The Swan Thieves
By Elizabeth Kostova,
Sphere
Rs 395, 611 pages
Why is it that within the historic artwork galleries of portray — or of sculpture, for that matter — solely a only a few ladies are represented? Whereas we have now solely to take a look at the work of artists like Amrita Sher-Gil and Anjolie Ela Menon, to say simply two, to see that this now not holds true, it's all the more bizarre that within the western custom of the plastic arts proper as much as and thru the nineteenth century ladies artists are largely famous by their absence.
The obvious social cause behind that is that, due to their associations with what was once known as a ‘bohemian’ way of life, portray and sculpture had been thought of out of bounds for ‘respectable' ladies. Was this proscription half of a bigger gender chauvinism which sought to maintain the world of artwork — and the depth of expertise and emotion that it stood for — within the safekeeping of male hegemony ?
That is the query – unasked in so many phrases by the creator herself, however implied nonetheless — that hovers like a query mark over this novel which could be described as a really suave thriller. Elizabeth Kostova’s first novel , "The Historian” , which turned a world bestseller, was a haunting re-narration of the Dracula legend , first recounted by the Irish author Bram Stoker who turned the cult of the vampire right into a literary traditional.
Kostova’s erudite and very eerie replace lived as much as Stoker’s masterpiece and gained each vital acclaim and a large readership.
In her second novel, Kostova has turned to the world of portray and painters, with particular concentrate on the French Impressionists — Monet, Manet, Pissarro, et al — of the nineteenth century. The story begins in presentday Washington DC the place a middleaged psychiatrist, who can be an novice painter, Andrew Marlow, is named in to take up the case of a wellknown American artist, Robert Oliver , who has been apprehended in an obvious try and vandalise an Impressionist portray, Leda and the Swan, displayed within the metropolis’s Nationwide Gallery. Below psychiatric care, Oliver lapses right into a brooding silence, like that of a dormant volcano, his suppressed feelings discovering expression within the type of a mysterious , lovely girl whose face he paints from some secret reminiscence over and over with obsessive repetition.
On the coronary heart of the thriller is a small assortment of letters exchanged in 1877 over a number of months between aged French painter, Olivier Vignot, and his nephew’s younger spouse, Beatrice de Clerval, herself an aspiring artist. The letters , which had been in Oliver’s possession when he tried to slash the Leda portray, are the one clue that Marlow, who in opposition to his will finds himself turning into a detective within the realm of artwork historical past, has in unravelling the enigma of the unknown girl who's central to his affected person’s obsession.
Kostova unfolds her story with ability, with the voices of various narrators, previous and current, carrying the plot ahead to its inevitable conclusion, which itself is sort of a chiascuro portray, an interwoven sample of sunshine and darkness. On its floor a poignant love story, The Swan Thieves at a deeper degree raises questions in regards to the relationship of artwork to the truth of our on a regular basis lives. Which is extra ‘actual’ , within the ‘actual’ sense of the time period, no matter that could be: the customary world of the commonplace and the standard, or the image-world transfixed and transfigured, past time and place, by the depth of the artist’s imaginative and prescient?
That’s the bigger thriller that The Swan Thieves leaves readers to unravel for themselves.