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The Swan Thieves (Paperback)

by Elizabeth Kostova (Author)
2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 576 pages
  • Publisher: Sphere; Export ed edition (15 Jan 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1847442412
  • ISBN-13: 978-1847442413
  • Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 14.8 x 4.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 300,596 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

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. Desperate to understand the secret that torments this genius, Marlowe embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism. Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities 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, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve hope.

About the Author

Elizabeth Kostova graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress for The Historian.

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Customer Reviews

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2.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars after "the historian", slightly disappointing, 12 Jan 2010
By Paul Grainger (Lincoln, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Swan Thieves (Hardcover)
Elizabeth Kostova's second novel (after her very successful `The Historian') is about art, love, madness and obsession. Working from the present to the past and back again, it tells the story of a quest.

Andrew Marlow is a psychiatrist in private practice who agrees to take on the case of Robert Oliver, a famed artist suffering from deranged behaviour in that he'd attempted to deface a work of art in Washington D.C.s National Gallery.

There is a problem, however, because Robert refuses to talk, though he does give Marlow permission to speak to others who know him about his condition.

This permission leads to the first of two storylines. Robert seems to have an obsession with painting over and over again the portrait of a certain woman. In order to work out her identity, Marlow asks for help from Robert's ex-wife, Kate and then his lover, Mary. They each provide Marlow with information in the form of their own narratives.

The second storyline is linked to the first by a package of letters written in French that Robert gives to Marlow, who has them translated. They turn out to be a one-sided correspondence between a little known painter, Beatrice de Cherval, and her uncle Olivier Vignot that centres on the 19th century French Impressionist scene.

These letters reveal two terrible secrets that turn Marlow's investigation on its head. What started as a dispassionate attempt to cure Robert Oliver of his demons becomes an obsessive quest to unravel a mystery that has a bearing on the lives of Robert, Kate and Mary as well as himself.

The author has created a fascinating, if uneven, story. Much is made of the present day happenings but it is the historical events that carry the most weight. This imbalance may disappoint some readers, though it is not to say The Swan Thieves is not worth reading. Three stars.
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12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Long, tedious, unconvincing - probably another winner from Kostova, 2 Dec 2009
By Keris Nine - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
At first glance, Elizabeth Kostova's second novel would seem to owe a lot to the subject matter of Patrick McGrath in its exploration of artists and madness (Port Mungo, Asylum) - the passions that drive one to create but which leave one unsuited to the mundane acts of everyday living and love. This would appear to be the case here with Robert Oliver, an artist who has become obsessed with the image of a woman that he continually finds himself compelled to paint in minute and realistic detail, even though she doesn't physically exist - at least not in this time period...

Caught up in his own interior world, Robert becomes increasingly distant from the realities of the present-day, from his wife and children, neglectful of his duties as a father and his career as an art tutor. When he attempts to attack a canvas of Leda in the National Gallery however, he is taken into care and hospitalised for psychiatric examination. It's here that the tone of McGrath is most evident, the psychiatrist Marlow becoming overly personally involved in his examination into Robert Oliver's past, in the process appearing a little unstable and unreliable himself.

As the novel develops however the structure and themes become more recognisably those that Kostova worked through in The Historian - the influence of the past, with letters, old documents and testimonies interweaved into the narrative. Here it's letters detailing a love affair between Béatrice de Clerval and her uncle Olivier Vignot, two nineteenth century French Impressionist painters, that could hold the key to the strange behaviour of the modern day painter. And what could be the connection between Olivier Vignot and Béatrice de Clerval, a modern-day unfashionably Impressionist-influenced but nonetheless brilliant painter with 19th century anachronisms in his work?

Unfortunately what is also recognisably a characteristic of Kostova is just how long drawn-out the uneventful story is by the overly-contrived fractured narrative. The psychiatrist Marlow has the money and leisure to travel around interviewing people who he really has no business contacting, people who end up being only too willing and old-fashioned enough to reminisce about Robert in the form of written instalments that they conveniently send to him on a regular basis.

The fact is that these reminiscences, mostly romantic reflections of women in deep admiration for the rugged, silent, mysterious, lovesick artistic genius that is Robert Oliver, are deeply tedious, all of them (including also the 19th century letters and the modern-day psychiatrist) narrating in the same tone of voice, and exhibiting the same characteristics - mildly prudish, prone to instant romantic attraction and deeply jealous. If only Kostova could deliver on the central premise, then this wouldn't be so bad, but the long drawn-out resolution arrives suddenly and fails to convincingly account for Robert's mad obsession.

None of the author's failings which are so evident here prevented The Historian from being a huge success however, so while it might not be to my taste, there's no reason to think that The Swan Thieves won't be just as popular.
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