Reviews for Strange Jazz

The average rating for Strange Jazz based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-02 00:00:00 Randy Phillips Book Review The Forgery of Venus represents Michael Gruber's fictitious foray into the world of representational art, aesthetics, forgeries, galleries, and art criticism. Meet Chaz Wilmont, an artist and our narrator within a narrator, the vehicle - a lemon - through which Gruber delivers his novel. Chaz speaks to you, the actual narrator, in the first person, through a series of sound files he recorded onto CD for you to listen to; and as with a lot of second-hand vehicles he breaks down often. You might say this is a novel about madness as witnessed from within the mind of he that is going mad. It is a story of an astonishing representational painter who feels he is born into the wrong time; a time of post modernism, kitsch, pop-art, and artistic and critical pretentiousness surrounding the abstract; a world in which technique, drawing skills and true representation in art are dead. Chaz enters the novel indifferent to it all much as the following passage is descriptive of his ambivalence: Slotsky was showing a kid named Emil Mono, big square tricolored abstracts in the loose dramatic style of Motherwell. One ground color, a blob of another color, and some blobs and streaks of a third color, perfectly respectable work, suitable for corporate lobbies, hotel meeting rooms, and the Whiteney Biennial. I really have no problem at all with work like this, in most cases a kind of wallpaper, anodyne, meaningless, or rather announcing the fact that meaning no longer inheres in painting. Of what ailment is indifference indicative? When what you love is denigrated and abused as if finding a beautiful woman with whom you had a relationship leaning against a grimy wall, in a mini-skirt, in a congested tunnel where she may be bought? What behavior might it lead to? Depression? Amorality? Alcoholism and drug abuse? Yes! Of course! And so we meet Chaz Wilmont, who struggles to just be, to survive in a modern world, an art whore who delves into substance abuse, a behavior born out of his painful indifference. I'd forgotten that booze knocked you out of that state of just being, which is why drunks are always going on about the past and making promises about the future, and why AA is always preaching one day at a time. As most of my GR friends know, I read crime fiction. But I am also a seeker of unusual crime fiction and I am traveling across the world in search of inspiration only to find it right here in Seattle, with Michael Gruber. After all The Forgery of Venus is above all about the crime of forgery, about mafia criminals, Nazis, fraudulent museum purchases and greedy industrialists (and here I refer to the real meaning of "greed" - as opposed to self-interest - where one obtains what one wants at the severe cost to others, by stepping across dead bodies to get it). Representational art may well be considered dead but this does not mean the art form and its many historical paintings aren't used to create fabulous wealth: in auctions, theft, underworld money laundering and forgeries. This is the carrot that is brought dangling before Chaz's nose, as if to say: "Your incredible talents need not be wasted. There are people who want what you do and what you have up until this point refused to do. There are people out there who understand the historical significance of a painting they might view; who understand that knowing art history lends to the enjoyment of a representational painting. There is no need to whore yourself out to advertising agencies and produce kitsch in order to survive and feed your wife and children." Every painting begins with an idea. The artist takes this idea and concretizes it into various aspects or objects that he places within the frame and onto his canvass. When we walk into a gallery or museum a subconscious communication takes place between you and the painter and it goes something like this: "I've given you the concretes," the painter says, "and now it is up to you to put them together and if I'm successful, you will within your own experiences arrive at the place where I started." (I will confine these remarks to representational art alone). Here is the painting in question: Robeky Venus by Diego Velasquez This communication is similar to what an author experiences with his readers. For example: one idea that helped trigger the novel, or is included in the novel, comes from Gruber himself: Some years ago my daughter worked on the campus of a technology firm here in Seattle and I occasionally went to lunch with her out there. On one of these occasions, we were walking down a corridor lined with glass-walled offices when I was struck by an image hanging against the glass of one of them. It was a reproduction of a Renaissance painting, a St. Sebastian, tied to a stake, pierced with arrows, looking hopefully heavenward. I was seized with curiosity as to why the inhabitant would post such an image in his office (or her, actually, for the inhabitant was at home.) As it happened, my daughter knew her, and made introductions. She was an art major, a fairly recent graduate of a good university, and she was helping the firm to organize its image holdings. I said,"I like your St. Sebastian." Blank look. I said, "The picture in your window." "Oh, is that who it is? I just liked the image." "Who is it by, do you know?" I asked "No, but I found it in that book. I could look it up." With that, she went to a copy of Gombrich's art history, in a particularly lavish, heavily illustrated edition, and threw it open in the middle, as one does with a thick volume. The page exposed showed an image of a 17th century Dutch landscape. She started to page through the book, but in the wrong direction, towards more modern art and not towards earlier. When