashbacks in the middle and bookending 'Present' sections. Parts of the story were touching, other tragic. Truth is, Michael Ondaatje's 'The English Patient' was written in a similar fashion and 1000x more effective. Easy read with difficult themes, gets you thinking in any case. The Prologue is very exciting, but by the end of the book, unless you read it in one sitting, it's hard to place the connection (I didn't read...more

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Feb 29, 2012 Mindy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club

This was really a 4.5 for me. I enjoyed the way the author went back and forth in time and the reader uncovered the characters lives and connections in alternating layers. The juxtaposition of model/artist and their relationship/need for each other was an interesting sensual and emotional way to relate Danzig and Merav and their approaches to art. I loved the ending where Danzig's and Merav's feelings of emptiness (their personal blank canvases) were pushed towards a kind of completion, a feelin...more

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Oct 10, 2010 Jennie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: gr-first-reads, historical-fiction, read-in-october, read-in-2010

Rarely comes a book so beautifully written that you feel as if you are reading the textual version of a breathtaking painting. This book is that type of book, lyrical prose pregnant with deep emotions and meaning. The main characters carry within them pain and sorrow, some that has been passed down from the choices their parents made long before they were even born.

This novel is a story of labels, accents and the struggle of identifying with the past. Both, Danzig and Merav had childhood's marre...more

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Oct 15, 2010 Karalee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads, historical-fiction, fiction-general

This book is as much a work of art as it is a book about art and artists. The language flows like water and the sum is much bigger than its parts. The book is very simple from the flow of plot but is packed with complexity and emotion behind the scenes. The book centers around two main characters, an artist and an artists' model. The artist, Danzig, is German and the model is Israeli and both have dark histories surrounding the Holocaust/WWII and the historical animosities between their cultures...more

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Mar 17, 2012 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: jewish-fiction

So thrilled to be taking this off of my "currently reading" shelf after a year!

I put off starting this book for various reasons along the way, but in the end I enjoyed it overall. It's pretty apparent from the get go that Rosner is a modernist (she lists Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham among her inspirations, as if one couldn't pick up on that from the strictly stream-of-consciousness POV points.) I love modernism too, and I thought it really served the middle of this story. I love how we...more So thrilled to be taking this off of my "currently reading" shelf after a year!

I put off starting this book for various reasons along the way, but in the end I enjoyed it overall. It's pretty apparent from the get go that Rosner is a modernist (she lists Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham among her inspirations, as if one couldn't pick up on that from the strictly stream-of-consciousness POV points.) I love modernism too, and I thought it really served the middle of this story. I love how we went backwards, not forwards in time to better understand these characters. I also really appreciate how deftly Rosner pulled off the Danzig/(Third Reich) Germany and Merav/Israel comparison, because obviously this is a hugely sensitive subject. She sought to explore how these two characters came to San Fransisco to escape the tensions within themselves vs their national origins, but obviously Israel is under real threat from her neighbors whereas the Germans had to make up threats to justify genocide. So true to a modernist style Rosner had two people die in place of her protagonists--Merav's childhood friend and lover, Yossi, was killed in a terrorist attack, and Margot, Danzig's sister and truly the most modernist construction in the book, pretty much took her life for Germany's sins. (On a related note while reading Margot's chapters I realized I'd had very little education into how regular German citizens fiercely embraced their society's view of patriotism during WWII. I rather wish that Yossi would have had some POV chapters, too, which could have better explored the Israeli sense of patriotism from someone who chose to stay in the army.)

Where it didn't work so much for me was at the beginning and the end--"the present" part of the story where Merav and Danzig meet each other and supposedly form some kind of relationship that touches upon both of their national and personal pasts. ...except that during all those times that Merav posed for Danzig they never learned more about each other than the identities of Israeli and German; they both remained locked in their own heads, pouring over narrative that was better covered in the middle. Obviously this is a very visual book with beautiful descriptions, particularly because it is about art. And I appreciated the fact that Merav reminded Danzig of his sister, the first "blue nude" he saw whom he also referred to as "M." But none of this was explored in a very conclusive and satisfying way. As much as I love modernism, the final act in particular deserved something a bit more concrete.(less)

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Aug 30, 2010 Brynne Betz rated it 5 of 5 stars

You breathe in the subtle scent. With greater force now, for some part of you desperately hungers for more. Your body turns floppy, its strength moving inward away from the surface, into the soul.

