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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
Very enjoyable satire on the art world with large cast of characters and elements of romance and mystery. The novel worked best when it was light-hearted and fun and I particularly enjoyed the "voice" of the painting. Sometimes the elements didn't gel together awfully well and some characters fell a little by the wayside whereas others threatened to run away with the novel. Overall though it is a massively entertaining romp.
This story really gets close to 4 stars most of the way, but I felt that after a languid read most of the way through seemed to rush to a conclusion in the last few pages.
The story is set in the world of high art and extreme wealth, decaying aristocracy and the rising newly wealthy. The characters, with the exception of the love interest are all larger than life.
Annie and her potential suitor are the 'real' people in this interesting and informative story, with most others being over the top. I liked this aspect of larger than life people - very English in some ways.
There is deception, death and betrayal along with paintings and fascinating history. I am not sure that the part of the story told by an inanimate object worked so well, but I can see that the author needed to access a long history somehow.
I learnt lots about Jean-Antoine Watteau and enjoyed this part of the story. A lot of detail is included in the story with most characters who converge on this painting having a side story that is given time to develop.
A good read and worth picking up and savouring.
The story is set in the world of high art and extreme wealth, decaying aristocracy and the rising newly wealthy. The characters, with the exception of the love interest are all larger than life.
Annie and her potential suitor are the 'real' people in this interesting and informative story, with most others being over the top. I liked this aspect of larger than life people - very English in some ways.
There is deception, death and betrayal along with paintings and fascinating history. I am not sure that the part of the story told by an inanimate object worked so well, but I can see that the author needed to access a long history somehow.
I learnt lots about Jean-Antoine Watteau and enjoyed this part of the story. A lot of detail is included in the story with most characters who converge on this painting having a side story that is given time to develop.
A good read and worth picking up and savouring.
Great story with some fantastic ideas. My only problem with the book was the highly stereotypical characterisation.
This was a delightful, delicious and most wonderful story. It grew on me with every page and every chapter, and the moment that the best character of all, the painting itself, was first introduced, I was in love. I should clarify. I was IN LOVE with the story of the painting, The Improbability of Love, not with the main character Annie McDee - a dull, uninteresting, foolish-on-many-levels 31-year old chef-but-more-of-a-loser. All in all, Annie remained as someone that I could care less about. And to be able to still LOVE and ADORE this book despite a boring main character (as well as her Jesse and her old beau) is saying a lot. The story of this painting is fascinating and I could so appreciate both the creativity and the depth of research and hard work that Rothschild has put into her labor of love.
Speaking of the author, she is incredibly accomplished and it was her debut novel (well, she has another book but this is her first major work, methinks.) This was an extremely well-written book, pulling aspects of history and modern world and giving us the grand tour of the fascinating world of art and artists and art lovers. The characters were out of this world crazy rich, and yet, real. If you love art, and especially paintings, you will enjoy this book.
My disappointments were again with Annie the main character and her boring fascination with food and her ex-boyfriend and her lack of interest in this amazing piece of art, as well as the very ending. I think I would have really loved more of a grand finale but alas, it all worked just fine.
I'd read anything else by the author, especially if it's about a piece of art! She captures the world impeccably well.
Speaking of the author, she is incredibly accomplished and it was her debut novel (well, she has another book but this is her first major work, methinks.) This was an extremely well-written book, pulling aspects of history and modern world and giving us the grand tour of the fascinating world of art and artists and art lovers. The characters were out of this world crazy rich, and yet, real. If you love art, and especially paintings, you will enjoy this book.
My disappointments were again with Annie the main character and her boring fascination with food and her ex-boyfriend and her lack of interest in this amazing piece of art, as well as the very ending. I think I would have really loved more of a grand finale but alas, it all worked just fine.
I'd read anything else by the author, especially if it's about a piece of art! She captures the world impeccably well.
After 4 years of living in Japan I am still perpetually gobsmacked by the idiotic assumptions westerners make about Japanese people. One of the key moments in this novel, where our heroine meets the love interest, occurs at an art museum. During this meet cute a group of Japanese tourists in a British museum are presented as befuddled foreigners, unfamiliar with a reference to the Mona Lisa.
“Mona Lisa?” one lady questioned.
The guide clapped his hand to his forehead. “I’m sorry. What a dolt. You probably haven’t been to Paris. It’s a painting in the Louvre. By Leonardo da Vinci.” The guide looked back at Annie slightly desperately.
Are you fucking kidding me, Hannah Rothschild?
First of all, I don’t believe one needs to physically travel to the Louvre in Paris to be familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait - seeing as it’s been acclaimed as “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied art work in the world.” (John Lichfield) If you live on this planet, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the piece. My first exposure to it was on an episode of Muppet Babies, for god’s sake. But if you are a Japanese tourist in an art museum across the world it is pretty damn improbable (<-- see what I did there) that you would draw a blank seeing as how particularly famous the Mona Lisa is in this country.
