The Forgery of Venus: A Novel - Hardcover

Gruber, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060874481 ISBN 13: 9780060874483

Publisher: William Morrow, 2008

Synopsis

Chaz Wilmot is a painter born outside his time. He possesses a virtuosic command of the techniques of the old masters. He can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough—artists whose works sell for millions—but this style of painting is no longer popular, and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. So Wilmot makes his living cranking out parodies for ads and magazine covers. A break comes when an art dealer obtains for him a commission to restore a Venetian palace fresco by the eighteenth-century master Tiepolo, for a disreputable Italian businessman. Once there, Wilmot discovers that it is not a restoration but a re-creation, indeed a forgery. At first skeptical of the job, he then throws himself into the creative challenge and does the job brilliantly. No one can tell the modern work from something done more than two hundred years ago.

This feat attracts the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present who becomes Wilmot's friend and patron. Wilmot is suddenly working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years, but his burst of creative activity is accompanied by strange interludes: Without warning, he finds himself reliving moments from his past—not as memories but as if they are happening all over again. Soon, it is no longer his own past he's revisiting; he believes he can travel back to the seventeenth century, where he lived as the Spanish artist Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez, one of the most famous painters in history. Wilmot begins to fantasize that as Velázquez, he has created a masterpiece, a stunning portrait of a nude. When the painting actually turns up, he doesn't know if he painted it or if he imagined the whole thing.

Little by little, Wilmot enters a mirror house of illusions and hallucinations that propels him into a secret world of gangsters, greed, and murder, with his mystery patron at the center of it all, either as the mastermind behind a plot to forge a painting worth hundreds of millions, or as the man who will save Wilmot from obscurity and madness.

In Chaz Wilmot, we meet the rarest breed of literary hero, one for whom the reader feels almost personally responsible. By turns brutally honest and self-deceptive, scornful of the world while yearning to make his mark on it, Wilmot comes astonishingly alive for the reader, and his perilous journey toward the truth becomes our own.

The Forgery of Venus, a blend of erudition, unflagging narrative brio, and emotional depth, brings us inexorably toward the intersection where genius and insanity collide. Miraculously inventive, this book cements Gruber's reputation as one of the most imaginative and gifted writers of our time.

About this title

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Michael Gruber is the author of five acclaimed novels. He lives in Seattle.

From AudioFile

Suspending disbelief is easy with Michael Gruber's thoroughly engrossing novel. Artist Chaz Wilmot has never lived up to his potential. He wastes his great talent doing commercial hackwork to survive. After agreeing to participate in a drug study investigating the source of creativity, Wilmot's reality suffers a seismic shift. Eric Conger gives voice to Wilmot as he slips between his life in the 21st century and his life as the Spanish painter Diego Velzquez. Is Wilmot/Velzquez painting the soon-to-be priceless nude, or is he hallucinating as he commits forgery? Conger's performance highlights Wilmot's anguish, disorientation, and uncertainty. VENUS will appeal to listeners who enjoy a little art history, a little mystery, a literate and entertaining bit of imagination, and a smart narration. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0060874481
• ISBN 13: 9780060874483
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 318