Customer Reviews

The Art Thief

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(31)

 

 

The Art Thief is an amateurish novel that lectures against romanticizing art theft while doing exactly that. The author is described in publicity material as the founding director of an international think tank on art crime with a board of trustees that "includes the respective art squad heads of the FBI, Carabinieri, and Scotland Yard, as well as renowned museum, art world, and criminology specialists." They may not have read his novel. The book is populated with slapstick national stereotypes and Keystone Cops. The bumbling hugely obese French detective of the Sûreté stops to indulge his gourmandise on the way to crime scenes and is almost too fat to see the clues. The depressed, poorly dressed working-class British art crimes detective "can't tell a Degas from a Manet from a fancy I-don't-know-what" but has solved all his cases. Despite the lectures the author provides on how art theft is funding the drug trade and terrorism, the thieves are motivated by love, loss, and a sense of fairness and are the only characters not mocked or stereotyped. The moral of the story: "Trust in thieves."

Charney thanks his editors in the acknowledgements but apparently no one actually edited the writing. He writes about spotlights that illuminate spaces "vicariously," people who "reflect thoughtlessly," academic halls decorated with "pendulous portraits" (shades of Dalí). The only possible conclusion is that he does not know whas those adjectives and adverbs mean. An attentive editor should have noticed these and other awkward uses of language. There should be no star at all attached to this disastrous title.

I was intrigued enough by the subject matter of this book to give it a chance, but found it tremendously disappointing. The writing is painfully bad at times, and would have benefitted greatly from an editor. The characters are cliched, and the ending contrived. How this book ever landed a major publishing contract I cannot imagine. I have seen self-published fan fiction with better writing than this. I was also amused by Mr. Charney's claim to have invented the study of art crime; there are at least two professional journals and numerous books devoted to the subject written before Mr. Charney was born. For those interested in art history and art world intrigue, I would recommend Thomas Hoving's King of the Confessors and Peter Mayle's Chasing Cezanne.

I wanted to enjoy THE ART THIEF, mainly due to my pre-existing interest in the subject matter. However, author Charney is simply not very skilled at telling a story that is even remotely interesting or believable. The plot of this book is not structured in a manner to engage the reader's interest. The character development is non-existent, and the prose awkward. In particular, Charney's efforts at "humorous" dialogue fall painfully flat.

THE ART THIEF contains some interesting lectures on art history, but they are not integrated into the novel's plot. I learned some interesting tidbits of information in reading this novel, but it didn't make the book worthwhile for me. I would have been better off reading a work of non-fiction.

Charney is probably a very talented guy, but I think his editor let him down by releasing THE ART THIEF in its current form. Novels like this make me wonder about the mindset of modern-day publishing.

The Art Thief isn't just bad, is one of the most poorly written novels I have ever read. Everything about it is overwrought and tired. The dialogue is bad, the book's rythm is bad, the way it was plotted out is bad... And the ending is so horrible I had to debate whether or not this novel was just one big joke or if someone, somewhere, felt that this was serious entertainment. If the first option is true, then the joke's on me. If it's the ladder, then someone out there should never be able to publish another book ever again.

We are supposed to be interested about a few modern art pieces that are stolen by an unknown presence. And maybe we would, if the characters felt real or sain. But what we are offered are poorly realised characters that all talk the same, all act the same, and all feel pretentious. You have the art expert and pro on art thieves lecturing about the same subjects over and over and over again. We have the two French policemen who, grossly caricaturized, act and speak so silly you'd think you were in one of the pink panther movies. You have the art detective who is never really given anything to do but mull over things over and over again. And you have two female characters that are so alike and the same that it's often hard to differentiate them.

Not only is this book repetitive, it is also written as a very bad art lecture. Long and long and long pieces of dialogue that never amount to much. For example, a professor is lecturing his students about art and keeps putting in silly, childish remarks in his lecture that are just annoying and unrealistic.

Did the author want to give us a new appreciation for modern art or art as a whole? Cause if he did so, he poorly missed the point. And the fact that the author felt the need to end every chapter with a cliffhanger, some of which are never answered, is just beyond annoying.

Halfway through this book, I told myself that I should just stop reading. I was getting so mad at it. But then I decided to see how bad it could actually become. So I kept on reading and came face to face with... The ending. It is so ridiculous, so overwrought that I literally threw the book across the room, never bother to finish reading the last few pages.

It is rare that I find nothing good to say about a book. Unfortunately, The Art Thief doesn't have a single redeeming quality. I will happily forever forget this book now that I've finished reading it.

Only one other time in my 52 years have I closed a book and thought "This publisher should be sued for malpractice." After all, there are lots of bad writers. They can't be blamed for their ineptness. They can be ignored, edited or rejected. But it is not their fault for being published.

