Interview with Elizabeth Kostova

From Dallas Morning News --

'Swan Thieves' author Elizabeth Kostova brings her flair for the artistic to Dallas Museum of Art --

By Joy Tipping --
April 14, 2010 --

Her gift, it turned out, was writing. She found a way to combine the two interests in her latest novel, the best-selling The Swan Thieves, which came out in January. It deals with a mystery involving both a contemporary painter and a group of 19th-century Impressionist artists.



Kostova wraps up her book tour with an appearance Friday at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of its Arts & Letters Live series.

In a recent phone conversation, Kostova, 45, said that although she's done other things to support herself, she's been a passionate writer since she was 8 or 9.

"My first things were just imitations of books I'd read as a child. I'd tinker around with them."

By the time she was 14 or 15, she had decided on writing as a career. That was, coincidentally, about the same time she quit painting.

"I loved it, and I had moved up into oil painting. ... I realized I never had the real gift for it. But I love color, I loved the smell of the oil paints, I had colors I liked best. And I had some memory of the feel of painting."

All that came in handy when she started writing The Swan Thieves. The book tells the story of a modern-day painter named Robert Oliver who attacks a painting depicting the mythical encounter of Leda and the swan (Zeus in disguise). Oliver is committed to a mental institution, where he refuses to tell anyone why he struck at the painting. The book's narrator, a psychiatrist charged with solving the mystery, begins to unweave the threads by talking to the various women in Oliver's life – although he finds that the most important one may have been dead for more than a century.

For both technical and emotional insight, Kostova says, she drew on information from artistically talented family members and friends who were professional visual artists.

"I pestered them with questions, followed them on landscaping expeditions, learned how they make the decisions that go into a painting," she says.

Although she didn't want the book to center around anything supernatural, she says, it nevertheless evolved into something with "a strong feeling of haunting by the past, someone caught between two worlds in something almost like possession."

As the daughter of a professor, Kostova grew up mostly in Connecticut but also spent time in other U.S. states and in the former Yugoslavia. Her first book, The Historian, is an updated Dracula tale set partially in Eastern Europe, and she clearly has a fondness for the region. That affection, and her desire to help fellow authors, led to the formation of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing (www.ekf.bg, where you can read about it in English or Bulgarian). The foundation supports seminars and competitions, public readings and lectures, and opportunities for writers to work in Bulgaria.

As for what's next in her own writing career, Kostova says she's started a new novel that's still in its infancy. She demurs when asked about the subject matter: "Part of it is that it's really raw right now, and things change a lot as you work on them. But I also feel like if you talk about it too much, it loses its energy."

Review of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

From The Telegraph (Calcutta, India) --

LITERALLY PUZZLING --

By: Ipsita Chakravarty --
March 26, 2010 --

The Swan Thieves By Elizabeth Kostova, Little, Brown, Rs 595

Elizabeth Kostova seems to possess a love for the literal. The Swan Thieves, she tells you, is about “a mystery in the heart of the rise of French Impressionism”; it is “a story about painting and painters”. The subject of her first book, The Historian, had attracted her as she is “interested in history”. Kostova also stresses the role of “research” in both novels. Shortly after starting work on The Swan Thieves, she mentions reading A.S. Byatt. One can’t help feeling this might have been injudicious candour.



Robert Olivier is a painter. He likes the French Impressionists. He’s obsessed with a woman he may not even know. One day, he flies at a painting in the National Gallery. Admitted into a mental home, he refuses to speak. As the story progresses, this rather interesting situation is sidetracked. Olivier must be crazy in the good old-fashioned sense of the word. At least, that’s almost all the explanation you’ll get.

Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist, sets out to record Olivier’s history. This entails sentimental reminiscences by women in the painter’s life and trips to exotic locales. Marlow’s perambulations are interspersed by letters between two 19th-century artists who had been lovers. As promised, everyone in the novel paints copiously.

The women are good-looking and, through sheer insistence, one is made aware that Olivier has a looming presence, “dark locks” and dishevelled clothes. Each character comes to that conclusion independently, several times over. Kostova seems to confuse her characters with the paintings they profess to love.

Perhaps this is partly intentional. Kostova begins with a rather obvious mis en scène, conflating text and painting. Presumably, the story that is about to be told must be seen within the framework of this painting. What follows is relentless description, often in an irritatingly formulaic cadence: “it was too pale, translucent”, “The furniture was modern and unobtrusive, incidental”. Sometimes Kostova has a stab at intensity. Lines like “and I felt his selfhood go down through me like lightning” certainly make for a lively read.

A glut of adjectives and frames clutter The Swan Thieves. The novel refers to so many contextual frameworks that it confuses itself. The myth of Leda and the swan is evoked, apparently to question traditional notions of power and sexual domination that it employs. Yeats’s poem is dutifully quoted. Kostova succeeds in making one almost comfortable with this disturbing myth. For a novel about obsession, it’s remarkably placid.

Painters diligently discuss what they feel about painting; a sentiment largely centred on paint under fingernails. Yet the engagement with French Impressionism seems superficial at best. Perhaps Impressionist painting, with its lilt of light and shadow, its fervent brush-stroke of heartfelt immediacy, its rebellious energy, is difficult to depict. Kostova periodically utters “Sisley” and “Monet”, describes paintings in laboured detail and offers a tenuous historical link through the epistolary narrative. Impressionism must serve a functional purpose; it must provide an object for the quest undertaken by Olivier’s psychiatrist.

In yet another ambitious frame of reference, Andrew Marlow is named after Joseph Conrad’s famous narrator. Conrad’s Marlow tells the story of the mysterious Lord Jim and goes on a quest that leads him to the depths of the human psyche, to the very heart of darkness. Andrew Marlow’s quest leads him to Olivier’s secret and, according to Kostova, to a “mystery” that lies at the “heart” of French Impressionism. Only it’s more of a puzzle, complete with clues and a solution, a triumph of the literal.

Review of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

From The Malaysia Star --

Swan song? --

By: Terence Toh --
March 19, 2010 --

The Swan Thieves
Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Publisher: Little, Brown, 565 pages

AN art gallery would probably be the last place anyone would anticipate a violent attack, and yet, at the New York National Gallery of Art, the unthinkable has happened: renowned painter Robert Oliver, a man known for his reclusive behaviour, has been arrested. His crime: attacking a painting, Leda, by Gilbert Thomas.



Called in to investigate is psychologist and part-time painter Dr Andrew Marlow, who rapidly becomes interested in the case, despite the reticent Oliver proving unhelpful. While highly talented, the artist exhibits bizarre, almost insane behaviour, most notably his obsession with painting a mysterious woman he has never seen in his life.

The only clue that Marlow finds is a stack of mysterious love letters given to him by Oliver, written in French by obscure painter Beatrice Cherval to her patron and lover in the late 17th century.