Here is a quote I pulled from a 16 year old article written about Japan’s love affair with the painting: “Ask any Japanese person what the most famous painting in the world is, and chances are they will say the Mona Lisa, by the sixteenth-century master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Though La Gioconda, the woman in the painting, has captivated people worldwide throughout the ages with her inscrutable smile, the Japanese seem to have a particularly deep affection for her.”
“Miura of the University of Tokyo calls the Mona Lisa "one of the Western paintings most admired by the Japanese since the Meiji era," and Japan's romantic feelings for the Mona Lisa never seem to fade.”
http://web-japan.org/trends00/honbun/tj000526.html
When the original painting came to Japan in 1974, 1.51 million visitors came to see the exhibition – a record that had not been broken as of the printing of that article.
So why would our author believe that Japanese people wouldn’t have a clue about this painting? And why does her character then also assume that they wouldn’t have been to Paris? We’re talking about a group of people that had just come on a hellishly long flight to look at art in Europe.
Are Japanese people dimwitted, uncultured and uninformed about art history? Are they so isolated they couldn’t possibly get references that the whole damn world understands? Ugh.
Oh, and then there’s an unbearably bullshit scene in which a librarian at the British Museum is sweet talked into giving up patron records. Um, no again, Ms. Rothschild. Patron privacy is one of the tenets of our profession, one that requires us to obtain a master’s degree – so on the whole we tend to be fairly 'with it' intellectually speaking. A group of librarians in my home country once refused to give up patron records to the government during a Patriot Act fueled counterterrorism investigation. So no, “one phone call and a fantastical excuse” wouldn’t convince me to hand over a customer’s name and phone number to an anonymous weirdo.
It just amazes me that our author managed to insult both the Japanese and librarians in the same sprawling, unfocused, anticlimactic novel.
Besides all that, the story was crammed with too many characters and not enough plot. It made for a tedious read. It’s took me almost 4 months to plod through it.
“Mona Lisa?” one lady questioned.
The guide clapped his hand to his forehead. “I’m sorry. What a dolt. You probably haven’t been to Paris. It’s a painting in the Louvre. By Leonardo da Vinci.” The guide looked back at Annie slightly desperately.
Are you fucking kidding me, Hannah Rothschild?
First of all, I don’t believe one needs to physically travel to the Louvre in Paris to be familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait - seeing as it’s been acclaimed as “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied art work in the world.” (John Lichfield) If you live on this planet, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the piece. My first exposure to it was on an episode of Muppet Babies, for god’s sake. But if you are a Japanese tourist in an art museum across the world it is pretty damn improbable (<-- see what I did there) that you would draw a blank seeing as how particularly famous the Mona Lisa is in this country.
Here is a quote I pulled from a 16 year old article written about Japan’s love affair with the painting: “Ask any Japanese person what the most famous painting in the world is, and chances are they will say the Mona Lisa, by the sixteenth-century master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Though La Gioconda, the woman in the painting, has captivated people worldwide throughout the ages with her inscrutable smile, the Japanese seem to have a particularly deep affection for her.”
“Miura of the University of Tokyo calls the Mona Lisa "one of the Western paintings most admired by the Japanese since the Meiji era," and Japan's romantic feelings for the Mona Lisa never seem to fade.”
http://web-japan.org/trends00/honbun/tj000526.html
When the original painting came to Japan in 1974, 1.51 million visitors came to see the exhibition – a record that had not been broken as of the printing of that article.
So why would our author believe that Japanese people wouldn’t have a clue about this painting? And why does her character then also assume that they wouldn’t have been to Paris? We’re talking about a group of people that had just come on a hellishly long flight to look at art in Europe.
Are Japanese people dimwitted, uncultured and uninformed about art history? Are they so isolated they couldn’t possibly get references that the whole damn world understands? Ugh.
Oh, and then there’s an unbearably bullshit scene in which a librarian at the British Museum is sweet talked into giving up patron records. Um, no again, Ms. Rothschild. Patron privacy is one of the tenets of our profession, one that requires us to obtain a master’s degree – so on the whole we tend to be fairly 'with it' intellectually speaking. A group of librarians in my home country once refused to give up patron records to the government during a Patriot Act fueled counterterrorism investigation. So no, “one phone call and a fantastical excuse” wouldn’t convince me to hand over a customer’s name and phone number to an anonymous weirdo.
It just amazes me that our author managed to insult both the Japanese and librarians in the same sprawling, unfocused, anticlimactic novel.
Besides all that, the story was crammed with too many characters and not enough plot. It made for a tedious read. It’s took me almost 4 months to plod through it.
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
Huge cast of characters, and they were all flat, one-dimensional caricatures. Literally, because one of the narrators is the painting that the story centers around. The painting's "voice" comes across as both snobbish and crass, and it felt really weird and not well done to have an inanimate object as a narrator. The story skips from character to character, and I just couldn't get into any of them. I stopped halfway through chapter 5.
The reviews are misleading - this isn't just a sendup of the art market and the über rich. There's definitely some satire, but there's also too much fawning over catered meals costing hundreds of dollars per person, and working ridiculous hours to suit the whims of the dishonestly rich for this to really be humorous. Maybe some people find Nazis, murder, false arrests, and money laundering hilarious, but not me.
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No