Customer Reviews

The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(25)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

Imagine the possibility of finding a new play by William Shakespeare! During restoration work on a 16th century book enticing letters are found that hint at the existence of an unknown play by Shakespeare. Obviously a major coup and soon after the discovery everybody seems to after this unknown manuscript, including a bunch of Russian mobsters and some Jewish gangsters.

The novel is made up of three story lines that converge as the story develops. Richard Bracegirdle, the letter writer from the 16th century; Jake Mishkin an Intellectual Property Lawyer; and Albert Crosetti an aspiring filmmaker making a living working for an antiquarian bookshop. The author uses the written word eloquently to bring three distinct characters to life in such a way that you get absolutely and completely absorbed in the narrative. The novel does not totally focus on the thrill of the chase to find the illusive manuscript, but incorporates the (dysfunctional) lives and loves of the main characters to give a rounded whole.

This is a literary detective story, where you will find it difficult to anticipate where the narrative will take you next, with the only way forward to turn the pages quickly to the next and the next. I think the novel holds something for everyone, even if you don't know anything about Shakespeare or books. I have to admit that this book is one of the best I have read so far this year and will definitely anticipate the next book of this author.

Having read Gruber's first two books Tropic of Night and Valley of Bones I wasn't sure I was ready for a third. The first two having left me a bit nonplussed. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy books and movies that take a detour around reality but those two books made a right angle turn somewhere and I'm not sure I'm over them yet!

TBoAAS is a whole other beast. Slow moving, tedious at times, it none-the-less hooked me and drew me in until I could not walk away. I felt that that the first 2/3's of the book moved at a glacial pace. Which is great if you want to fully involve youself in the characters and the plot. At some point, which I can't precisely pin down, the pace picked up and hauled me, open-mouthed, to the final pages.

Honestly, who would have thought combining a self-absorbed, womanizing lawyer (a heavy lifter, literally, to boot) with a dreamy young man who believes life is literally determined by the movies and setting them on what may or may not be a wild goose chase for an unknown Shakespearean manuscript could prove to be so entertaining?

As a mark of how well done the book is, I shed a few tears at the end, not because it was sad but because the story was over. To date only two other writers have affected me that way.

You don't have to be a literary, artsy type to get into this story, btw. You DO need to persevere long enough to let the story get hold of you. Then you're stuck. Happily so, I might add.

In all the years that I've been buying books on Amazon I have never taken the time to write a book review. Lazy? Yes. Selfish? Probably. But this novel irked me enough that I had to finally post words online. Let me say that I am a book a week reader with a wide variety of tastes. Only about once or twice a year do I put a book aside unfinished. And Book of Air and Shadows gets that dubious distinction for 2008.

The main reason? Jake is unbearable to read. I'm all for an anti-hero. In fact I kind of dig them. But Jake is so smarmy and proud of his bedroom conquests that I couldn't help wondering if the author was perhaps giving us insight into his own frustrated sexual fantasies.

So okay. Jake likes sex. Cool. Go for it guy. But when 75% of what he has to say is about bedding women it's not exactly helping propel the story forward.

My frustration was compounded by the fact that the other narrators were more interesting and actually had something to say...storywise. Each time I turned the page and saw it was a Jake chapter I groaned outloud. Finally I had to just give up the fight.

There it is. My first ever review. Sure hope it helps someone else out there in Amazon-land.

Far from an ordinary genre thriller, "The Book of Air and Shadows" is a complicated tale spanning four centuries. Within the requisite context of action and suspense, societal, cultural and historical issues are addressed with wit and style.

There's lots of shoot 'em up action in this story, told by an assortment of engagingly flawed characters--Shakespeare himself is in the mix--a very difficult device Mr. Gruber pulls off without a false step. Wild plot twists and digressions on topics as varied as the guilt of the very rich, the influence of movies on culture and the nature of truth make it an entertaining and memorable read. Mr. Gruber did some prodigious scholarship; there's information about bookbinding, 17th century armaments, the development of mathematics, Shakespearean lore, the Russian Mob, and geology.

Gruber deftly illustrates the foibles of the main characters (and what foibles they are!) with humor and keeps the reader as curious about them as about the next plot twist. Some charming and well-defined minor characters keep the book from becoming too angst-ridden and their contributions make the main players' voyages of self discovery as riveting as the plentiful action.

This is one of the few thrillers I've read recently that didn't waste my time. It's very smart, very satisfying and well, thrilling.

It appears that all writers are fascinated with the genre of "what if" fiction and Michael Gruber is no exception. In the Book of Air & Shadows he asks the reader "What if a couple of modern day antiquarian bookstore employees (Albert Crosetti and Carolyn Rolly)accidently discover letters and cyphers purportedly written by an intimate of William Shakespeare alluding to the existance of a hidden Shakespeare play written in the Bards own hand? Building on this first what if, he continues to tease us with more what if's. What if an Intellectual Property lawyer were to become involved in the question of potential ownership of the manuscript. (Is it really finders keepers). What if pursuit of the manuscript resulted in the brutal murder of a Shakespearan scholar? And so it goes.

In a chronicle liberally peppered with offbeat characters in unlikely situations, complex codes, and illuminating historical information, Gruber interweaves stories of detection, deception, and a few pithy observations, i.e. "We sometimes fall in love with unsuitable people, which is why Cupid carries a bow and arrows and not a clipboard with a stack of personality tests".

Suggestion: Before you begin this book, all prospective readers should get out their high school copy of the Canterbury Tales and read a couple of excerpts so that they are up to speed and prepared for the writing style put forth in the "Ciphered letters" and "The Bracegirdle Letters" chapters.