The publisher, on the other hand, in this case Simon and Schuster, is fully responsible for what they bring to the page. It is hard to imagine how more than one person in that firm agreed to publish this sorry, convoluted, cringe-inducing manuscript. Even worse, they got allegedly credible authors to actually write positive clips to promote the book.

To Noah Charney: Please learn to write before you attempt another book.

To the editors of Simon and Schuster: SHAME. SHAME.

Don't waste your money on this terribly written thriller. This book got a lot of hype. I fail to understand why. I was really looking forward to reading it. All of my favorite European locations + Art. Sounded great in the ads. But it was painful to read. Reminded me of a first year lit major. Noah Charney never an met adjective or metaphor he didn't like. I love mysteries and will usually read a book all the way through unless its a totally lame plot. The plot "idea" is good, but poorly executed. I never got involved with any of the characters, they're all cliched cardboard cutouts. The inspector does nothing. The Frenchmen are absurd. I could never even understand what they had to do with the plot. All they did was gorge on outrageous amounts of food. Mr Charney should read Donna Leon or Andrea Camilleri to learn how to deal with characters & food, as well as plot. And, The Art Professors' lectures are so very adolescent. Was this just a chance for the author to put down what he considers the "philistines".

Maybe Mr Charney knows his "Art Historical"sic, stuff but he doesn't know how to develop characters. I finally got so tired of the over the top adjectives and poor writing that I skimmed the last 1/2 of the book. A waste of time. I do not recommend.

I can think of two good things about The Art Thief. 1) It evoked very strong feelings in this reader. Unfortunately, those feelings included hostility and boredom 2) Because I received it as a desk copy from the publishing rep, I did not waste one cent on this drivel. What I did waste was too much time on a book that is neither well-written nor interesting.

While Mr. Charney may have impressive academic credentials, he certainly is not a fiction writer and this book proves it. The language both is stilted and pretentious and often reads like a freshman creative writing exercise. Here is but one example: "Sunlight dipped toward the horizon, over pencil-sketch trees calligraphed onto the impossible blue of the sky, tinged a burnt scarlet. The moon was already aloft, its craterous yin-yang hanging in the premature daylit night." (p. 270) The Art Thief is full of this sort of pretentious crap. Half the time, I'd finish a passage and not know what Charney was even trying to describe.

Not only was the writing convoluted, so was the plot. By the time I got to the end, I didn't even care what happened. The character development was non-existent and the dialogue was completely unbelievable. Mr. Charney must have connections in publishing because I can't imagine how else he managed to get anyone to publish this book. I'm offended on behalf of every really good writer who can't get published. I mainly finished the book so that I could confirm for myself that, yes, this is the worst book I've ever read. I plan on sending it back to the publishing rep. If I sell it back to a used bookstore, someone else will waste their time and money on this pabulum, and I wouldn't do that to a fellow-reader.

Avoid this one at all costs. If you want a GOOD and well-written book on art theft, try Edward Dolnick's, The Rescue Artist.

This caper is art historian Noah Charney's first novel and it shows. There is no doubt that Charney knows his stuff. The problem (one of many)is that he wants to show off his stuff. A Caravaggio disappears from a church in Italy. One Malevich disappears from the Malevich Society in Paris, another from the National Gallery in London, and an unnamed Suprematist painting disappears from a collector's house in London. All of these thefts are related somehow, but the denouement is so convoluted and complicated that I'm not sure anyone can follow this muddle, and by the time you get there you no longer care. Along the way Charney inserts long pendantic pages where he puts his words into the mouths of lecturing characters telling us sometimes interesting things about art history. Unfortunately this brings the action to a halt. Of course Charney's knowledge could be put to good use and would be in the hands of a more experienced and better writer. Some of his metaphors and similes are just awful i.e. 'the room was long and narrow and looked like the digestive tract of a computer'. Despite the failure of this novel I think Mr. Charney should give a novel a try again. Perhaps with better editing and advice a better novel will emerge.

I received this book as a gift so read it. I was disappointed and had to force myself to finish reading it. The characters were flat and so there was no tension created and I could never really care what happened to them or in the mystery. I also found the writing style to be difficult to read. At first I thought it had been translated from another language, but upon checking found that it was written by an American. The descriptive words were awkwardly chosen so I was often distracted and thus the reading bumped along rather than flowed. All in all, I would not recommend this book.

I usually have a code of finishing a book I start, but I had to make an exception in this case. I thought the writing was horrible. The style of flipping among all these meaningless plots, that you could barely keep straight, was very annoying. I usually love books about the art world, but this didn't cut it at all. I hate to be negative about a first time author, but better luck next time!