An artist born outside his time, Chaz Wilmot can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough—and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. His unique abilities attract the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present, and soon Wilmot is working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years. But his creative burst is accompanied by strange interludes—memories that are not memories . . . and he begins to wonder if he is really the person he believes he is. When a previously unknown masterpiece by the Spanish painter Velázquez is discovered, the artist suddenly finds himself lost in a mirrored house of illusions—and propelled into a secret world of greed, lies . . . and murder.
In The Forgery of Venus, Charles P. Wilmot Jr., a frustrated artist with two ex-wives and a mountain of bills, suddenly wakes in a fabulous-but-strange place with his problems mysteriously erased. Is someone playing a trick on him, or is the experimental creativity-enhancing drug he's been taking actually altering the waking world? Unfortunately, Chaz is such a self-obsessed blowhard you just don't care. Michael Gruber spends so much time dropping the names of painters and Italian techniques in a run of art-geek technobabble that he buries his terrific conceit — a drug that makes Chaz think he's reliving the life of Diego Veláuez. C+
The Forgery of Venus is a carefully and elegantly constructed novel that does a brilliant job of revealing a painter's life. The book pulls you in very early on to characters that feel like people you know, particularly if you originate from the northeast. Gruber's prose are sumptuous without being the slightest bit tedious. He moves in an out of plot twists with ease without losing the reader.
If you are an artist, particularly a painter, this book is a kind of pornography of the craft. Gruber's detailed and deeply researched descriptions of masterly technique are engrossing. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the arts and especially those who are practitioners.
Gruber's literary thrillers transport the reader into detailed realms entirely apart from ordinary life - worlds of passionate scholarship, pivotal moments in history, monumental avarice - where the stakes are as sophisticated as they are deadly.
From shamanism to Shakespeare - and now the art world - Gruber's meticulous research and considerable writing skills bring his intricate and rather fantastic plots to life.
The narrator of this sixth book (like the narrator of 2007's, "The Book of Air and Shadows") is a flawed, apparently doomed character, but in this book Gruber does not need to switch points of view to get other perspectives. Instead, his narrator, Chaz Wilmot, simply, literally, becomes the 17th century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez.
The story opens with a prologue - commercial artist Chaz declares to an old college friend that the Velázquez' "Venus" about to be auctioned for record millions is a fake, a forgery, a Chaz Wilmot in fact. Painted in 1650. He presents a CD, in which, he says, he explains everything. This CD - the story of his life - is the heart of the book.
After college Wilmot did not live up to his initial promise. Like his famous father, he became a commercial artist in an increasingly digitalized world with less and less use for traditional illustrators. He had plenty of talent, but was held back by some inner resistance to selling his paintings. This part is never really clear. But no matter.
He makes a good living despite this flaw, but not good enough. His young son has a lung disease which is expected to kill him by his early teens if not sooner. Treatments are cripplingly expensive and now there's a clinic in Switzerland offering a new, experimental treatment which might actually cure him - for a price.
Meanwhile Chaz enters a drug experiment run by another old friend who is testing the effects of Salvinorin A on creativity (this is a real drug, Gruber tells us in a postscript - legal too - but you won't want to try it at home). He has a vivid flashback to his father's funeral then goes home and paints. The next five days are the most productive he's ever had; "total focus, total pleasure in the work." He can't wait for his next dose. Another flashback, more productivity.
But then things get scarier - he finds himself in the body of a boy in a foreign country a long time ago - Velazquez. And next time he's Velazquez the apprentice, already better than his teacher. And then he's painting at the Spanish court.
Chaz cannot get enough of this stuff. He becomes irritable and erratic and steals extra doses. He's dropped from the study, but it no longer matters. He no longer has control over his own identity and slips in and out of being Velazquez in the 1600s and Chaz in New York. His personal life begins to fall apart, but his art has never been better.
Then Mark, his gallery owning friend, offers him a very lucrative job - the restoration of a Tiepolo ceiling in a Venetian palazzo. It's more a re-creation than a restoration and the lines between forgery and original art become more difficult to define as Chaz is pulled deeper into the schemes of a wealthy, sophisticated art dealer, the son of a Nazi art dealer/thief.
Velázquez' life continues to intertwine with Chaz' in increasingly intense ways although he's no longer taking the drug. And Velazquez is tortured by incomprehensible dreams of a hellish place, which Chaz recognizes as New York while Chaz can no longer determine which of his own memories are real and which are delusion.
Still, in the grip of creation, he is magnificent. Gruber brings an excitement to the painter's vision and work that is totally captivating. The reader begins to see with the eyes of a painter even as the painter can no longer tell whose eyes he sees through. It's a marvelous, creepy sensation that makes the heart beat at least as fast as the increasing danger and convolutions of the plot. (Many readers will also want to run to a museum - or the internet - to look at Velázquez' paintings with their new eyes.)
Gruber immerses the reader in his knowledge of the art world and the fascinating, exacting, highly sophisticated techniques of old master forgeries. His exploration of identity and its connection to memory entangles the mind amid plot surprises that are as bizarre and repellant as they are satisfying. There are a lot of contradictions and blurry lines here and Gruber clever storytelling and rich, descriptive prose style makes it all work.
