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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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