In the course of his investigation, Marlow encounters the two women in Oliver’s life: his sweet yet frazzled ex-wife, Kate, and his mistress, the hauntingly beautiful yet conflicted Mary Bertinson. He soon uncovers a complex tale of forbidden love, obsession and art that traverses continents and spans two centuries.

From my brief synopsis, I would not be surprised if readers dismiss The Swan Thieves as a Da Vinci Code knockoff. However, rest assured that The Swan Thieves is nothing like that. In fact, it moves in a completely opposite direction from Dan Brown novels, relying on slow-building tension and character elaboration rather than non-stop suspense to hook readers. Of course, whether it succeeds in doing this is up for debate.

The Swan Thieves is the second novel by Elizabeth Kostova, an award-winning American author most known for her debut work, The Historian, a gripping re-imagination of the Dracula legend that as of 2005, proved to be the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in American history. In The Swan Thieves, Kostova revisits the same plot elements that brought her debut novel such success: multiple points of view, frequent forays to the past and romantic melodrama.

The result, however, is disappointing. Despite showing a lot of promise in the beginning, Kostova’s novel ends up unfulfilling, unresolved and, ultimately, unsatisfying. It is a chore to read, being wordy and dragging.

At 500 parts, this is a whopper of a story. Much of the book is used to elaborate on the back stories of the characters, rather than focusing on the more intriguing mystery elements of the tale.

A lot of the novel feels unnecessary and, honestly, the story could have been told in three-quarters of the book.

The narrative alternates between modern-day and the 18th-century world of Beatrice Cherval, but this is handled rather awkwardly. While the story of Beatrice proves important to the plot, it is shoe-horned into the story at inappropriate parts and feels disconnected from the main narrative.

To make things worse, there are too many flashbacks where very little happens.

Kostova’s characters are also uninteresting. While her supporting cast are all right, they are all introduced too briefly (such as Marlow’s kind-hearted father) or too late in the story to make an impact (such as Pedro Caillat, an eccentric art collector).

Her main cast are humourless and all sound too alike to engage the reader. While Oliver, the character central to the mystery is quite well-written, we never get to hear things from his perspective.

The story does have some interesting things to say about the power of obsession and the power of art to inspire, preserve and destroy.

Overall, however, Kostova’s second novel proves to be a disappointment, with unlikeable characters, a tedious narrative and an unsatisfying ending.

It is recommended only for art lovers and insomniacs looking for the best way to fall asleep.

Review of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

From The New York Times --

Fiction Chronicle --

By Jan Stuart --
Published: March 11, 2010 --

THE SWAN THIEVES
By Elizabeth Kostova.
Little, Brown, $26.99.



Writing novels about artists and their creative urges is as thorny as making biopics about writers and the interior process of putting words on a page. Such is the lesson of this stultifying romantic why-dunit from the author of “The Historian,” in which a psychiatrist (regrettably) named Marlow takes on the puzzling case of an artist arrested for attempting to slash a painting in the National Gallery of Art. Was it professional jealousy or a crime of passion? Violating every professional boundary in pursuit of an answer, Marlow proves a perfect match for his felonious patient, Robert Oliver, a ­commitment-challenged flake with a penchant for women who gravitate toward any wall within head-banging distance. Among them are Oliver’s ex-wife, Kate, and ex-lover, Mary, who provide two of the several narrative voices, which range in style from 19th-century epistolary to the sort of robotic art commentary suggestive of a tour guide tethered for life to the French Impressionist wing. Almost every­one in Kostova’s insular universe is a painter or a collector, and they have much to say about the books’ fictive canvases, variously described over the course of 500-plus pages as “incredible,” “extraordinary,” “remarkable” and “superb.” Absorbing so much blather about paintings you’ll never see is like slogging through a scrapbook of social columns recounting parties to which you’ve never been invited.

Interview with Elizabeth Kostova

From The National Post (Canada) --

Q&A with Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Swan Thieves --

by Mark Medley --
February 15, 2010 --

Elizabeth Kostova foreshadowed the current vampire craze when her debut novel, The Historian, was released in 2005. While on the surface the book was a modern reinterpretation of the legend of Vlad the Impaler mixed with a dose of eastern European history, at its root the novel was simply a well-written detective story. The book sold an estimated four million copies and was translated into 40 languages, and a film adaptation is in development. If nothing else, Kostova will always be the question to a Jeopardy answer: She wrote the first debut novel to debut at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Her latest novel, The Swan Thieves, tells the story of a psychiatrist trying to figure out why his patient, a painter named Robert Oliver, attacked a priceless canvas hanging in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Kostova recently spoke to the National Post’s Mark Medley about vampires, obsessions, and French Impressionist painting.

Q: The Historian came out in 2005. What’s been going on in your life since then?

A: Since The Historian came out in 2005, I have mostly been working on my new book, which was released a few weeks ago, The Swan Thieves. The research for that was also extensive - it’s taken most of these four years.

You spent ten years researching and writing The Historian, this one took five. Did you feel rushed?

I felt as if it left skid marks on my desk, honestly ... (With) The Historian I wrote sometimes 10, 20 minutes a day, around the edges, doing a lot of other jobs.

The first novel was obviously a massive success. How did it affect your life?

I still keep a pretty big disconnect between my public life and my personal, private, writing life. And I think that’s important for authors, just for peace of mind. But I also have been really thrilled to have (a) readership. I’ve loved being on tour, reading in public, and getting to meet some of my readers.

Do you have a sense of who your readers are?

I have a strong sense of who my readers are, I think. They tend to be people who are very interested in literature. Many of them are great readers. They’re sometimes particularly interested in a subject matter - Dracula with The Historian, east European history, travel - and with The Swan Thieves I’ve had a lot of people come to readings on this tour who are avid painters, or they love art history, or they love museums, so there’s kind of a connection with art for a lot of readers who show up.

Let’s talk about that. Your first book dealt with the mythology of Vlad the Impaler, and now you’ve transitioned to Impressionist painting. How’d that happen?

I know it seems like kind of a strange jump to make a transition from a first novel about Dracula and the legends and history of Vlad the Impaler to French Impressionist painting, but I really wanted to learn something new with each book, and have a chance to do research that’s completely new to me. Also, in a way, they’re not that different. They’re both books about obsession: obsession with history and the way we’re haunted by history in contemporary life.

What are some of your obsessions apart from writing?

I’m not sure I have any! I think I’m a little bit like some of my characters in The Swan Thieves, who really eat, live, drink, dream, and breath their art form. But I love to travel when I have the opportunity to do that. I also love to read. I’m a great reader and I think that’s something that always fills the well for writers.

I remember when I read The Historian it felt like a throwback to another era of literature. This feels a bit more introspective. Was that a conscious decision?

I think The Swan Thieves feels a little bit more introspective as a book partly because of the subject matter. It’s really a book about people’s internal lives. Their love of their artwork. In the case of the narrator, his knowledge of human psychology. It’s also about people’s personal lives in a very intimate way. There are several rather unusual love stories in the novel. So I think that an introspective tone worked for me with his novel, although there is, again, a mystery that has to be solved by the end of the story. Often a book’s subject matter will determine its tone for an author.

