9780061632624
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Forgery of Venus audiobook

  • By: Michael Gruber
  • Narrator: Eric Conger
  • Category: Fiction, Suspense, Thrillers
  • Length: 10 hours 3 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: April 01, 2008
  • Language: English
  • (3595 ratings)
(3595 ratings)
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Forgery of Venus Audiobook Summary

Chaz Wilmot makes his living cranking out old-master parodies for ads and magazine covers. When he’s offered a job restoring a Venetian palace fresco, he is at first, skeptical–he immediately sees it is more a forgery than a restoration. But he is soon seduced by the challenge and throws himself into the work, doing the job brilliantly.

This feat attracts the attention of Werner Krebs, a shady art dealer who becomes Wilmot’s friend and patron. Wilmot is suddenly working with a fervor he hasn’t felt in years, but without warning, he finds himself reliving moments from his past–not as memories but as if they are happening all over again. Soon, he believes he can travel back to the 17th century where he lived as the Spanish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez. Wilmot begins to fantasize that as Velazquez, he has created a masterpiece and when the painting actually turns up, he doesn’t know if he painted it or if he imagined the whole thing.

Little by little, Wilmot enters a secret world of gangsters, greed and murder, with his mystery patron at the center of it all, either as the mastermind behind a plot to forge a painting worth hundred of millions, or as the man who will save Wilmot from obscurity and madness.

Miraculously inventive, this book cements Gruber’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and gifted writers of our time.

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Forgery of Venus Audiobook Narrator

Eric Conger is the narrator of Forgery of Venus audiobook that was written by Michael Gruber

Eric Conger’s stage credits include appearances Off-Broadway and at the Long Wharf Theater. He has appeared as a regular on Another World and Loving, and has translated the works of Feydeau.

About the Author(s) of Forgery of Venus

Michael Gruber is the author of Forgery of Venus

Forgery of Venus Full Details

Narrator Eric Conger
Length 10 hours 3 minutes
Author Michael Gruber
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date April 01, 2008
ISBN 9780061632624

Subjects

The publisher of the Forgery of Venus is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Fiction, Suspense, Thrillers

Additional info

The publisher of the Forgery of Venus is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780061632624.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Harry

