Saturday, January 23, 2010

*THE SWAN THIEVES* by Elizabeth Kostova


Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe has a perfectly ordered life—solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient. In response, Marlowe finds himself going beyond his own legal and ethical boundaries to understand the secret that torments this genius, a journey that will lead him into the lives of the women closest to Robert Oliver and toward a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.Ranging from American museums to the coast of Normandy, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, from young love to last love, THE SWAN THIEVES is a story of obsession, the losses of history, and the power of art to preserve human hope.
***Rate this 3/5. I so wanted to love this book but I could not. I compared it to her first book, The Historian, and it came up very short. This book went on and on, back and forth in time, between the psychiatrist, the wife, the other woman, and a mysterious 18th century couple and in the end, nothing was really resolved. This was 561 pages and rather a boring read.

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