How did you research this novel?

I researched The Swan Thieves in a very similar way to The Historian. I did a lot of traditional research, reading any primary sources I could find, in this case a lot of letters written by 19th century French artists, journals, and certainly other sources like biographies. And for The Swan Thieves I did a lot of looking at paintings in-person. In a way it was a great excuse to go to all the museums I love and not only look at artwork there again but actually set scenes in particular rooms and galleries.

Much like The Historian, The Swan Thieves is, in part, an epistolary book. Why, as a novelist, do you like using letters to tell a story?

I think we all have a secret wish that we could read other people’s letters. And, of course, now the letter is kind of a dying art form. And I really wanted to give that sense of intimacy you get with character and knowledge of the character’s voice, and especially the character’s self-perception, which you can get very directly from a letter.

I find writing about art very difficult to do; there’s a disconnect between images and the words used to describe them. As an author, how do you tackle that problem?

I think it’s very hard. I completely understand what you’re saying. I think, as writers, we always have a loop of words going in our heads - I’m sure you experience this. You’re always thinking ‘How could I describe that in words?’ There is this sort of gap, or as you say disconnect, and it makes you feel, well, there’s the visual and then there’s something that goes in black and white on the page in letters and words, and then somehow through that we get a window again on the visual. I invented a lot of paintings for [the book]. As you know, a lot of the paintings are fictional, actually, although they’re based on particular artist’s work or styles. And I tried really hard to write the way you would sketch without looking at the page, if that makes sense. I’d try to look with my mind’s eye the painting that didn’t exist or one that does exist and to choose words for it that had as much to do with reactions as with descriptions. It’s very hard not to be cliched when you write about a painting. And you can also end up doing a pure description that’s just colour and form and ‘This is in the middle’ and ‘That’s in the left hand corner.’ And what I really wanted to convey was a character’s reaction to a painting, but still give some visual guide to it.

What do you hope people take away from the novel?

I really hope readers take away from The Swan Thieves some kind of renewed or freshly kindled love of painting. Paintings are so refreshing to me. Because they’re static, and we’re so used now to quick media imagery or the visual equivalent of a sound bite, there’s something incredibly restful about standing in front of a painting or looking at great reproductions of paintings on the page. Although I have to say the Impressionists don’t reproduce very well. It’s wonderful to see their brush work in the flesh.

Can I ask what you’re working on next?

I started work on a new novel in November. I had an idea very suddenly last summer and I’ve been making notes for it for awhile. I keep hoping that I’ll somehow write a novel that’s about 200 pages long and involves no historical research but I just don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m losing hope.

Review of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves

From The Edmonton Journal --

Mystery novel inspires love-hate response --

By: Robert J. Wiersema --
February 14, 2010 --

Story reels from beautiful to painfully boring;

Elizabeth Kostova made a big splash with her debut novel, The Historian.

The Swan Thieves
Elizabeth Kostova Little, Brown 564 pp; $32.99

Here's a conundrum: How can one write about a book when they're unsure whether to highly recommend it, or suggest it is best avoided?

Is it possible to love a book and not really like it, simultaneously?

Apparently so: that's the quandary I'm facing with The Swan Thieves, the new novel from Elizabeth Kostova.

Kostova entered the publishing world with a splash with her bestselling 2005 debut novel The Historian, which interwove a re-envisioning of the gory life and legend of Vlad Tepes (Bram Stoker's model for Dracula) with a 20th-century investigation into the Vlad myth, using first-person narration, letters and other texts, and historical scenes.

Kostova uses a similar, though simplified approach with The Swan Thieves.

In 1999, Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist and amateur painter based in Washington, D.C., takes on the case of an artist, Robert Oliver, who has been arrested for attacking a painting in the National Gallery of Art. After a brief conversation following his hospitalization, Oliver falls silent, and spends his days repeatedly sketching and painting an enigmatic woman. Unable to communicate with his patient, Marlow attempts to understand his obsession with the mysterious woman. His investigation takes him into conversations with Oliver's ex-wife and his former lover, and, as pieces begin to fall into place, he begins to research the history of the painting which Oliver attacked, and the life of a little-known Impressionist, Beatrice de Clerval.

Threaded through the narrative of Marlow's investigation are Beatrice's letters, which Marlow steals from Oliver to have translated, and third-person scenes from Beatrice's life.

The premise and the approach of the novel are certainly promising, with their overtones of obsession and passion, and the compelling mystery at the core of the book. Whether it actually works, though, whether The Swan Thieves fulfils that promise, is an unresolved question.

There were times that I found the novel utterly engrossing, when I read compulsively and at every available opportunity, and there were times that I was bored almost to the point of frustration. There were times when I found the characterizations rich and complex, and times when Marlow, in particular, had about as much depth as the paper he was printed on. There were times when the 19th-century scenes seemed utterly pointless and an unwelcome departure from the contemporary storyline, and other times when Beatrice's story formed the more compelling line of the novel. There were times when I found the novel beautiful, gracefully written almost to the point of being breathtaking, and other times when I found the language of the novel so overwrought as to be almost painful. And the resolution of the novel is, on the one hand, completely satisfying while at the same time disappointing.

I guess what it boils down to is this: I found The Swan Thieves to be an engrossing if not altogether satisfying reading experience. I would recommend it, guardedly, with all of the above caveats.

Additional Interview with Elizabeth Kostova

From Toronto Star --

Author turns from Dracula to painters --

By: Vit Wagner --
Feb 10 2010 --

Elizabeth Kostova received some valuable advice in 2004 when the rights to her debut novel, The Historian, were purchased at auction by U.S. publisher Little, Brown and Company for the phenomenal sum of $2 million – and it didn't have anything to do with how to invest the unexpected windfall.

"Several experienced, published writers told me that it's a really good idea to get started on something new right away, partly so that whatever you begin to write feels entirely your own," she says .

As it turned out, The Historian, a narrative steeped in Dracula folklore, charged up the bestseller lists after its 2005 publication, eventually selling nearly four million copies in 40 different languages. Who knows what effect the hoopla would have had if the author had waited before plunging back in?

"I know this will sound a little cavalier, but I wasn't concerned with expectations," says Kostova, 45, who was raised in Tennessee. "I wasn't writing for an audience or a market. It is the kiss of death for any literary writer to start worrying about those kinds of things.

"The Historian is an odd book that combines a lot of different elements, so I didn't really know if it would even sell. And my publisher has never pressured me to do anything other than write what I want to write."

Kostova, talking on the phone from a hotel room in Montreal, is on the road promoting her newly published second novel, The Swan Thieves, another mystery of sorts but this time having nothing whatsoever to do with vampires.

The story centres on the relationship between Robert Oliver, a successful painter apprehended while attempting to stab an Impressionist painting in a Washington art gallery, and Andrew Marlow, the psychiatrist who tries to uncover the motive behind the assault.

