StarAstrologer - Books : The Forgery of Venus: A Novel
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780060874483
ISBN: 0060874481
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: April 01, 2008
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: April 01, 2008
Sales Rank: 53198
Studio: William Morrow
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Product Description:
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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I'm a sucker for novels about art forgery and faked antiques. I've thoroughly enjoyed Jonathan Gash's Lovejoy series and Iain Pears Art History mysteries featuring Jonathan Argyll and the Italian art theft squad. So seeing "The Forgery of Venus" was a no-brainer for picking up, but this book was more than an art scam rip-off; it's a kaleidoscope look inside the "hero's" head that makes this a masterpiece read.
Artist Chaz Wilmot has little regard for modern painting technique: "Anyone ... Read More
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Having enjoyed Gruber's "Book of Air and Shadows", I was looking forward to "The Forgery of Venus" and I was not disappointed. The story grabbed me from the very beginning and didn't have a slow spot all the way through.
The book has an unusual perspective, the first person narration is presented as a recording made by artist Chaz Wilmot, Jr. for a friend and is a recounting of his experiences and memories of his involvement with the discovery (or is it forgery?) of a previously unknown ... Read More
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I have liked everything Gruber writes (especially Night of the Jaguar and Tropic of Night). He is smart, imaginative, his ideas are provocative and go outside the boundaries of our current socialization. This book tackles the springs of creativeness. His artist hero is a great imitator of old masters. He is not a forger but a reinventor of new art in old techniques. The artist merges with Velasquez after taking a new drug being tested and ... Read the book, it's worth it.
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This is a fantastic book. It keeps you guessing. Classic Michael Gruber. You just can't put it down.
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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.
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