my umpteenth blog

Back in...June? It seems like it's been forever, but really (apparently) it's only been a few months...I started reading The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova. I'm not quite sure what to say about it.

Plot first, I guess. A fairly famous (and fictional) American artist is arrested at the National Gallery of Art for attempting to attack a painting (depicting the myth of Leda and the Zeus-swan). With a knife. I know, right? He is admitted to a psychiatric institution under the care of Dr. Marlow, psychiatrist and main character extraordinaire, who is also an artist of sorts and, taking an intense interest in his patient's case and only confession that "I did it for her", goes to extreme lengths to follow the artist's obsession with a possibly fictional woman whom he paints and sketches over and over and over again. Eventually Dr. Marlow finds this woman (a faint memory of her anyway) and the reason for his patient's obsessive focus on her. This case becomes something of an obsession for Dr. Marlow himself as he tracks down former amours, associates, and paintings of his patient. It is interesting to see a number of lives unfold and the way they reflect and re-reflect one another. The contemporary story-line is frequently interrupted by first letters and then narrative snippets from the life of the mysterious woman at the heart of all this arty intrigue.

The main problem with The Swan Thieves- its length. It was, like I said, an interesting story, but there simply was not enough material to fill all of those pages (and, it seems, nearly half of my suitcase). I don't think I enjoyed it quite as much as The Historian, but all in all, this was pretty wonderful. It's not the kind of book that I could gobble and gobble and finish quickly. Her writing is quite dense, and the book was very slow going for me. That being said, Kostova's writing has moments of quiet brilliance and unexpected insight. I really loved the imagined paintings that make up the core of Marlow's search. Each one seemed absolutely real and vivid. I wanted to see all of these paintings in real life, though the descriptions were so skillful that somehow I'm not sure I'd need to.


It was a nice book to span my time in D.C. D.C. is the main setting for the story, and it complemented my frequent museum visits well. Also provided great Metro reading as I could only focus for bits anyways.

Great if you're in the mood for something to nibble at. If you haven't read The Historian yet, read that instead.