"I've had a very warm reception from readers," says Kostova, who will read Wednesday at Harbourfront Centre's Brigantine Room on a program with fellow authors Rabindranath Maharaj and Beth Powning. "Some of the response has to do with readers who loved my first book, but a surprising number of readers have come up to me and said that they haven't read The Historian but are interested in what this book is about. It's been gratifying to meet a lot of people who love painting."

Virtually every character in the book, including the psychiatrist Marlow, is either a painter or aspires to be one, even if only as a weekend hobbyist.

"I know several artists and they were generous about letting me interview them and watch them paint," she says. "One artist I know let me go with her on a landscape painting excursion, where I could hang over her shoulder and ask why she was making particular decisions."

Kostova surrendered her own artistic aspirations – at least in the visual realm – at about the age of 15.

"I realized instinctively that I had no talent. But I still remember saving my allowance to buy oil paint, which was expensive, and I still recall the smell of the paint and the wonderful names of all the colours."

Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves, Another Review

From Philadelphia Inquirer --

Leda and the swan rigmarole --

Reviewed by Frank Wilson --
Feb. 7, 2010 --

After hundreds of pages, you eventually do learn why a painter wielded a pen knife in a gallery.

The Swan Thieves
By Elizabeth Kostova

The best thing by far about Elizabeth Kostova's second novel is its basic story. Less fortunate is the manner of its telling.

First, the story: Robert Oliver, a painter of great talent and growing renown, has been confined to a mental hospital in Washington after a guard at the National Gallery stopped him from defacing a painting with a pen knife. The hospital is called Goldengrove and the psychiatrist's name is Andrew Marlow. Since his arrest, Oliver has stopped talking.

But he opens up briefly for Marlow, telling him that he did what he did for "her," who turns out to be "the woman I love." That, however, is neither his ex-wife Kate nor his ex-girlfriend Mary. Later we will learn, when Kate confronts her husband over a letter she has found in his pocket that she assumes is addressed to Mary, that the object of Robert's affection is dead.

The painting Oliver was in front of when he pulled out his knife is called Leda and is by a 19th-century French painter called Gilbert Thomas. Hanging beside it is Thomas' self-portrait.

Oliver clams up again after telling Marlow he can talk to anybody he likes, including Kate and Mary. Later, though, he gives Marlow a packet of letters written in French. These turn out to be a correspondence between two contemporaries of Gilbert Thomas, a woman named Béatrice de Clerval and her husband's uncle, Olivier Vignot. Both are painters, and Vignot exhibits regularly at the annual Paris Salon. Gilbert Thomas is mentioned from time to time, never flatteringly, in their correspondence.

Oh, I almost forgot: Marlow, who is a painter himself, provides Oliver with a full array of painting supplies, which he uses to paint and draw over and over again the same beautiful woman. Whether the image is from memory or imagination, no one but Oliver can say, and he's not talking.

Obviously, given a set-up like this, what the reader wants to find out is the reason Oliver attacked the painting in the National Gallery, the identity of the woman he keeps painting and drawing, and what any of this has to do with Olivier Vignot and Béatrice de Clerval. Rest assured, the reader does find all this out eventually.

But eventually is the operative word - which brings us to the manner of this tale's telling.

Andrew Marlow is the overall narrator. But there are chapters attributed to Kate (these, presumably, have been put together by Marlow from notes he has taken from his visit to her). Then there are chapters attributed to Mary (accounts written by her and sent to Marlow). Finally, there are selections from the letters between Olivier and Béatrice, and occasional chapters relating to their relationship.

Nothing ostensibly wrong with any of that, except that so little of it has to do with solving the mystery at the heart of the novel. Instead, it tells us more than we care, or need, to know about Marlow and his love life, Kate and her courtship and marriage, and Mary and her romance. We do learn a lot about Robert Oliver's physical presence: "I went to him and put my arms around him and caressed his head," Kate tells us, "the heavy curls, the massive forehead, feeling that surprising mind inside, the vast gifts I had always admired and wondered about." (We wonder about them, too, Kate.) And, just in case you weren't paying attention the first time, there's this: "When Robert came home from teaching, I touched his brown sweater and his curling, separating locks of hair, his stubbly chin, his back pockets, his calloused hands. . . . If I wasn't exhausted from the day, he touched me to keep me awake a little longer, and then I reached for his smooth, hairless flanks and . . . " - you get the idea.

Mary fills us in further with similar details. But none of it advances the story.

There is another odd feature. Gilbert Thomas, Béatrice de Clerval, and Olivier Vignot are all fictitious. But the book opens with two pages describing a real painting that hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. The book ends with us discovering that the woman in the painting had a connection to - the fictitious Béatrice de Clerval.

At one point, Mary writes to Marlow, "I think Robert was - is - a writer at heart, too; if someone had collected in order all those bits and pieces of his writing to me, they would have made a kind of short and impressionistic but very good novel about his daily life and the nature he was constantly trying to paint."

It certainly would have made a better novel than The Swan Thieves.

Another Interview with Elizabeth Kostova

From The Globe and Mail (Toronto) --

From Dracula to Impressionist art --

By: John Barber --
Feb. 07, 2010 --

U.S. novelist Elizabeth Kostova sold her debut novel, The Historian, for an astonishing $2-million and went on to earn even more for the publishers who put such faith in it. Catching the vampire wave just as it began building five years ago, Kostova’s contemporary retelling of the Dracula myth sold four million copies in dozens of languages around the world. Her new novel, The Swan Thieves, is just as big but quite different. Plumbing the psychological depths beneath the sweetness and light of Impressionist painting, it begins with an obsessed contemporary artist’s attack on a famous canvas in a Chicago museum.

How did it feel when The Swan Thieves reached No. 4 on The New York Times bestseller list the week it was published?

Putting it on the bestseller list is not my goal for a book, frankly. ... But I’m touched by this. It’s a very interior and rather quiet book, and those books don’t tend to climb on the bestseller list.

How does it differ from The Historian?

It’s a quieter book. The Historian was in many ways a very literary book in the tradition of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, but it has much more adventure and a questing plot, which does tend to pull in a wider net of readers.

Were your publishers concerned about you leading your readers in a new direction?

My publishers are wonderful because they have let me write what I wanted to. They’re wise enough to know that, with any author who’s not simply writing formulas – who’s trying to create something new – pressuring them to do something for market purposes almost always backfires. I can’t imagine working under those circumstances, actually.

But don’t they arise automatically when you sell four million copies of your first novel?

Yes and no. For me that happened accidentally. The publisher marketed heavily. It’s certainly not the reason I wrote that story. I wrote that story because I wanted to tell that story. I wanted the pleasure of writing my way through it.

The obsessive artist at the centre of The Swan Thieves attacks a painting in a museum. Did a real incident inspire you?

There wasn’t. It seems to happen pretty often, and it seems to have different causes. Sometimes people damage paintings or sculpture because they love it. They throw their arms around a statue in a fit of hysterical passion and it falls over. Sometimes it’s love, sometimes it’s raging at the academy and sometimes it’s mental illness – and probably often a cocktail. But there are a lot of good stories about those things.