October 19, 2013

Book ReviewThe Forgery of Venus represents Michael Gruber's fictitious foray into the world of representational art, aesthetics, forgeries, galleries, and art criticism. Meet Chaz Wilmont, an artist and our narrator within a narrator, the vehicle - a lemon - through which Gruber delivers his novel. Chaz speaks to you, the actual narrator, in the first person, through a series of sound files he recorded onto CD for you to listen to; and as with a lot of second-hand vehicles he breaks down often.You might say this is a novel about madness as witnessed from within the mind of he that is going mad. It is a story of an astonishing representational painter who feels he is born into the wrong time; a time of post modernism, kitsch, pop-art, and artistic and critical pretentiousness surrounding the abstract; a world in which technique, drawing skills and true representation in art are dead. Chaz enters the novel indifferent to it all much as the following passage is descriptive of his ambivalence:Slotsky was showing a kid named Emil Mono, big square tricolored abstracts in the loose dramatic style of Motherwell. One ground color, a blob of another color, and some blobs and streaks of a third color, perfectly respectable work, suitable for corporate lobbies, hotel meeting rooms, and the Whiteney Biennial. I really have no problem at all with work like this, in most cases a kind of wallpaper, anodyne, meaningless, or rather announcing the fact that meaning no longer inheres in painting.Of what ailment is indifference indicative? When what you love is denigrated and abused as if finding a beautiful woman with whom you had a relationship leaning against a grimy wall, in a mini-skirt, in a congested tunnel where she may be bought? What behavior might it lead to? Depression? Amorality? Alcoholism and drug abuse? Yes! Of course! And so we meet Chaz Wilmont, who struggles to just be, to survive in a modern world, an art whore who delves into substance abuse, a behavior born out of his painful indifference.I'd forgotten that booze knocked you out of that state of just being, which is why drunks are always going on about the past and making promises about the future, and why AA is always preaching one day at a time.As most of my GR friends know, I read crime fiction. But I am also a seeker of unusual crime fiction and I am traveling across the world in search of inspiration only to find it right here in Seattle, with Michael Gruber. After all The Forgery of Venus is above all about the crime of forgery, about mafia criminals, Nazis, fraudulent museum purchases and greedy industrialists (and here I refer to the real meaning of "greed" - as opposed to self-interest - where one obtains what one wants at the severe cost to others, by stepping across dead bodies to get it). Representational art may well be considered dead but this does not mean the art form and its many historical paintings aren't used to create fabulous wealth: in auctions, theft, underworld money laundering and forgeries.This is the carrot that is brought dangling before Chaz's nose, as if to say: "Your incredible talents need not be wasted. There are people who want what you do and what you have up until this point refused to do. There are people out there who understand the historical significance of a painting they might view; who understand that knowing art history lends to the enjoyment of a representational painting. There is no need to whore yourself out to advertising agencies and produce kitsch in order to survive and feed your wife and children."Every painting begins with an idea. The artist takes this idea and concretizes it into various aspects or objects that he places within the frame and onto his canvass. When we walk into a gallery or museum a subconscious communication takes place between you and the painter and it goes something like this: "I've given you the concretes," the painter says, "and now it is up to you to put them together and if I'm successful, you will within your own experiences arrive at the place where I started." (I will confine these remarks to representational art alone). Here is the painting in question:Robeky Venus by Diego VelasquezThis communication is similar to what an author experiences with his readers. For example: one idea that helped trigger the novel, or is included in the novel, comes from Gruber himself:Some years ago my daughter worked on the campus of a technology firm here in Seattle and I occasionally went to lunch with her out there. On one of these occasions, we were walking down a corridor lined with glass-walled offices when I was struck by an image hanging against the glass of one of them. It was a reproduction of a Renaissance painting, a St. Sebastian, tied to a stake, pierced with arrows, looking hopefully heavenward. I was seized with curiosity as to why the inhabitant would post such an image in his office (or her, actually, for the inhabitant was at home.) As it happened, my daughter knew her, and made introductions. She was an art major, a fairly recent graduate of a good university, and she was helping the firm to organize its image holdings. I said,"I like your St. Sebastian." Blank look. I said, "The picture in your window." "Oh, is that who it is? I just liked the image." "Who is it by, do you know?" I asked "No, but I found it in that book. I could look it up." With that, she went to a copy of Gombrich's art history, in a particularly lavish, heavily illustrated edition, and threw it open in the middle, as one does with a thick volume. The page exposed showed an image of a 17th century Dutch landscape. She started to page through the book, but in the wrong direction, towards more modern art and not towards earlier. When I pointed this out to her, she said, "How do you know? I thought you said you didn't know who painted it." "I don't. But the style of the painting is from earlier in the book. You're in the 17th century there, and the Sebastian is a quattrocento painting, the 15th century, two centuries earlier." Now appeared on her face a look that suggested to me that no one had ever spoken to her about historical styles of art. I might have been speaking Welsh. She clearly did not share my sense that an understanding of where art came from and what the artist meant by it, as derived from his own historical experience, is essential to the intelligent viewing of a picture.VelasquezAnd so this remarkable story begins...steeped in art history: the history of a painting by Velasquez and a man who through ingesting an experimental drug travels back in time and believes he has become Velasquez. It is a story about a criminal deception, about the control some would exert over Chaz Wilmont. About people in his life who would do anything to get him to paint as he was meant to paint while profiting enormously in the process.-------------------------------------------------------About the authorMichael GruberAre you a little bored with the conventional thriller but do you still get your entertainment from books, and are you the sort of reader that might read literary fiction but is often frustrated by the lack of a good "yarn" in such novels? Are you totally incensed at having to live in the "Cult of In-between" where your desire for the standards of literature that harbor questions posed in a serious way - questions surrounding the human condition - is in constant conflict with your craving for a good yarn; sadly consigned almost exclusively to thrillers that are formulaic and written in dull prose? Michael Gruber shares your sensibilities. It's not that he harbors the inability to write popular fiction. He's actually quite good at it. He is generally acknowledged to be the ghostwriter of the popular Robert K. Tanenbaum series of Butch Karp novels starting with No Lesser Plea and ending with Resolve. That partnership ended when Gruber realized that writing the same book over and over was boring. And as Gruber says:I'm not exactly bitching, had I stayed with that job I might be a Patricia Cornwell or a Clive Cussler by now, with seven-figure advances and the rest of that kind of life. On the subject of cults in fiction he clarifies the issue and defines it "as a writer with a relatively small number of passionately devoted fans, who never quite breaks into mass-market popularity."And it's true: since then, Michael Gruber has not written the same book twice. Otherness is a word Gruber frequently uses to describe the Cult of In-between. Having discarded popular fiction and with it its millions of followers and since "I don't do cute, and there goes another 70 million readers..." it seems to Gruber that he will never attain the sales of some of his fellow authors (though he once did arrive on the NYT best seller list). Perhaps with a movie this might change as there are cases where a cult readership arrives at popular readership via the exposure of a novel onto the silver screen.The novel, THE RETURN, (out since early September) would be an ideal vehicle for a couple of older male stars, and there's a nice ingenue role there as well. We shall see. I am pretty content with the cult as is, although I guess I could learn to like being fabulously wealthy too.;Gruber's life reads like that of a Renaissance man. Born in NYC and a graduate of the public school system he earned a BA in English literature and after working for various small magazines in NY, he went back to City College and obtained a second BA degree in biology. Even that wasn't enough, following this he went to Miami and received a masters in marine biology. During his stint in the U.S. Army he served as a medic. In 1973 he received a Ph.D. in marine sciences, for his study of octopus behavior.Doing a 180 he worked as a chef in various NY restaurants, then he was a hippie, worked as a roadie for rock bands, was an analyst in Metropolitan Dade county, followed by the title of Director of Planning for HR; worked in D.C. in the Carter White House, Office of Science and Technology Policy; a policy analyst and speech writer for the EPA and was promptly promoted to Senior Executive Service of the U.S., the highest level of civil service.Only then did he begin writing fiction, mostly writing the novels for Robert K. Tanenbaum after having moved to Seattle. Michael Gruber is a brilliant author whose books not only serve up great prose (and as is so often the case nary a plot to go with it), but delivers on both: a plot that is brilliant, cleverly worked out, and simultaneously delving deeply into the human condition. This, while reading along in "page turning" mode. That is not easy to do :-)Michael Gruber is unique. I've only met a few that have read him, but he is an island unto his own: a brainy human being's thriller.

