Wynne employs all the devices of an expert roman policier.
A spectacular story of vengeance and fraud told with verve and style by British journalist Wynne, translator to English of Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, 2000, among others.
The incredible story of how Dutch painter Han van Meegeren avenged himself on supercilious art critics by becoming an expert forger of Vermeer and fooling the Nazis conveys a valuable lesson in how we see, notes Wynne in this methodical, suspenseful tale. A largely self-taught artist with reactionary views out of sync with modernist fashion, van Meegeren, from the city of Deventer, obsessively taught himself the arcane knowledge of 17th-century painting (the use of pigments, ores and metals) while studying architecture in Delft. At first hailed as a promising young talent, he was passed over as a fogey, then left his first wife and scandalously married Joanna Oelermans, former wife of esteemed art critic Karel de Boer. Moving from art restoration to copying the masters, van Meegeren devoted himself to forgery, and decided to choose as his “victim” Vermeer, an artist long neglected with a paucity of output whose rediscovery was largely due to the writing of French critic Théophile Thoré in the mid-19th century. Working out of a house he purchased with Joanna in Nice, van Meegeren stripped a second-rate period canvas, employed only materials Vermeer would have used, reproduced the craquelure to make it completely convincing, and in essence created a lost 17th-century religious masterpiece of his own genius: The Supper at Emmaus, after a Caravaggio he had seen. Next came the job of authentication, readily supplied by the respected aging critic Abraham Bredius, and soon the phony masterpiece was bought for a fabulous sum and hung in The Hague’s Boijmans Gallery. With the advent of war, and Hitler’s determination to own a Vermeer of his own, van Meegeren’s knockoffs soon made their way into Hermann Göring’s collection. The forger’s trajectory from wealthy charlatan to national hero makes for delicious reading.
Wynne employs all the devices of an expert roman policier.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-58234-593-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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