This book is WONDERFUL - I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED it!!
INTRIGUE, MYSTERY, ROMANCE, DECEIT, ART, FORGERY - and the story itself is MASTERFULLY CRAFTED.
I hope you can mentally visualize paintings by the DUTCH MASTERS, but if not, it helps to use GOOGLE to look up ones mentioned in the book. I did that for many that I was not familiar with.
Set in the mid-1600's, late 1950's and the year 2000, the story jumps back and forth, but it isn't confusing at all. The book was so good that I didn't want it to end. I immediately re-read it chronologically, which gave me a different perspective - but I preferred the way the author wrote it. Of course!!
Naturally I don't want to spoil the story for anyone, so I'll stop here but I WILL share a few excerpts that "grabbed me".........
Pg 139
"Betting on a flower's future blooming always seemed to him like betting on the motion of clouds."
Pg 183
"As a patent attorney I follow the history of inventions. The guy who filed the first zipper patent in the nineteenth century called it the Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure. For obvious reasons that name never caught on..."
Pg 205
"She was sixteen and being courted by the local boys. My husband was forever finding ribbons tied to the fence-post as a sign of some secret love promise."
Pg 212
"How remarkable, she thinks, the way paintings trap light and time. Father Barry used to call it starlight, the passage of pigments on canvas across the centuries."
Pg 219
"An open mouth was a sign of sexual availability in Dutch culture at the time. A signifier of sorts."
Pg 234
"Wasn't the promise of immense wealth a cryogenic cloister in which to grow old? Couldn't decades of eating the best foods, taking the best vacations, and sleeping in the finest beds prevent the slumping of the frame and the spackling of the skin? All these years, she has kept him in his forties."
Pg 262
"You carry grudges and regrets for decades, tend them like gravesite vigils, then even after you lay them down they linger on the periphery, waiting to ambush you all over again."
ENJOY!!
JOAN
Sounds amazing Joan, and love that you have picked some fav quotes. I do that and it's fun to refer back to and remember the book all over again. I do love a non-chrono book where you have to work a bit for the answers!
ReplyDeleteRebecca, if you like this kind of book, try Alice Hoffman's "THE THIRD ANGEL". It's 3 chapters, three different years, going backwards in time. I really enjoyed it and then re-read it backwards (Chapter 3, 2, 1) and felt a different sense of empathy for the characters. xo
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