Jonathan

January 12, 2020

** spoiler alert ** Brilliant in many respects, Gruber takes the reader on an unusual journey toggling back and forth from the present to the days of the famous Spanish artist, Velasquez. The catch is that the mind of the central character, Chaz Wilmot may or may not be how this journey is experienced. Extremely well researched, the characters engage at a deep level offering art history in parallel with the underworld of art forgery. With a lifelong appreciation for great art while lacking the knowledge of the masters, this story has inspired me to learn more about them! But it's the journey that will continually raise questions in your mind, the central theme being, What is real? This is a great story and unique in many respects. Highly recommend, whether art is of interest or not!

Gerald

December 03, 2013

Thanks to Judy Wisdomkeeper's comment on Goodreads for recommending this book. Gruber's writing style has a voice, and right away that puts him at the top of my list. Besides the plotting, which goes back and forth in time in ways I've never experienced in a book, The Forgery of Venus fascinates in two other ways - its meticulous description of painting technique and its depiction of mental illness. Peter Carey's Theft, which I also enjoyed, also has these two elements. The neurological issues are also reminiscent of another masterpiece novel, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Michelle

July 07, 2008

Oh how I love Michael Gruber.Here's a man who never writes the same book twice. The first of his I read was The Witch's Boy, a modern fairy tale.Then I read Tropic of Night, which has mainly to do with voodoo in Miami (I'm leaving out a lot of important details, but it was excellent).And then I moved on to The Book of Air and Shadows, which is a "literary thriller," meaning that it's a thriller that centers around books, one of my very favorite genres.And now The Forgery of Venus, which has to do, broadly, with art and a sort of time travel. I was an art history minor in college, so I could conjure up all the paintings in my mind while reading about them, which of course helped, but I'm sure that's not necessary. It's a real page turner; I read this book in the space of 24 hours. The point is: this man can write. I'm happy that I still haven't read everything he's written.

