The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova – Review

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

To start with the good points: Holy cow, can Kostova write some gorgeous descriptive prose! Describing painting has to be second only to describing music in terms of difficulty, but Kostova is so good at describing the various artworks that she mentions that even I, with my extremely limited artistic vocabulary, could picture them as clear as day. In fact, she describes the paintings so vividly that I spent a very frustrating fifteen minutes on Google before I realized that neither Leda and the Swan nor Gilbert Thomas were real. (Nor is Beatrice de Clerval nor Olivier Vignot. Sisley is a real historical figure, although the painting which opens the book is either fictitious or is mis-dated in the book.)

However, while the writing was lovely and full of vivid detail, this story itself was seriously in need of an editor. It’s an interesting idea for a story, and there are parts that move along well enough, but the simple fact is that there was simply not 500+ pages of story here. After a while, when Marlowe is hearing more details of Robert’s life, and he’s painting the mysterious woman yet again, and we get one more of Beatrice’s letters from the past, I just wanted to yell “Get on with it already!” (I felt the same way near the end of The Historian; during their 95th stop in some small village i their eleventieth Eastern European country, I started wondering if we were even getting close to the point.) In The Swan Thieves, large sections – especially those spent filling in Robert’s backstory without providing many useful clues to his condition – just dragged, made worse by the fact that I didn’t really care for any of the characters. I pressed on, wanting to know the answer to the mysteries that the book had set out, but when I finally got to them, I was let down. Not that they didn’t fit the story, just that they weren’t interesting or compelling enough to merit the 500-odd pages that it took me to get there. 3 out of 5 stars.

via Elizabeth Kostova – The Swan Thieves « Fyrefly’s Book Blog.