Do you have a favourite period or genre in painting?

I do love the Impressionists, especially now that I’ve looked at them again, harder.

Your hero apologizes for liking the Impressionists.

He went through that cycle that a lot of viewers do, of burning out on the Impressionists for a while. We’re so overexposed to those images. There’s also a way in which they look tame and pretty after 20th-century art. And they also don’t reproduce very well. I also had that experience that my character Andrew Marlow had of going back to the Impressionists and realizing how stunning they are – how radical, how wild, how visceral the paintings are.

What are you working on now?

A new novel. I started it in November. I think it will be quite different from each of the first two in many ways, but again it will involve a lot of historical research.

Do you expect it will be another 600-pager?

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages ... I don’t seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

More Reviews of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

From The Montreal Gazette --

Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves: A painter's legacy --

By Ian McGillis --
February 4, 2010 --

Elizabeth Kostova made a big splash with her debut novel, The Historian.

Twenty years ago, when A.S. Byatt’s Possession achieved great critical and popular acclaim, a new hybrid sub-genre was born. A meld of postmodern narrative strategies, detective fiction conventions and art history, it’s a form whose permutations and combinations afford limitless scope, but also hold out plenty of pitfalls if not handled with great care.

Elizabeth Kostova made one of the biggest debut splashes of recent years with The Historian, a novel that took on the fact/fiction combo of Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. For her follow-up, she eschews the macabre for a more straightforward exploration of how the past – in this case, the legacy of an unjustly neglected female artist in 19th-century France – echoes in the present. The Swan Thieves’s sales, then, may hinge on whether sufficient numbers of readers find painters as interesting as vampires. Unfortunately, other issues may make that question moot.

The novel’s premise is promising enough. Robert Oliver, a highly regarded American neo-Impressionist, has been committed to a psychiatric hospital after attacking a painting in a museum. Highly reluctant to talk, he finds himself under the care of Andrew Marlow. A frustrated painter himself, Marlow quickly grows obsessed with why Oliver attacked that particular painting; he ends up stretching his professional ethics to near breaking point as he attempts to get to the bottom of Oliver’s psychosis, seeking out his ex-wife, an ex-girlfriend and other figures from Oliver’s past. The trail soon leads him to 19th-century Normandy and a romantically charged correspondence between (fictional) painter Beatrice de Clerval and her elderly uncle.

What quickly becomes apparent is that, for a novel spanning three centuries and multiple perspectives, The Swan Thieves is sorely lacking in tonal range. Characters as diverse as a struggling young female art student and a melancholy bachelor psychiatrist are given essentially the same voice. Readers may well find themselves flipping back to a chapter’s first page to confirm just whose version they are meant to be reading. In a multiple-voice novel, that cannot be a good thing.

The same confusion applies to the elderly man and younger woman exchanging letters in 19th-century France. Even Kostova herself appears to recognize the latter problem, as the epistolary device is eventually abandoned in favour of a third-person account.

Marginally differentiated points of view aren’t necessarily fatal in themselves. One of Kostova’s avowed models, Joseph Conrad, was prone to them himself. But in order to work, they must at least feel emotionally plausible, and it’s awfully hard to accept, for example, that Kate, a proud and wary young woman, would so easily agree to reveal her innermost thoughts to a snooping doctor she has only just met. It’s also a stretch to believe that Robert, so self-absorbed and frequently callous in his treatment of the women in his life, would dedicate himself to the rehabilitation of a female artist’s reputation.

Which brings us to The Swan Thieves’ biggest problem: its central figure. Kostova intends to invest Robert with enigmatic depth, but by literally denying him a voice – we learn of him almost exclusively through the viewpoints of others – Kostova has effectively left a hole at the centre of the novel.

Structurally, too, things could have been tighter. A Mexican interlude, while introducing a crucial character, nonetheless feels gratuitous in its choice of setting, as if the author had been advised to let some literal sunshine in. Here, as elsewhere, readers with a fondness for romantic convention – surely a significant chunk of Kostova’s following – aren’t even allowed the payoff of a steamy love scene: at the crucial moment, the prim standards of an earlier epoch take over and the deed is demurely avoided.

Sentence by sentence, it should be said, The Swan Thieves is well written. Kostova is strong on the working lives of artists; her descriptions of paintings and how they are made resonate with felt details, and she conveys with nuance and sympathy the emotional state of an artist caught up in a creative compulsion.

Somewhere within The Swan Thieves, an appealing fictional biography may be struggling to make itself seen, but at least for now, Kostova’s best qualities remain obscured.

More Reviews of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

From The Dallas Morning News --

Book review: 'The Swan Thieves' by Elizabeth Kostova --

By JOY TIPPING --
January 31, 2010 --

In a reading environment when it seems that every book jacket and promotion screams "relentless page-turner!" or "you'll stay up all night reading!," it's remarkably refreshing to come across an author who takes her own sweet time drawing you into the story.

Elizabeth Kostova does that gorgeously with The Swan Thieves, her follow-up to the faster-paced but equally contemplative debut The Historian, one of the best modern-day takes on Dracula to come out in the last half-century or so. To keep her readers enthralled in both books, Kostova relies not on improbable plot twists or end-of-chapter cliffhangers but on thrills that build across centuries and through the voices of a handful of indelible characters.

The Historian focused on the literary; with The Swan Thieves the author takes her obvious passion for research and lasting beauty into the art world. The book is, at first, narrated by Andrew Marlow, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist who's treating Robert Oliver, an accomplished artist who's apparently had some sort of breakdown.

Oliver is arrested and put into a mental institution after attacking a National Gallery painting depicting the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, in which Zeus ravishes (some translations imply rape) Leda while in the guise of a gigantic bird. Leda also has relations with her husband that night, and later gives birth to two sets of twins, one set immortal (including Helen, who caused all that trouble in Troy) and one set mortal.

There is precedent for Oliver's behavior: In the 1700s, Louis d'Orléans, a member of the French royal family, for unknown reasons stabbed Correggio's 16th-century painting of the subject.

Marlow is brought in to find out why Oliver tried to slice the painting (by a fictitious artist), which is difficult as he refuses to speak. Just before going mute, however, the artist gives Marlow permission to interview anyone he wants about the case. That's a handy convenience, but it doesn't stop Marlow from eventually blurring, and in some cases obliterating, all sorts of ethical lines between the professional and personal.

As he investigates the case, Marlow becomes enthralled with the women who surround Oliver: his wife, his young student-lover and a long-dead (fictitious) impressionist artist named Béatrice de Clerval, with whom Oliver seems insanely obsessed. We hear their voices, too, as Marlow's inquiries lead him from D.C. to the small Virginia college where Oliver had worked to Paris, leading to a denouement that's deeply satisfying but that won't surprise anyone who's been paying attention.