John

November 20, 2018

A fascinating tale of art, artistry, art forgery, time travel and what literary critic John Clute dubbed godgaming: the gaslighting, for reasons nefarious or otherwise, of someone so that they come to believe in a completely false reality.Chaz Wilmot Jr, living in the shadow of the memory of his father, an artist in the Norman Rockwell mold, is himself a relatively successful commercial artist who's constantly trying to hide it from himself that, just like his celebrated father, he could have been so much more of an artist than his own timidity has allowed him to be. To increase the pressure on him, his son by his second failed marriage has a mystery ailment that may kill him young unless he has the kind of medical treatment that only multimillionaires can afford.When a medical researcher offers Chaz a place on an experimental program to test a new drug that will supposedly boost imaginative creativity, he jumps at the chance. But the drug does more than enhance creativity. It also -- as per the drug in Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand -- seems to give him the power to travel into other lives and alternate versions of his own life. In particular, he finds himself drawn into the existence of Diego Velázquez, the great 17th-century Spanish painter. On occasion he recovers consciousness after one of his transtemporal journeys to find that in his absence, so to speak, he has been painting in the style of Velázquez.From there it's but a short step to Chaz's immersion in an international conspiracy to launch new forgeries of the Old Masters onto the art market, beginning with a phony Velázquez, an erotic masterpiece that he painted in response to a months-long love affair he experienced in his centuries-ago existence as the great painter.But there's a drawback to forging artworks for gangsters. They reckon the one thing that could go wrong with their fraudulent schemes is if the forger himself blabs, and there's an obvious way of making sure this doesn't happen . . .It's difficult to know quite where to start in describing why I enjoyed this book so much. So far as I can tell (I was married for twenty years to a fine artist), the artistic insider-talk is authentic, complete with lots of very funny, very snide remarks about New York's Whitney Museum and the stuff it chooses to hang. (For some reason MoMA escapes similar mockery.) I know far less about the art-forgery world, for obvious reasons -- the closest I've ever come to it is never quite getting round to reading Tom Keating's autobiography -- but in this respect, too, the details seem authentic.The book's stuffed with nice artistic insights. Here, for example, is part of Chaz's commentary on why a particular life-sized portrait Velázquez did is so affecting:But [the portrait's] power comes from a lot more than scale, because a life-size Kodachrome print would be a joke. It's not mere illusion, has nothing to do with those fussy little nature mort or trompe l'oeil paintings you see in the side rooms of museums, it's its own thing, the life of two men, artist and subject interpenetrated, coming alive, the vital loom of a life in a moment of time . . .On reading that observation, that what's important about a portrait is not just the painter, not just the subject, but the intersection of their two lives, I sat back in my chair, and said, "Yes!" before continuing to read. And there are countless little observations like this. For the time I was reading this novel I felt I was learning to think how a fine artist can think.Aside from a short framing section front and back, the novel's narrative is supposedly a transcription of Chaz's own account of events as dictated by him onto a compact disk. As such, it mimics spoken monologue, with lots of sequential commas everywhere and the like. It took me a little while to get used to this but, once I did, it seemed completely natural, the "spoken" flow of the words drawing me in in a way that a more formally correct text might not have done -- so much so that, when I got to the book's last few pages and the concluding little section by Chaz's friend, the more written style seemed almost anticlimactic. I felt rather like Chaz's friend did when he wrote, as the book's final few lines:[I] stood for a moment in front of the greatest painting in the world, The Maids of Honor by Velázquez, and thought about what it would be like to be him, really be him, and I couldn't deal with it, and I left and reentered the long, gray sanity of my life.The wrapup near the end of the book, where most of what has gone before is rationalized, struck me as a tad hasty, and I can imagine this section would strike some readers as being clodhoppingly Dan Brownish. As for me, though, it made me grin. For much of the book Gruber has been pretending to spin a Dan Brownish tale while mischievously addressing quite different concerns, and now here he comes right out into the open in a sort of take-it-or-leave-it moment before returning to what he's really interested in.The Forgery of Venus represented, for me, an absolutely addictive experience -- far more gripping than the average thriller or adventure yarn. It surely has launched Gruber into the forefront of my consciousness as a writer to watch.

