Customer Reviews

The Artist of the Missing: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

At first, LaFarge's first novel "The Artist of the Missing" bears striking similarity to Paul Auster's existential style, especially Auster's famous "New York Trilogy." LaFarge's themes of absences, coincidence, loneliness and his pawn-like hero Frank also echo Kafka. The second part of "The Artist" drifts into Haruki Murakami ("The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle") territory, where the bizarre, skewed logic and mystic circumstances become merely commonplace. And it's in the novel's 2nd half that the plot, which starts out tight, atmospheric and menacing unravels. Frank, the self-taught "artist," is a sympathetic hero, diligently searching for his past, his vanishing parents, while taking his quest to a mythical, mercurial, nameless city. The quest becomes more profound after he meets and falls for a mysterious police photographer of the dead -- Prudence. After that, images, ideas, symbols, scenes, characters and adventures weave in and out almost indiscriminately. This severs what had been a snug bond with the reader. Overall, "The Artist" is still a good read, very original and LaFarge has a clear, erudite style. I'm eager to see what he comes up with next in novel No. 2.

Like many outstanding books or even movies, I don't believethis book is something that can be fully digested in one reading.There are just so many layers of meaning, symbolism, even visual imagery that now in my second reading I'm finding so many new things that I didn't notice the first time through. Relate this to watching Kubrick. Do you really catch everything the first time? I was actually so intrigued by some of the concepts in this piece that I'm composing an orchestral work which aims to musically represent themes in the book. I noticed much criticism for the gradual change in narrative and even in the city's visual images as the book progresses. I feel however that this change is consistent with the Prologue. Notice that the dead man first notices everything, and then, the harder he looks to find the essence of the city, the more bleak his experience becomes. I feel this same progression as the book leads Frank to the prison, to the doll factory, and to the grotesque and unexplainable court system run by children. Just keep reading the book, and you'll start to see the connections!

I read this book on a lark a few year's back after I met the writer at a wedding. Motivated by curiosity then, it is curiosity again that brought me back to see what this fellow has been up to since, what kind of reception he received, &c. &c.

The thing about this book is that it is clever and smart and ambitious but also formally inventive in a way that just does not fit in today's world of Kingsolver or DFW, namby-pamby or clever-cerebral. (You can see here on which side of things my sympathies typically lie.) I am pleased to see that he seems to have made a career of things, something which I believe seemed far from clear then. To hazard a prediction, I suspect that he might be considered somewhat of a genius later, even if all he can claim for now is has-sold-well-in-Denmark.

In a simple way, this book manages to conjure a surgically precise set of feelings. It's got an ethereal quality remniscent of Borges but also Huysmans but still also all its own. In short, it's worth checking out and much, much better than most of the schlock that gets published as "(L)iterature" today.

"the artist of the missing" is good stuff. the story is filled with imagination, loneliness, curious illustrations, love and adventure. it has all the ingredients needed for a spectacular novel but doesn't follow a set pattern. the book takes twists in plot and is happily not formulaic. makes you think and wonder and realize and all that important inner stuff books should do. "the artist of the missing" is a good ride

This one went over my head. Way over. Still, I'm looking forward to more by Lafarge.

I didn't get a chance to finish reading my preview copy before it was stolen out of my hands by another fan of Paul LaFarge. Bravo!!

WHo is this guy? This book is haunting, beautiful, and just plain good. Can't wait to read more.

Ben Katchor is a cartoonist with a fine eye for the humdrum and magical details of city life. If he had run into a youthful, callow Italo Calvino at some point, "The Artist of the Missing" hints at the book the two might have produced.

Unfortunately, I don't mean this as a compliment. Mr. Lafarge styles his prose in exactly the way one would expect of a recent graduate from a writer's programme in which Borges, Calvino, and Perec were the modish subjects of study. Mr. Lafarge clearly has a knack for turning the mere cranking out of words into a beast of identifiable character.

At each point throughout this book, the style hangs together. Paragraphs read pleasingly. The turns of phrase are evocative. But the book does not have a set of characters to glue it together; it is bereft of people; of the intertwinglings between characters that drive a plot; of much life at all, alas.

While the absence of emotion or anything to empathise with can yield strength - Borges ascended to a pinnacle of 20th-century literary fame without squeezing either tear or smirk from the most pliant of souls - I fear this does not work well in a novel. Or perhaps merely not in Mr. Lafarge's novel. Ben Katchor's cartoons are compressed, even more so than Borges, and they succeed on some similarly passionless level. Alas, the chill that scratches over Mr. Lafarge's novel skitters on for scores of pages, rather than one or a dozen, and wearies where shorter stories might enliven.

"The Artist of the Missing" hardly rises above the level of self-conscious creative writing. Promising, to be sure, and a possible harbinger of something lovely from Mr. Lafarge as he gains experience, but ultimately not quite worth the trouble of reading.

While The Artist of the Missing will not be for all tastes, no-one could honestly deny that Paul LaFarge has real skill with the English language -- marvelous skill, for the book is full of marvels.

If you like surrealism and fantasy, if you are seeking dreamworlds to explore, then you will love this book. Every page holds a surprise, a lilt or a tilt in an unseen direction, or at least an unexpected turn of phrase. It's all done with an old world sensibility, and in the end it leaves the reader feeling like he or she has sat through a performance by a master of legerdemain, someone who glories in the art of pulling beautiful handkerchiefs out of thin air and then turning them into butterflies or rabbits or flames.

For a first novel, this is magnificent accomplishment. My only reservation is a minor one, for by the end I was enchanted and enthralled. But the techniques felt familiar, for though the landscape here is unique, the path to it is one that has been crossed by many great writers, from the Grimm brothers to Italo Calvino to Stephen Millhauser. LaFarge does it just about as well as anyone, and there's nothing wrong with doing well things which have been done before (realistic novelists build their careers on it), but I have a nagging suspicion that LaFarge is good enough to do even more, to stake out territory which is completely and undeniably unique to him, and I expect that with his future works he will.

Until then, The Artist of the Missing will do just fine, for it is a book to treasure and adore.

While The Artist of the Missing will not be for all tastes, no-one could honestly deny that Paul LaFarge has real skill with the English language -- marvelous skill, for the book is full of marvels.

If you like surrealism and fantasy, if you are seeking dreamworlds to explore, then you will love this book. Every page holds a surprise, a lilt or a tilt in an unseen direction, or at least an unexpected turn of phrase. It's all done with an old world sensibility, and in the end it leaves the reader feeling like he or she has sat through a performance by a master of legerdemain, someone who glories in the art of pulling beautiful handkerchiefs out of thin air and then turning them into butterflies or rabbits or flames.

For a first novel, this is magnificent accomplishment. My only reservation is a minor one, for by the end I was enchanted and enthralled. But the techniques felt familiar, for though the landscape here is unique, the path to it is one that has been crossed by many great writers, from the Grimm brothers to Italo Calvino to Stephen Millhauser. LaFarge does it just about as well as anyone, and there's nothing wrong with doing well things which have been done before (realistic novelists build their careers on it), but I have a nagging suspicion that LaFarge is good enough to do even more, to stake out territory which is completely and undeniably unique to him, and I expect that with his future works he will.

Until then, The Artist of the Missing will do just fine, for it is a book to treasure and adore.