Review: The Lost Van Gogh

 The Lost Van Gogh is a combination art history lesson and roller coaster. It’s not aspoiler to tell you that it’s about a lost van Gogh that’s found and then lost again and everyone in this tale is trying to find it, each with their own agenda. Nobody is who they pretend to be, and everyone has enough secret baggage to send a 747 plunging to its watery grave. The effect steers awfully close to the comic, but luckily we’re in the hands of a skilled driver.

     A New York girl buys an old painting in a second-hand store upstate. Her boyfriend, an up-and-coming young painter, discovers there’s more to this painting than meets the eye. They make a big mistake: they tell somebody. Just a handful of people, really. But every single person they tell, they shouldn’t have.

     This story is marinated in the New York art world, seasoned with Amsterdam, and served up fittingly enough, in the little French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh drew his last breath—and he’s not the only one to die there for his art.

       Jonathan Santlofer is a rare bird, an author who’s also a painter in his own right, which makes him eminently qualified to pen this tale. (As the author of a mystery title involving van Gogh myself), I was impressed. You will be, too.

The Lost Van Gogh can be found here on Amazon.

Stephen Dobyns on intuition

 Stephen Dobyns is an American novelist and poet--at least, he's billed as a poet, but think of his poems more as short, exquisitely crafted stories. He also moonlights as a detective novelist.

“Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop.”

Favorite books

Cold Dog Soup

The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini

Common Carnage

Bonus Quote

Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you are just letting stuff seep in.