Kostova uses words exactly as painters use oils, laying down brushstrokes and tiny layers that at first seem disconnected and abstract, but that eventually coalesce into a glorious whole. She creates sentences that can send you pondering for hours: "Perhaps that is the reality of sin, to know the shape of the soul and feel it chafing inside the body." And in all 564 pages, there's not a single red herring: Everything, no matter how small a clue, fits perfectly into the image that's finally revealed.

The Swan Thieves will delight lovers of words – she is the most exacting grammarian I've ever encountered in fiction – but also may entice a good many readers into paying more attention to fine art. It made me want to run to the library and grab whatever I could find on impressionism and technique, to spend an afternoon at the Dallas Museum of Art looking more closely at the paintings than the guards would probably appreciate, and to learn the crucial differences between umber and sienna, Venetian red and alizarin crimson, violet and ultramarine.

Elizabeth Kostova and her book The Swan Thieves

From nwi.com, Munster, IN --

Author's love of art weaves intriguing mystery --

By Jane Ammeson --
January 30, 2010 --

Author Elizabeth Kostova is an expert at interweaving the past and the present, creating a Gothic-like atmosphere that compels the reader to keep turning the pages. Kostova, author of "The Historian," a New York Times bestseller with a unique take on the vampire legends of Eastern Europe, is now back with "The Swan Thieves" (Little, Brown and Company 2010, $26.99).

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlow likes to paint in his spare time and so when he is asked to become the therapist for Robert Oliver, an artist arrested for trying to slash a painting at the National Gallery of Art, Marlow is intrigued. But Oliver will barely talk to him except to give him a packet of letters dating back to the 1800s and written in French. They are the correspondence between two French impressionist painters and between the letters and Oliver's compulsive painting of a beautiful dark haired woman, Marlow becomes obsessed enough to start on a journey to determine what is haunting Oliver.

"I have loved paintings for a long time as a spectator not as an artist," says Kostova , a Yale graduate who then earned a master's of fine arts from the University of Michigan, in explaining one of the reasons why she chose to have art become the center of the mystery in her novel.

As in "The Historian," the central figure travels from place to place while unraveling the mystery.

"I was writing about places I'd been in the past for ‘The Historian' because I was too poor and too busy to travel," says Kostova, who reads French and speaks Bulgarian. "This time I deliberately went to places that I wanted to write about."

Part of her travels was based upon gathering more information for her novel.

"I have the desire to learn something well," she says noting that she talked to psychiatrists as well as art historians and also used the courses she's taken in art history in helping her write her book.

"After reading my book, I hope readers will share the pleasure of looking at paintings again," says Kostova.

Another Review of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves

From Winnipeg Free Press --

Kostova's fevered novel expected to age well --

Reviewed by Laurence Broadhurst --
30/01/2010 --

The Swan Thieves
By Elizabeth Kostova
Little, Brown, 565 pages, $33

Elizabeth Kostova's fevered new novel is not a sequel to her 2005 groundbreaking bestseller The Historian. It will unjustly suffer if it is read as one.

But it is tempting to do so for several reasons. Both novels are about obsessions. Both are narrated by a variety of voices crucial to intricate plots. Both jump regularly between the studying present and the studied past.

Both use the ploy of found letters to enliven that past. Both are cheapish mystery mocked up as rich history. And both are tremendously long and dense.

Overtly, this second novel by the American art-school grad is at pains to announce that it is about art and lovers of art.

Everything about the book does this. The main object is Robert Oliver, a dark and quiet but charismatic, semi-wild artist and art teacher who commits the pivotal crime: in the National Gallery in Washington, he assaults a 19th-century French painting of a Greek myth (Zeus-as-swan and his human paramour Leda, who will mother Helen of Troy).

The main character is Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist charged with decoding and recuperating Oliver, and a man who fancies himself an amateur artist.

At one point, at wits end to crack Oliver's persistent brooding and silence, Marlow even resorts to sketching him. The supporting characters, Oliver's damaged women and the late 19th-century circle of Parisians, are all artists.

They love painting, they paint, they talk about painting, they write about painting -- they are even painted.

The main victim and key in the mystery is that French painting, its story and its history. Even the cover of the book is a painting.

Marlow concludes that healing Oliver can only be accomplished by deciphering the motives for his powerfully ironic act. Why would a great, successful painter, a lover and teacher of painting, try to stab a painting?

His patient goes mute, giving him only the name of a woman -- not his estranged wife -- and some old French letters.

Marlow, a kind, middle-aged intellectual who is strangely single, puts on his Robert Langdon tweeds and sets out to take up the chase, now in Washington, now New York, now Maine, now North Carolina, now Mexico, and now, inevitably, Paris.

Those who read The Swan Thieves merely as either a manically anticipated sequel or a novel about art, or both, will be dearly disappointed.

They will complain that the art history is too contrived, that the artsy characters are stereotypes, or that the great girth of the novel is less an echo of the depth of Kostova's debut and more her belaboured writing-by-brushing.

They will even chirp that The Historian was a great novel, sold spectacularly to be made into a film and wonder if The Swan Thieves is less slow-cooked novel and more raw script.

But the book is not really about visuals. It is a long mystery by a writer who must have read Dan Brown but tired of his tiny chapters, awful characterization, campy dialogue and frenetic pace.

On a deeper level, though, the book is about a cleverly retold Greek myth. As so many Greek myths, it is therefore about gender, about age, about humanity, about memory and about truth -- about men behaving as women and women behaving as men, about seniors and juniors falling in lust and love, about beautiful children and ugly children, about wonders remembered and about creative lies.

It took Kostova a decade to fashion The Historian, an immediate smashing success. Only four years later comes The Swan Thieves, destined to disappoint now but to age well.

Elizabeth Kostova and her book The Swan Thieves

From Metro (UK) --

Elizabeth Kostova paints an impression of 1870s Paris --

By: Siobhan Murphy --
01/27/2010 --

Best-sellerdom seems to have come as something of a surprise to American novelist Elizabeth Kostova.

Her first book, The Historian, became the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in US history. The blood-tingling, 642-page Gothic reimagining of the Dracula myth hit all the right commercial buttons: it was a historical thriller involving a dash across Europe and plenty of clues in old documents (ticking the Da Vinci Code box); and it came along just as the current bout of neck- rophilia was kicking off.

But Kostova, now 45, was blissfully unaware of all those spheres lining up: she’s not a popular fiction fan, it transpires.

‘It sounds crazy now but I wasn’t particularly aware of the whole Da Vinci Code phenomenon when The Historian came out,’ she admits. ‘I’d been working on my book for ten years and I don’t really read too much commercial fiction; I like fiction that has a very high standard of prose. For an adventure story, for instance, I like Robert Louis Stevenson.’

Bloodsuckers fare little better. ‘I’d never read much in the vampire genre – in fact, I was surprised to find myself writing anything to do with vampires,’ she says. ‘It’s myth and legend that interest me. I don’t really feel I have time to read genre fiction – that sounds snobby and I don’t mean it that way. But if I have the choice between reading some genre fiction and settling down with Bleak House… life is short, you know.’

