Elizabeth Kostova's second novel, The Swan Thieves, carries on with much of the same characteristics of her earlier The Historian, which melded historical background about the Romanian Vlad the Impaler with Dracula legends--including a preponderance of action told through flashbacks, a modified epistolary format, and a certain detachment from the reader as a result. Since the main character of The Historian was trying to discover the true story about her father, it worked really well.
In The Swan Thieves, the main character, a psychiatrist named Andrew Marlow, finds his world turned upside down when a new patient arrives at the hospital after having attacked a painting at the National Gallery in Washington DC. It turns out the man is a painter with a long history of instability--and won't talk to anyone, but simply paints in silence. Marlow finds himself quickly becoming obsessed with finding out what provoked his patient to attacking a painting, and with the help of some 19th-century letters and some of the women his patient loved and left, Marlow inches closer to uncovering his patient's true history in the midst of a hundred-year-old mystery in the heart of the French Impressionist era.
Kostova's prose is elegant as always--beautiful turns of phrase and gorgeous diction--but the elevated style of her narrator's polished speech and the chronological distance from the events of the novel (Marlow is looking back ten years after the fact) combine to leave the reader somewhat detached from the novel. It makes it that much more difficult to care about the characters from such a distant narrative, as do Marlow's own somewhat repressed emotions.
I certainly enjoyed The Swan Thieves and definitely recommend it, especially to those with an interest in art and internal ruminations--but I would guess that many will be put off by the relatively slow pacing and psychological bent of the novel.
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