Daoist56

July 31, 2016

For those reviewers who gave this less than 5 stars: respectfully - you are of course entitled to your opinion! - but really, what can you want from an author? The book is creative & well written, the author has done his research and uses it to support an intriguing look at art, memory, the nature of our identity, our selves, our relationships, how value is derived (at least in art) the gray areas of human behavior and a whole lot more. So really - you're going to complain?Okay, okay, as I said, everyone is entitled to their opinion, which is what makes it all so much fun. And speaking of fun, this book is a great read. It's not light and breezy fun, but a great summer combination of page-turning and thought-provoking. The unreliable narrator, in this case, is the perfect instrument for exploring many of the topics named above, and I did from time to time think of Billy Pilgrim, untethered from time in a similar way, though more of a foil than is the protagonist here. And similarly either crazy or not. Beyond that, maybe the similarities end with the fact that they both float around in time and space and are therefore fascinating & suspect storytellers, but in my defense, how often do you meet people, even fictional ones, like that?As someone who used to hobby-paint, I *loved* the descriptions of painting. The writing in general is enthusiastic and deft, but while I found these passages inspiring enough to make me want to find my brushes again (if I could get off the couch - perhaps I'll read another novel instead), I do wonder how someone uninterested in the process might get through them. Maybe just fine - it's not a question meant to imply a negative, but a genuine curiosity. On the other hand, I once read a 10,000 word article on shipping via the eyes of sailors on a tramp steamer simply because the writing was just so good, and I suspect the same thing will pull along any non-artistically oriented reader.A word about endings: I felt a bit let down by this one, but I also feel a tremendous sympathy for the author - and contemporary writers generally. The arc of modern literature has left them in a position whereby if they leave the ending ambiguous, people complain that it's a cop-out; yet if they come down on one side or the other, people complain that it's too tidy and real life does not work that way. Perhaps this suggests the need to re-structure the novel, but in Western literature, conflict is at the heart of every story, and where does that leave the writer? Not everyone can writing an ending as perfect as Joyce did for The Dubliners, and there are plenty of books out there with satisfying endings. Still, I empathize, and it did little to dampen my enjoyment of the novel.But as usual, I digress. Pick up the book, pay the author, read the story. You'll be doing a good thing.

Nadine

July 12, 2008

** spoiler alert ** I've read Michael Gruber's voodoo-mystic, Miami atmosphere thrillers, loved them, and was thrown by this latest effort.The Forgery of Venus takes the reader to the New York art scene, and immerges him into a world whose boundaries have been lost by drugs and self pity. The protagonist, an artist who has failed to live up to his potential, becomes involved in a scheme to forge a Valezques. What the reader is left with at the end is questions, not answers. Did the drug trial the artist participate in create an alternate universe? Was he forced into his criminal business deal? Did he really go insane, or did he find his way to his true artistic gifts outside the strict codes the New York art community was enforcing?If your preference is a book that makes you think, and leaves you wondering, this book is for you. Everything is pitch perfect: the atmosphere, characters, plot. Gruber doesn't hit one wrong note in this work. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time, and eagerly will await his next effort.

