A Book Review: Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

So I told myself that I was so going to review all books I read this year, and then promptly began the year by re-reading some of my favorites that I wouldn't necessarily want to publicly claim were my favorites. So, I realized that I needed to revise my goal (because it's early in the year, and we all know year-long goals are works in progress until right around July, when we have whittled and tweaked them down from dramatic to achievable. My book review goal will be the same. For all new released books that I finish this year, I will review. . . and I might throw in a review for some of those old stand-by favorites, too.

Well, I chose a tough book to start out. I mean, a really  tough book for me to review, simply because I'm still not really sure how I feel about it. Here is an elegant plot summary from the Washington Post: "Robert Oliver, a charismatic and hugely talented contemporary American painter in his early 40s with a style reminiscent of the impressionists. Tall and powerfully built, with the near-mythic "great wingspan" of an archangel or a Greek god, Robert suffers from the all-too-human miseries of artistic obsession. He has recently been arrested for trying to attack a painting called "Leda" in the 19th-century collection at the National Gallery of Art, and lands in a psychiatric facility called Goldengrove in Rockville. There he's assigned to a doctor named Andrew Marlow, himself a painter who, until now, has regarded his demanding psychiatric practice as merely his day job. After a brief interview with Marlow, Robert refuses to speak for the 11 months he remains at Goldengrove, expressing himself only by compulsively sketching and painting the same mysterious figure: a beautiful young woman in period Victorian clothing. Baffled and fascinated, Marlow embarks on a not-entirely professional quest to understand the origins of Robert's fixation, traveling to North Carolina, New York and as far as France and Mexico to interview the people who might shed light on the painter's silent mania. Kostova alternates chapters featuring Marlow's first-person voice with those of several others -- sometimes, as in "The Historian," in the quaint, slightly fussy form of confessional letters. These perspectives include those of Robert's ex-wife (a former painter) and an art-school student with whom he became involved for a time. Interspersed among the modern voices are those of a young woman in late-1870s Paris who is an impressionist painter named Béatrice de Clerval, along with her elderly uncle, yet another painter."

Now, for my opinion on what I read, Kostova is an academic--she is trained in research. You can literally feel all the personal research and study that was behind every casual reference events, historical or works, artistic. Her book is an amalgamation of all her work, and I think a reader cannot but help appreciate and respect that. She is a craftsman, who takes great pride in the details. Her syntax, diction impeccable. Yet, it is this very craft that, I think, alienates me from her work. I felt no great connection to these people. They blended from one into the other, nothing to hold them in my mind as meaningful and distinct. Unfortunately, I believe, that is part of Kostova's theme. In obsession, grief, love, and art--we are all the same. We are united in our obsessions. I can buy that. Shoot, I love things on tragic, unrequited love. I dig it. It speaks to me, unfortunately, in very, very familiar tones. :) But at the cost of this theme, I got no great sense of personality or developed any kind of love or understanding for the characters, and alienation from true understanding, especially when we are talking about love affairs--painful, consuming love, is just too big a sticking point to get over. The obsession didn't feel real, justified, or understandable. Frankly, the work lacked the empathy of experience. There was too much research, and not enough from the heart. I wanted to feel the passion, and I all I felt was the work that went into getting the description of passion completely accurate.  2.5 stars out of 5