The Swan Thieves Book

4.5 stars

I am by no means artistic or creative, but this seductively written book immersed me in the world of art in a way that left me simply aching for more. I wanted to jump in the car, take a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the National Gallery, and sit quietly with the beauty of the paintings all around me. The world and the mind of the artist appealed to me in a way that pleasantly surprised me and wholly captivated me.

Robert Oliver, a notable artist, has attempted to attack a painting in the National Gallery and is now consigned to the psychiatric care of Dr. Andrew Marlow. What would drive a man to commit such an act - in particular a man that lives and breathes art himself? An obsession is soon revealed; an obsession that mystifies and leaves both reader and physician thoroughly intrigued. We learn much of this story with alternate first-person narratives, Dr. Marlow's among them. Marlow is a caring and gentle middle-aged man, a bit of an amateur painter himself. He is determined to unravel the mystery surrounding this complicated and silent new patient; he is a dedicated physician who enjoys the simple pleasures in life.

"Now when I dream big, it's for my patients, that they may eventually feel that ordinary cheerfulness of kitchen and orange, of putting their feet up in front of a television documentary, or the even bigger pleasures I imagine for them of holding down a job, coming home sane to their families, seeing the realities of a room instead of a terrible panorama of faces. For myself, I have learned to dream small - a leaf, a new paintbrush, the flesh of an orange, and the details of my wife's beauty, a glistening at the corners of her eyes, the soft hair of her arms in our living room's lamplight when she sits reading."

We hear from two women that know Robert quite intimately and the character development is superb - an element that is essential to my enjoyment of most any book. A dual storyline of a nineteenth century female Impressionist painter is also introduced very slowly, first by a series of letters interspersed in the main narrative and later by chapters devoted to this portion of the plot. A forbidden love is both haunting and tender. The mystery surrounding this account may be the key to unlocking the mind of Marlow's gifted and troubled patient.

Initially, I wished that we had a bit from Robert's point of view, but that desire was quickly subdued when I realized that his narrative would have lessened much of the slow-building suspense. The shifts in narrator and in time in no way confused me and were done seamlessly and with purpose. Elizabeth Kostova's love for and knowledge of art shines through in this novel and may very well make you enthralled by the magic of the brush as well. If you are accustomed to a fast-paced mystery, then this may not be a book for you. But if you delight in a well-crafted plot that is peeled away layer by layer, then this makes the grade for sure. Exquisite prose and a dose of romance without being overly sentimental furthered my overall enjoyment. I have read Kostova's The Historian, which I liked though a bit less than this, and I really wish she would write another!

"The painter shows muscles through skin, through clothing, but he or she depicts something else as well, something both elusive and immutable: the warmth of the body, its heat and pulsing reality, life. And, by extension, its movements, its soft sounds, the tide of feeling that rises and floods us when we are loved enough to forget ourselves."