Katie

March 25, 2014

This was a pretty good book. One that I didn't hold out to big of expectations for to be honest. In the hands of someone else this book could have been very dry and boring because in my opinion the actual story wasn't that great until almost the end, but it was neither. The writing and characters kept me going, especially Chaz. Even though he was a batshit crazy, snotty artist he was likable and him as narrator was great. The details about art in general were bordering on pretentious, but were mostly enjoyable and immersed you into the world. Great ending as well. Thumbs up :)

Armand

September 18, 2008

** spoiler alert ** notes in no particular order:concept: Charles Wilmot Jr. gifted painter with serious personality flaws and gift for self- destruction gets involved in a complicated scenario during which he both begins to go mad, imagining himself to be the famous painter Velasquez and also being hired/ sucked-in by a sophisticated criminal master forger (Werner Krebs).- The beginning rolls along a little too quickly and we get an abbreviated bio on Wilmot with few scenes and most dialogue being heavily reported. A LOT of background on his family and maybe not all needed.It seemed like the author wanted to do more with the family history that appears here, but he let go maybe from editorial pressure. The sister and mother who are so heavily built up here barely play a role at novel's end.- The book really finds its stride around page 50 when characters come alive in scenes and via dialogue. Much nicer to watch the story develop instead of getting Wilmot's quick reports.The book has some wonderful meditations on art and the role it plays and on morality and what it means in the modern age.Werner Krebs is a great antagonist to Wilmot a sociopathic liar, control freak and scholar of the German condition who happens to share a deep a passion for painting as Charles does.The scenes in the past of Velasquez are beautifully handled with wonderful moments of historical detail. In particular I remember a discussion about all the gold that the Spanish Empire is bringing back from Central America and yet how poor the Spaniards are. It's nice to see the author, Michael Gruber, does not shirk from describing the excesses of capitalism and the free market in history.Made me much more interested in the history and theory of painting.The ending, however, was a little too abrupt for me. I appreciated the final connection between Wilot and Velasquez, but the criminal conspiracy stuff involving mind control etc was unbelievable (in a bad way)

Eileen

February 29, 2008

I cannot even describe how much I love art forgery. I don't know why. I don't know what it is, but art forgery fascinates me. Which is weird because unoriginality, copycatting, clones of society, all that crap pisses me off. But there's just something about...the lengths people go to, the imitation of something so great that someone would rather try to recreate it than even bother to attempt to create something better of their own, the...homage of it. It just excites my emotions. Anyway! This book is a head trip. It's great. It's like living in madness, at least a little bit...until the book is over. I loved it a lot. I may try to read the author's other works as well now.

Scot

June 28, 2010

I’ve read a few different books on art forgery in the last few years, most memorably Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell. I enjoy combining learning more about art and art history with how high stakes crimes in this area have operated in the past, and how they (I assume) continue to endure in the present. I know that technology regularly offers advancements in spotting the fakes, but I’d suspect that it also regularly offers criminal minds – particularly the more creative ones – ways to circumvent those advances as well.This is a novel, so I can’t assume the criminal master techniques described and discussed here are truly practiced in the real world, but they do make for a good read. The author clearly loves art and did well in art history at university. He expects that with a few references and allusions any reader will recall which Old Master was famous for which technique or stylistic innovation, and he assumes a shared reverential devotion to artistic achievements in the West from the Renaissance forward. If these requirements concern or bore you in the slightest, forego reading this novel.If, however, you don’t mind mulling over the personal struggles of an artist with great natural talent who feels he has replicated his father’s descent into mediocrity in the service of corporate demands, if you can handle psychological reflections on how our early relationships with parents can mold and scar us for life, and if you’re open enough to accept that in a hallucinatory drug state, it might be possible to cross over and truly experience the life of a person in another time and place as if you were that person (though it could well throw your own sense of identity and reality into jeopardy)—well, then, this is a novel for you, especially if you hold a special place in your heart for the work of Velasquez.This is the first book by Gruber I have read, and I picked it up on a fluke—no one recommended it, I had never heard of it, it was just in the right place at the right time when I reached for something to read. However, the author makes enough of an impact that I shall remember his name and probably check out some other work of his in the future.

Jonah

July 01, 2014

Another smart and engaging charmer from Michael Gruber. I don't know anyone else who can craft a page turner from a narrative where not very much happens . . . and yet life as we know it seems to hang in the balance. I notice that a fair number of readers just don't get Gruber. If you've stunted your intellectual growth reading urban fantasy and what passes for romance these days, you're probably not going to appreciate the effort Gruber requires. If on the other hand you still have enough functioning synapses to create a spark when you rub them together, you will find reading Gruber a rewarding exercise.

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