Michael Finkel The Art Thief

The Art Thief, by Michael Finkel, begins with the miracle of clarity.  Stéphane Breitwieser and his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus enter Rubens House, a museum in Antwerp, Belgium on a busy Sunday morning in 1997.  In a brief moment, in the lulls of viewers and guards, Breitwieser steals a small sculpture of Adam and Eve.  The robbery is described with the same grace required to commit the deed.  In a few paragraphs, they are gone, having exited slowly while the crime went unnoticed.  They take their treasure home and place it on a table by their bed. 

Finkel’s ability to use literary ju-jitsu to describe the thievery of Breitwieser and Kleinklaus is a hint of what’s to come.  Here’s a book that accomplishes in a mere 211 pages to offer in-depth portraits of three main characters; Stéphane, Ann-Catherine and Stéphane’ mother, Mireille, over a span of 30 years and a life-arc that encompasses the theft of an estimated $2.5 BILLION worth of art.  Going in, the touch is light, almost like ballet.  But as readers, we’re hooked.  Even though we know what’s to come, our emotional impact is stunning.  This is the ride of your life, and the feelings of envy are inevitably transformed to terror and a regret so powerful that tears are a reasonable response.

Breitwieser stole 239 items between 1995 and 2001.  Finkel dances through time as the danger of Breitwieser’s deeds grows ever more palpable, and we see the grace he once demonstrated slowly transformed into something much darker.  There’s a love story wrapped up here as well, as powerful as Breitwieser is skilled in his theft.  But Breitwieser’s obsession with (stealing) art creates a sort of vacuum/void around the man.  The self-contradictions ricochet. Reading The Art Thief is something like holding a beautiful mirror while it shatters in slow motion.  It’s the kind of book that might be easily read twice, or more. You almost become Breitwieser, until you cannot. 

Finkel’s storytelling mastery never overpowers his story, characters or his reader.  The knife he uses is so sharp that we do not feel the cuts until it is far too late.  In a sense, Finkel’s skill echoes that of his subject.  Breitwieser steals art; Finkel ups the ante and steals your heart.

Unsurprisingly, in retrospect, the story Finkel tells about creating his book is as complex and simple and compelling as the book itself. Here’s the link, or listen below.  For all the good it will do you, lock up your heart.   Just try.

Andrew F. Sullivan The Marigold

Rather than wrapping it in a bunch of confabulated adjectives, let’s just call The Marigold a great novel.  At the same time, let’s make no mistake; Andrew F. Sullivan takes the stuff of “novel” and does so much new with that stuff, all the while checking every normal novel box; characters(compelling), plot (driving), setting (Toronto); then applies a fevered imagination to turn “a novel” into, well, The Marigold. 

To say The Marigold sucks you in is incorrect.  Instead, Sullivan overgrows you, after burying you in the pit beneath an up-and-coming skyscraper.  Sure, Sullivan gives you characters; Stanley Marigold, a greedy, driven developer, but he’s nuanced.  He’s not a mustache-twiddling bad guy, he’s a human doing what humans do best, covering the past with the future.  We also meet Cathy Jin, a city inspector sent to deal with a peculiar new anomaly called The Wet.  It’s a fungal rot growing beneath the city that’s subsuming buildings and consuming those who live inside.  And there’s Cabeza, who meets 13 year-old Henrietta, when she leads an expedition of tweenagers into a sinkhole.  Sinkhole fans will find lots to love here.

For all the formal and informal invention to be found, The Marigold is an easy, enjoyable read.  Eventually you’ll note that it’s slipped into your mind like a wet tentacle made of brains.  Don’t worry – once it’s that far in, it keeps going and growing.  You cannot imagine just how far Sullivan will take his novel, or the talent required to manage the opposing poles of weirdness and normality.  Sullivan invents his own genre, one that allows him to treat the many evils of this world by recasting them as aspects of nature yet to be revealed.  Everyone and everything in The Marigold is in the process of becoming their best selves, which readers in this predecessor of that world will find by turn wondrous, awesome, hilarious, thought-provoking and flat-out terrifying.  Generally, all at once. 

The genius at work here is that The Marigold feels like a normal novel, even when, in retrospect, you realize it’s not.  That page-turning plot turns out to be an intricate, intimate symphony.  The world itself, an “of course, it’s that way” while reading, has been overrun by tendrils of rotting capitalism.  It’s not a species – it’s a system.  Before you start reading, buy some mildew remover, so you can sleep at night after you’re finished.  If there’s a you left.

In conversation, it’s clear that Andrew F. Sullivan did not grow this book on a Petri dish in his basement.  Or probably not.  Our goal was to talk about the ingredients of the book, and not to serve up the autopsied remains.  Here’s the link, or listen below. After finishing the book, believe me, autopsied remains will feel as everyday as a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.  Hold the jelly, though.