I pointed this out to her, she said, "How do you know? I thought you said you didn't know who painted it." "I don't. But the style of the painting is from earlier in the book. You're in the 17th century there, and the Sebastian is a quattrocento painting, the 15th century, two centuries earlier." Now appeared on her face a look that suggested to me that no one had ever spoken to her about historical styles of art. I might have been speaking Welsh. She clearly did not share my sense that an understanding of where art came from and what the artist meant by it, as derived from his own historical experience, is essential to the intelligent viewing of a picture. Velasquez And so this remarkable story begins...steeped in art history: the history of a painting by Velasquez and a man who through ingesting an experimental drug travels back in time and believes he has become Velasquez. It is a story about a criminal deception, about the control some would exert over Chaz Wilmont. About people in his life who would do anything to get him to paint as he was meant to paint while profiting enormously in the process. ------------------------------------------------------- About the author Michael Gruber Are you a little bored with the conventional thriller but do you still get your entertainment from books, and are you the sort of reader that might read literary fiction but is often frustrated by the lack of a good "yarn" in such novels? Are you totally incensed at having to live in the "Cult of In-between" where your desire for the standards of literature that harbor questions posed in a serious way - questions surrounding the human condition - is in constant conflict with your craving for a good yarn; sadly consigned almost exclusively to thrillers that are formulaic and written in dull prose? Michael Gruber shares your sensibilities. It's not that he harbors the inability to write popular fiction. He's actually quite good at it. He is generally acknowledged to be the ghostwriter of the popular Robert K. Tanenbaum series of Butch Karp novels starting with No Lesser Plea and ending with Resolve. That partnership ended when Gruber realized that writing the same book over and over was boring. And as Gruber says: I'm not exactly bitching, had I stayed with that job I might be a Patricia Cornwell or a Clive Cussler by now, with seven-figure advances and the rest of that kind of life. On the subject of cults in fiction he clarifies the issue and defines it "as a writer with a relatively small number of passionately devoted fans, who never quite breaks into mass-market popularity." And it's true: since then, Michael Gruber has not written the same book twice. Otherness is a word Gruber frequently uses to describe the Cult of In-between. Having discarded popular fiction and with it its millions of followers and since "I don't do cute, and there goes another 70 million readers..." it seems to Gruber that he will never attain the sales of some of his fellow authors (though he once did arrive on the NYT best seller list). Perhaps with a movie this might change as there are cases where a cult readership arrives at popular readership via the exposure of a novel onto the silver screen. The novel, THE RETURN, (out since early September) would be an ideal vehicle for a couple of older male stars, and there's a nice ingenue role there as well. We shall see. I am pretty content with the cult as is, although I guess I could learn to like being fabulously wealthy too. ; Gruber's life reads like that of a Renaissance man. Born in NYC and a graduate of the public school system he earned a BA in English literature and after working for various small magazines in NY, he went back to City College and obtained a second BA degree in biology. Even that wasn't enough, following this he went to Miami and received a masters in marine biology. During his stint in the U.S. Army he served as a medic. In 1973 he received a Ph.D. in marine sciences, for his study of octopus behavior. Doing a 180 he worked as a chef in various NY restaurants, then he was a hippie, worked as a roadie for rock bands, was an analyst in Metropolitan Dade county, followed by the title of Director of Planning for HR; worked in D.C. in the Carter White House, Office of Science and Technology Policy; a policy analyst and speech writer for the EPA and was promptly promoted to Senior Executive Service of the U.S., the highest level of civil service. Only then did he begin writing fiction, mostly writing the novels for Robert K. Tanenbaum after having moved to Seattle. Michael Gruber is a brilliant author whose books not only serve up great prose (and as is so often the case nary a plot to go with it), but delivers on both: a plot that is brilliant, cleverly worked out, and simultaneously delving deeply into the human condition. This, while reading along in "page turning" mode. That is not easy to do :-) Michael Gruber is unique. I've only met a few that have read him, but he is an island unto his own: a brainy human being's thriller.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-02 00:00:00 Mayssa Alwani Brilliant in many respects, Gruber takes the reader on an unusual journey toggling back and forth from the present to the days of the famous Spanish artist, Velasquez. The catch is that the mind of the central character, Chaz Wilmot may or may not be how this journey is experienced. Extremely well researched, the characters engage at a deep level offering art history in parallel with the underworld of art forgery. With a lifelong appreciation for great art while lacking the knowledge of the masters, this story has inspired me to learn more about them! But it's the journey that will continually raise questions in your mind, the central theme being, What is real? This is a great story and unique in many respects. Highly recommend, whether art is of interest or not!