Kostova’s follow-up novel The Swan Thieves, therefore, may rival The Historian for length at 564 pages but there’s nary a fang-tastic frolic in sight. This time, for our dose of history haunting the present, we’re transported back to France at the birth of Impressionism, framed by the linked modern-day story of a psychiatrist determined to discover why a famous artist has been committed to his care – even though said artist refuses to speak and just obsessively recreates the portrait of a mysterious dark-haired woman.

‘I wanted to write about a painter as I’ve always been fascinated by the way they work and how they see the world,’ Kostova explains. ‘I also had this idea, which is more of a literary experiment, of wanting to write a character built entirely out of other people’s voices, who in a way wouldn’t be allowed to speak for himself.’

Kostova acknowledges a debt to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim for this second aspect – the psychiatrist, our narrator, even calls himself Marlow. To write convincingly about painting, however, was a challenge for which there are few successful examples to draw upon: the intensity and absorption of the creative moment is evocatively rendered here.

‘I worked very hard at that,’ she says. ‘I know a lot of painters and they were very generous in allowing me to watch over their shoulder and pester them with questions. And I did paint a little bit until I was about 15 or 16 – a long time ago but I still remember the smell of the oils and the feel of the brushes.’

Kostova summons up 1870s Paris partly through a series of letters threaded through the narrative, an increasingly intimate correspondence between two artists on the edges of the Impressionist movement. The epistolary element is an echo of The Historian.

‘Letters are such a wonderful lost art – I think it’s a great way to experience voices,’ Kostova says. And why Impressionism? ‘I found myself, like Marlow in the book, burning out on the Impressionists. We’ve had so many big exhibitions over the past 20 years and you see those images reproduced endlessly on tote bags, greetings cards, umbrellas… But I went back to them and had the experience Marlow has when he realises what remarkable views of nature these paintings are and how radical they were in their own era.’ Another chance, then – as with the Dracula legend – to reimagine what many take for granted.

‘I do keep kind of hoping I’ll write a novel that doesn’t involve so much research,’ laughs Kostova but you know she doesn’t mean it: she’s happy to admit that it’s important for her ‘to learn something new for myself with every book I write’.

And she has no intention of scaling down to short-story collections any time soon. ‘I think the long novel is, for many people, an antidote to the rush that we’re all in. It’s a comfort and a haven. For me it’s a very natural form because I grew up reading Victorian novels. And I think I’m just naturally long-winded.’

The Swan Thieves, published by Little, Brown, is out now, priced £16.99.

A Review of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves

From The Daily Vanguard (Oregon) --

Love, art and obsession --

By Wendy Shortman --
January 27, 2010 --

The Swan Thieves is an intriguing tale about one artist's inspiration

In Elizabeth Kostova's new book, influential painter Robert Oliver ruins his own painting hanging in the National Gallery of Art. Andrew Marlow, a psychotherapist, sets out to uncover the secrets behind the actions of the painter. In the process, Marlow unravels a story that reveals the artist's tangled love life.

Marlow begins an obsession of his own as he tries to get answers from a mute Oliver who will only utter the words “I did it for her.” Being a painter himself, Marlow now finds himself bringing his work home, disrupting his own safe life, to discover Oliver's complex one.

Marlow discovers letters that tell the stories of chapters of Oliver's life that are both secretive and fascinating—from the story of Oliver's muse and undeniable obsessions for all of the subjects of his inspiration, to an overall theme of human psychological nature.

“Paintings are very personal, of course, individual expressions of vision, but they're also time capsules, especially as we get farther and farther from the time in which a painting was done,” Kostova said.

The book uses real and fictional pieces of 19th-century painters to set the backdrop for the painter's stories.

Kostova's book is a story of the relationship between love, art and history. It illustrates the way in which art can sometimes tell us history, and in this case, past stories of love.

“I've always had a ‘history’ feeling about paintings, as well as an aesthetic reaction,” Kostova said. “When I look at or into a painting, I feel as if I'm looking through a window into some aspect of history, even if the painting is actually contemporary.”

Always “a little envious” of the talent and process of painters, as Kostova discusses in the trailer for the book, her respect of the craft becomes apparent in her newest work.

“I can't remember a time when I didn't wish I could see the world the way visual artists do, as an experience of color, form, texture, and other visceral things,” Kostova said. “There's a certain removal about being a writer, a translation of the concrete world into a tape loop of words, that I think painters break right through.”

The Swan Thieves is the author's sophomore novel, following the widely acclaimed The Historian. Dealing with some of the same themes of obsession and history as her newest work, The Historian was a smash hit that has been published in 44 languages, with a Sony film being developed.

The Historian put Kostova on the map, as she blended factual pieces of history with fiction to create the story of a woman who follows her father’s footsteps in a search for the truth behind the myth of Dracula. In her search for clues, she unlocks secrets of her own past with an obsession much like Marlow's in The Swan Thieves.

The fusion of real artworks and Kostova's page-turning fictional storytelling make for a novel that will keep your attention. It may even bring up old questions about the connection between an artist's work and their own life, and how they sometimes seem interconnected. Or it may bring up other age-old questions of the way we as humans think about our own past.

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, a Review

From Telegraph (UK) --

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova: review --

By Judith Flanders --
25 Jan 2010 --

The Swan Thieves will leave its readers laughing, but for all the wrong reasons, says Judith Flanders.

Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel, The Historian, was a smash hit, a vampire-romp that capered across Europe dragging its breathlessly giggling readers in its wake. The Swan Thieves, her follow-up, will also leave its readers laughing, but for all the wrong reasons.

Robert Oliver is a painter on the cusp of fame. He has it all: a beautiful and devoted wife, two lovely children, a job that leaves him time to paint. But one day he is found in the National Gallery in Washington, attempting to damage a painting of Leda and the Swan. Refusing to explain, he is sectioned, and put under the care of psychiatrist and part-time painter Andrew Marlowe.

A bundle of 19th-century letters in French is found in his possession, which Kostova drip-feeds to us before, rather bumpily, beginning their back-story: that of a French Impressionist painter who is caught between her husband and another love and the ultimate secret of her work.

As in The Historian, the reader is ferried about the world by the narrator to meet each new character — what was a charming device in The Historian now appears to be Kostova’s single method of plotting. The people in Oliver’s life each tell their share of the story to Marlowe in his attempt to solve the mystery of the artist’s breakdown.

This constant return to the beginning palls. Worse, all the characters share a level of pretentiousness that makes the reader want to slap them silly: the shrink can’t just peel an orange, no, he has to “feel a pang of contentment” as he solemnly admires the orangeness of his orange; his dream-girl in turn confides smugly, “In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition.” (As he ends up marrying her, one feels grateful not to have to share a breakfast table with either of them.)

The denouement is signalled a quarter of the way through, but, despite the characters constantly telling each other how clever they are, they have hundreds of pages to plod through before they reach the same conclusion, which makes them seem curiously thick.

