
Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves entertains and delights on many levels. Aside from being a study of the debilitating effects of obsession, it is a love story and an art history lesson about the impressionists. The opening scene shows an impressionist artist painting a landscape when a woman crosses his path and hurries though the scene. She is carrying something, but on her return, her arms are empty. On a whim he adds her to his painting and remarks to himself, “…and now she is frozen in haste. She is a real woman, and now she is a painting.” This scene sets the stage for the mystery that underlies the entire book and drives the featured character, Robert Oliver, to behave as he does as he tries to make a painting become a real woman. Kostova does a remarkable job of leading the listener to smugly arrive at clever, insightful conclusions which prove to be false.
A cast of first rate, acclaimed actors gives life to the diverse characters, transporting the listener from academia to salons, back and forth across the Atlantic from the age of the impressionists to the age of Aquarius and back again. Musical clues signal the start of passages from earlier times or indicate that the narrator is reading the contents of an old letter. Rather than detract from the action, the music adds suspense and anticipation to the romantic enigma making this audio presentation a particularly sensual experience. Kostova’s descriptive prose and straightforward dialogue provide the verbal foundation for the drama. One can almost feel the painful despair of the mental state created by an obsession that keeps Robert Oliver a prisoner of his passion. The story is so compelling and the mystery so skillfully prolonged from the beginning of the book until its final chapters that the listener is torn between wanting to know what happened and not wanting the suspense to end.
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
Read by Treat Williams, Anne Heche and others
Hachette Audio, unabridged: 18 hours on 17 CDs
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