Blue Nude invites you to meet your essence. Its elixir races through your veins to tantalize your slumbering aches, those lost behind your self-constructed mirror.

Poetic, seductive and secretly devourable, Rosner has woven a tapestry with life's deepest, darkest, most life-affirming threads, giving her...more

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May 12, 2010 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

I loved a lot of the writing in this novel, especially where the author imagines and describes the artistic process. It is a novel built more on juxtapostion and character than on plot. Rosner builds her tale around Danzig, a German painter and Merav, an Israeli model. Danzig's story felt clearer and more powerful to me though Rosner spends a lot of time on Merav's story. The closing pages are again a study in juxtapostion as Danzig learns he must hold himself back physically in order to break o...more

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Sep 04, 2012 Rebecca rated it 4 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this story of Danzig, an aging bitter German artist who can no longer "create", and Merav, the talented Israeli nude model who "ran away" from her home country. The story jumps through time and point of view but is wonderfully engaging and quite moving - there is such a striking juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, history and art. Its a short and easy read that i couldn't put it down.

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Jan 05, 2011 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: milpitas-library-book-club

Only on page 52 but already drawn in. Upon completion I will say that it certainly held my attention because I read it in two days with little reading time. The jumping back & forth through time was a bit distracting to me although I see why she did it. I also don't enjoy reading about suicide since my life has been touched by that particular tragedy and I don't need any reminders as I already think about it too often.

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Sep 24, 2011 Monty J Heying rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction

Regarding Barry S.'s comment...

He has a right to his opinion, of course, but...

Barry apparently seeks idealism rather than realism. Look around. The walls are dripping with relationships that don't go anywhere. Look at the divorce rates. I had no problem, relating to the book at all, and there are plenty of people like me who, on some level, seek love but don't know how to give or receive it. Or they attach so many conditions to it that love is blurred beyond recognition.

It would be nice if ever...more

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Jul 11, 2011 Gill rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Rosner is a very fine writer, a true stylist who's writing voice is in perfect pitch from the start. I picked this up Friday afternoon and could hardly put it down. Finished it Sunday afternoon. I haven't read her more celebrated novel. I may look for it eventually. I love Rosner's voice and I think the situation she's invented here is fascinating. But in the end, she cuts it short.

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Nov 23, 2010 Sherry rated it 3 of 5 stars

How much of our past trauma influences our choices when it comes to romantic partners, desire and intimacy? This book seems to imply trauma trumps positive situations when it comes to love. I liked how the protagonists and other characters visualized how they (as artists) see their art, work and themselves through their art. Wasn't sure whether to rate it 3 or 4 stars. I think its because I loved the beginning of the book more than the ending.

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Feb 21, 2012 Lschneier rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is a fast moving tale about a German painter Danzig and an Israelian artist nudist Mergav who get together to find themselves. We flow back into their lives as they struggle with past loves and secrets. The beauty of art and music flow with the author's words. But I could not love this book because the characters were not sympathetic.

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Feb 11, 2013 Emma rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is a character study of an artist and his model which explores some aspects of fate and its juxtaposition with art and history. The artist is an expat German and his model has left Israel. Both of these characters had parents who were embroiled in WWII. They leave to get away from the hatred and bitterness and find each other.

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title link	preview: Blue Nude: A Novel
avg rating	preview: Blue Nude: A Novel Goodreads rating: 3.54 (243 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7890530-blue-nude?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1270502452l/7890530.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7890530-blue-nude?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Blue Nude: A Novel by Elizabeth Rosner[/url]

Blue Nude: A Novel

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