Blackout

This author, Connie Willis, has won several prestigious science fiction awards (Hugo, Nebula). So, her bona fides, along with a positive reviews from several sources including this lengthy one in the Washington Post, and an intriguing story line, persuaded me to dive into this incredibly overlong (500 pages) and tedious book. I have never worked so hard to get to such a disappointing ending. We begin in the year 2060, in Oxford, England, when time travel has been perfected and historians routinely travel back to various periods of time to make observations and do their research more directly than is possible through today's documentary methods. But we already have hints that things are starting to go awry as the schedules for several people are being re-arranged at the last minute, creating all sorts of problems with getting the historians properly prepared with background information, appropriate costuming, and even the relevant language skills for their assignment. Three characters, Eileen, Polly, and Mike, all end up in various parts of WWII-era Britain (London in the Blitz, the rescue of soldiers from Dunkirk, the countryside evacuation of children) unable to get back to present time. They eventually manage to track down one another in hopes that the others have an effective "drop" to return to Oxford, but there the story ends. It turns out that All Clear, the sequel, is really just the second half of the present book. Based on this review from The Guardian, I am unlikely to pursue another trudge through overly detailed and not very interesting day to day meanderings in order to find out if they make it back. While I love sci-fi and historical novels, this one left me mostly bored and tired.

The Art Forger

Based on the actual--still unsolved-- theft of several famous paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, which in fact included several by Degas, this is a fictionalized and romanticized account of what happens when one of the Degas paintings (a fictitious one) resurfaces. Claire Roth is a talented painter who has made the all too common mistake of falling for her famous and married art teacher, Isaac Cullion. Three years ago, when he was having a "painter's block" she painted a picture for him to help him meet a deadline for a viewing by an agent from MoMA. The picture she painted, fortunately or unfortunately, became the keystone for their accepting his work for a special showing and was ultimately purchased by them; yet he refused to admit that he hadn't painted it. When Isaac dumped Claire, she tried to set the record straight and became persona non grata in the art world; now no one will touch her work. She has become labelled as "The Great Pretender." She works making custom reproductions for a company called Reproductions.com and is a certified Degas specialist. When the owner of a famous Boston gallery comes to her with an offer for her own show at his gallery if she will make a copy of the missing Degas from the Gardner heist, she is eventually persuaded by his claim that he will return the original to the museum itself. As she works with the painting, though, she comes to realize that it is not a real Degas but a clever forgery that had been hanging in the Gardner all these years. No one is going to want to hear that, any more than the experts at MoMA wanted to hear that they had been fooled into buying a painting by a graduate student instead of the well-know professor. We see what we want to see. Author B.A. Shapiro has done detailed research that will tell you the nitty gritty details of how to forge a painting if you have the talent, as well as the struggles facing unknown artists.

Crazy Enough

We went to see a Pink Martini concert here in Bend recently. There has been such a glut of tell-all memoirs about people's miserable lives in the last few years and I really have no interest in reading them; I am generally not a consumer of celebrity gossip and not interested in their private lives.  But when this woman, Storm Large, had the temerity to step into the giant shoes of China Forbes as the lead vocalist for Pink Martini and, according to bandleader Thomas Loudermilk, save their bacon by learning 10 songs in 5 languages in 6 days, AND to do a one-woman show about her life and then write a bookabout herself that won an Oregon book award, well.... I admit my curiosity was piqued. BTW, she was amazing and I was totally won over with her renditions of Pink Martini's songs and totally entertained with her sassy banter and torchy presentations of their Latin numbers.
But maybe you don't want to read this book. Sometimes you just want to maintain the illusion, and after reading this book, that just is not possible. While you have to admire the tenacity and guts and talent that it took to overcome the incredibly destructive -- both active and passive--parents she had, one sort of wishes one didn't know how she almost destroyed herself in the process. I am not sure I can ever hear her sing again without being reminded of all the pain behind it, although she absolutely soars above that when she sings. She has in every way lived up to her name, larger than life, leaving detritus in her stormy wake. She doesn't think well of us in the audience generally, and you can't really blame her, given the experiences she has had, but it does change things. That sharp edge to her banter just takes on a different significance. But do go see her sing. She is magnificent!