Air & Shadows would not be a contender for any literary awards, but in general, it is a satisfying read for a lazy afternoon.

I thought of using "Masterpiece Thriller" or "A Wild and Thoughtful Ride" as my titles, but wanted to get one key message across to Amazon browsers: The less you know about what is going to happen, the better, as this story unfolds before you.

It's An Instance of the Fingerpost: A Novel meets The Maltese Falcon, as written by Robert Ludlum. A compelling combination. The author uses three entirely distinct narrating points of view to move the story along and uses those perspectives to expound on Shakespearean England, film, bookbinding, dysfunctional families---there is a lot going on here.

While the book is fairly classified as a "literary thriller," it becomes more of the latter and less of the former as it moves along. While the writing seems very real for most of the book, the characters are unrealisticly outstanding--in the modeof, say, James Patterson--and there's a bunch of gratuitous "sex talk"--not sex scenes,but rather guys talking unrealistically about sexual exploits--that weaken the book somewhat, but these problems stand out as imperfections because the book is otherwise executed at such a high level.

Get ready to enjoy yourself.

Albert Crosetti, a young filmmaker in progress works in a rare book store. A fire next door to the shop sets off an international quest for a literary grail, an undiscovered manuscript by William Shakespeare, written in his own hand. The play which is about Mary Queen of Scots is the product of 17th Century intrigue as England labors under post-Elizabethan religious turmoil under the reign of the beheaded Mary's son King James I.

Bracegirdle, a young man of so little promise that his father apprenticed him off, proves to be a talented accountant, inventor, gunner, cryptographer, and (ultimately) spy. He is sent by Lord Darden to befriend "W.S." with a fanciful claim that they are maternal cousins. Bracegirdle's mission is to convince W.S. to write a play glorifying the late Scottish queen and prove W.S. to be a secret papist.

The Bracegirdle manuscript discovered in the binding of a water-damaged rare book is taken to a British scholar in residence at Columbia who cheats Crosetti and then having made a deal with the devil, a Russian gangster, pays with his life. But by then the Bracegirdle document has been placed for safekeeping with a New York lawyer Jacob Miskin, who opens this narrative in a cottage on Lake Henry awaiting his own death.

This is an astonishingly well-crafted novel, written in three distinct voices-Crosetti, Miskin and Bracegirdle. It presents historical and literary back-story with keen insight, while making but one passing and sly reference to the DaVinci Code to which this work most favorably compares. Michael Gruber clearly contemplates a blockbuster version to be produced and offers some insights into film, reality and art that are truly thought provoking.

Push the Buy It Now button and travel through time and space with characters you will never forget.

This book is like a seven-course literary feast for the starving reader. It is my first book by Mr. Gruber, and having finished it about 10 minutes ago, I'll be ordering the rest of his catalog immediately. It absolutely soars on so many levels: a superbly plotted thriller with a deft, energetic plot full of intricate, dark twists; an existential meditation of the roots of personal identity and growing up; a good-natured, deconstructionist poke at fiction and metafiction; a biting, anecdotal familial drama (or two!), á la David Sedaris. It never comes off clumsy or over-reaching and it's written in an effortless, breezy prose that makes it impossible to put down. Like any good meal, you want to slow yourself down just so you can savor every flavor, but in this author's capable hands, resistance is clearly futile. When you're done, you'll just sit back and think to yourself, "Wow, I won't have anything that good for a long time." And you'll be right.

I decided to read "The Book of Air and Shadows" because it was billed as a "Da Vinci Code" type of mystery (although hopefully better written) about a lost Shakespeare manuscript. Overall, it was a very enjoyable book, but it wasn't quite as fabulous as I hoped it would be.

The story revolves around the age-old letters of an English spy, Richard Bracegirdle. In the letters, Bracegirdle claims that William Shakespeare wrote a play about Mary, Queen of Scots, which is hidden in a secret location and has never been discovered. When the letters are finally unearthed by two bookshop workers in modern day New York City, a series of dangerous events begins to unfold. Multiple characters are united in this mysterious quest to locate what could be the greatest literary treasure of all time.

I enjoyed the way author Michael Gruber shifts back and forth to tell the story from two of the main characters' points of view, and how excerpts from the letters are interspersed between the chapters. The book is written in a sort of stream of consciousness narrative that took a while to get used to, and the only time it really annoyed me was in certain chapters narrated by the character of James Mishkin. (However, that character is kind of an arse, so I think alienating the reader was the author's intent.) I also thought that it took a while for the book to really pick up the pace, and the ending was a bit more rushed than it needed to be, which seems to be the case with most mystery novels these days (why is that?). My other gripe with this book is that I thought all the sexual references were overdone and unnecessary at times. I'm not a prude by any sense of the imagination, but I thought a lot of the smutty references were out of place and took away from the central action of the story.

Despite its few tragic flaws, "The Book of Air and Shadows" kept me entertained until the very end. I thought certain things were kind of predictable, but there were enough surprising twists and turns that made the novel extremely worthwhile. If you like mysteries, this book is definitely worth reading, and I think most Shakespeare buffs will enjoy it as well.

I think the plot and the storyline was well developed and the idea of a lost Shakespeare manuscript great. However, the characters annoyed me. Every character was so much to the extreme: three siblings, one a gorgeous blond model, the other a former heavyweight Olympian-turned lawyer, and the third a former prison thug-turned Jesuit priest. Not to mention the Nazi mom and Jewish dad. The other characters were similary extremists and I thought it was not believable the way every character was written so exceptionally. Other than that, good plot, though a little too much diversion into the main character's sex life and various other musings.