As fascinated as Snare with the portrait, Cumming has fashioned an absorbing mystery.
A true tale that demonstrates the power and seduction of art.
Gracefully melding art history and biography, British art critic and editor Cumming (A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, 2009, etc.) traces the life of John Snare, a 19th-century bookseller who became obsessed with a painting he happened to buy at an auction: a portrait, he came to believe, of King Charles I as a young prince, made when he visited Madrid—not by Van Dyck, to whom it was attributed, but, Snare was certain, by the eminent Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). Cumming traces Snare’s efforts to find evidence for his increasingly firm conviction, the furor over public displays of the work, and the effects of his obsession on his career, well-being, and family. Interwoven with chapters following Snare’s adventures is a discerning look at Velázquez, hardly known outside of Spain in the 19th century. “He left so few paintings—not more than 120 over a forty-year career,” Cumming reveals, that his art “was rare, unfamiliar, obscure” even to art lovers and critics. Analyzing his technique, themes, and compassion for his subjects, she makes a convincing case that his paintings “are both dazzling and profoundly moving all at once.” Snare, despite “no education, no social standing, no pedigree as a gentleman or an expert on painting,” recognized Velázquez’s greatness. He worked tirelessly to document the portrait’s provenance; poured his savings into mounting exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, and New York; and several times hired lawyers to counter suits contesting his right of ownership. His business went bankrupt, and, leaving his wife and children in England, he fled to America, hoping to earn money from exhibiting his prized possession, which he defiantly refused to sell. After his death, the painting was never again seen.
As fascinated as Snare with the portrait, Cumming has fashioned an absorbing mystery.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6215-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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