And, as a final flourish, when the so-called mystery is unravelled, this obvious explanation is sufficient to ''cure’’ in an hour a man who has been disturbed enough to suffer elective mutism for a year: an insult to the mentally ill everywhere.

Review of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

From The Observer (UK) --

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova --

By Lisa O'Kelly --
24 January 2010 --

Elizabeth Kostova's first novel was breathtaking, but can she match it with her follow-up, asks Lisa O'Kelly

Where do you go next when your first novel turns out to be the fastest-selling debut in American literary history? That was the challenge facing Elizabeth Kostova after The Historian (2005) sold 2 million copies in hardback, knocked The Da Vinci Code off the top of the of the New York Times bestseller list and went on to be translated into 44 languages. A clever, if somewhat soapy, retelling of the Dracula myth, The Historian flattered its readers with its aura of academic seriousness and set the stage for the current wave of vampire chic.

Kostova's new novel, The Swan Thieves, keeps the gothic motif going with its themes of art, madness and obsession. It's another historical thriller (of sorts) which swaps the eastern Europe of Vlad the Impaler for 19th-century Paris and the birth of impressionism.

The set-up is intriguing. An acclaimed artist, Robert Oliver, has been arrested for attacking a painting in the National Gallery in Washington DC, a version of the myth of Leda, the Queen of Sparta, in which Zeus took on the form of a swan to rape her. Oliver is committed to an upmarket private institution where he comes under the care of Dr Andrew Marlow, himself an aspiring painter, who is especially good at working with difficult and creative patients. Marlow is said to be able to "get a stone to talk", but he only manages to elicit a few initial words from Oliver, who then goes completely silent.

The rest of the novel is taken up with Marlow's quest for information about Oliver's past. Back and forth across America and the Atlantic he goes, in search of the artist's former wife, his lover, his paintings and colleagues, looking for facts to unlock his mind and reveal not only why he attacked the painting but why he continues to paint over and over, from memory, a mysterious, dark-haired woman.

The novel's historical element is introduced through translations of old letters Oliver let Marlow see before he went silent. These turn out to be the increasingly intimate correspondence of two minor 19th-century impressionist painters, Olivier Vignot and Beatrice de Clerval. How did the letters get into Oliver's hands? And is there a link between them and the mysterious beauty of his paintings?

Slowly, the answers become clear. But it takes almost 600 pages and too often Kostova's unnecessary attention to detail overwhelms the story: an account of an otherwise irrelevant summer painting school where Oliver first encountered his lover, Mary, spans nearly 80 pages. This wouldn't matter if we cared more for Oliver and his problems, but while his silence makes him an intriguing patient, it makes him a less than compelling fictional character. Despite being set in a psychiatric hospital and narrated by a shrink, the novel never takes us far enough inside the artist's head for us to feel terribly interested in his psyche.

It might have helped if Kostova had given Oliver the chance to tell his own story. Instead he is the sum of others' accounts of him - and these accounts are monumentally unflattering. In fact, the novel often reads like a study of the male creative ego and its complacently assumed right to indulge itself whatever the effect on those who love and support it. But Kostova doesn't properly question this. Instead, she romanticises art and artists.

Interestingly, Kostova writes about the past with more assurance than she does about the present: the letters between the impressionist artists are the best part of the book. But Marlow's task lacks the urgency to keep us interested and the revelations, when they eventually come, fall desperately flat.

Review of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

From The Guardian (UK) --

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova --

By Joanna Briscoe --
23 January 2010 --


The Swan Thieves
by Elizabeth Kostova
As reader-gripping devices go, there's nothing like a really good quest. Fictional missions involving arcane codes, old books, missing antiquities or the odd vampire have entranced the public for some years with edge-of-the-seat plots and supernatural surprises ­nestling among the relics.

Given the pulse-racing nature of Elizabeth Kostova's debut bestseller, The Historian, in which Vlad the Impaler was unearthed among archives and mountainous regions, one could be forgiven for expecting another page-turning romp through the paranormal. But in The Swan Thieves, Kostova forsakes vampires for artists – artists beset by talent and torment, all destructive lifestyles and a whiff of linseed, who implode their way through more than 500 pages. This is something of a disappointment. Give us the hair-raising twists of pick'n'mix mysticism any day.

The Swan Thieves examines the link between madness and creativity, territory more effectively covered in recent years by Patrick McGrath. Before we start on the multitude of artists, we are treated to a lengthy biography and professional assessment of psychiatrist Dr Andrew Marlow of Washington DC. A bit of an artist himself on the side, one day he is sent the more accomplished, charismatic and infinitely more loopy painter Robert Oliver as an in-patient.

Oliver has just threatened to attack a painting, wielding his knife near a ­depiction of Leda and the swan, but has not actually slashed it. This is a shame for the plot, and can conveniently stand as a metaphor for this novel: The Swan Thieves is a perfectly decent work that needs a machete taken to it. It could be cut by a third. Better still, a half. Perhaps, after selling 3m copies of The Historian, Kostova may be just too successful to edit. The result is like wading through a superior sort of treacle.

Once resident in Marlow's psychiatric centre, Oliver turns mute, so it is left to the doctor to find the keys to the great one's psyche by setting off on his own sleuthing tour round the country to interview the artist's significant others. First off is Kate, the ex-wife. Then it's a colleague. Then it's Oliver's girlfriend and some far-flung artist contacts, necessitating a spot of foreign travel. However, as is hinted and then revealed with spurts of obfuscation, the real significant other in Oliver's life is a dead person. Nineteenth-century letters and much meandering among obscure French artists thread through the novel as testament to his obsession. We're supposed to see the parallels between these painters' lives, but believe me, it takes some time.

The women in Oliver's life soon discover his slovenly habits, his ­breathtaking unreliability and his ­endless paintings of an unknown woman in 19th-century clothes. This image reappears throughout the novel as Oliver obsessively paints her in different guises, while clutching his bunch of crumbling letters at all times. In the meantime, Kate Oliver, the appealing ex-wife, takes over the narrative, but by the time we know her entire backstory – along with every doorway ever entered and vista ever viewed – a weary sense of plot fatigue takes over. There is also the essential problem that Dr Marlow's search, which pins the novel together, is not believable as a premise and therefore forms a slightly bogus structure. He displays a stalker's zeal in his pursuit of biographical detail, when surely his busy career as senior shrink with painting hobby on the side would consume most waking hours.

As a portrait of a monster with a heavenly gift, the novel is interesting. But it is simply far too long, and rarely achieves real emotional authenticity. Kostova has followed a well-written, superbly paced adventure with a more self-consciously "literary" novel whose prose is not deathless. While the socking supernatural quest behind The Historian gave it the momentum of fear and mystery, this more traditional and groaningly long-winded search is paradoxically less convincing, and appears to put literary aspiration above storytelling. Bring back the vampires, the demon plotting, the chilling revelations. Readers expecting the delights of The Historian, beware.