Customer Reviews

Forgery

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

 

 

I read this book last spring when I was starting a very new experience in my life. I had just moved to Manhattan and I took the subway to work in a school in a very economically challeged neighborhood in Brooklyn. The school was amazing, but the trip was long and I often found myself getting sad when the train emptied out at Wall Street, which marked the halfway mark of my commute. But luckily for me, I was never alone because I had Rupert and Nikos, and the rest of the wonderful characters in this most brilliantly written novel. Beyond the characters, Murray's writing style in general made me feel curious about art and the Greek culture in general. Sabina Murray's writing style (that got me with Carnivore's Inquiry) just makes me hungry for more!!

In his starred review for Booklist, David Pitt puts it best:
(starred review) Forgery.
Murray, Sabina (author).
June 2007. 272p. Grove, hardcover, $24 (0-8021-1844-5).
REVIEW. First published June 1, 2007 (Booklist).

Murray's latest novel tells the story of Rupert Briggs, a recently divorced man who, in the summer of 1963, heads off to Greece to find new items for his uncle's art collection. But, like quite a few things in this beautifully written book, the title is deceiving; although it does refer to dubious works of art, it also (and primarily) refers to Rupert himself, a man who isn't quite what he appears to be. There's also friendly Steve Kelly, who may not be merely the journalist he claims to be. In fact, the story itself is something of a forgery, a psychological thriller posing as a gentle travelogue, a fairly dark voyage of self-discovery posing as a relatively light story of comic misadventure. Rupert is an intricately designed, intriguingly presented character: we know we like him, but we also know there are plenty of things about himself he isn't telling us (including, perhaps, the truth about the death of his young son). Murray does a lovely job of transporting us to mid-1960s Greece, a country teetering on the edge of political upheaval; unlike the people, this place, which no longer exists, feels entirely genuine. Forgery is a deeply complex, emotionally and intellectually rewarding novel about the lengths people can go to to make themselves into the people they wish they were.
-- David Pitt

An accomplished stylist, Sabina Murray (Slow Burn, The Caprices, and A Carnivore's Inquiry), currently a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, has written, in Forgery, a novel strong on aesthetic mood and weak on plot.

The story is told in the first person by Rupert Brigg, 30, an American plagued by guilt and grief over the death of his son Michael and a divorce from his wife Hester.

Rupert travels to Athens, Delphi, and the Greek archipelago, in search of classical artifacts unearthed by archaeological digs. He travels to Aspros and other islands of the Cyclades, encountering a menage of donkeys, sheep, and goats along the narrow streets.

The conversationalists who populate this novel are akin to the avant-garde artists and French existentialists of West Bank cafes. There's a lot of cigarette smoking, imbibing of alcohol, and, oddly, consumption of eggplants. One wonders where all the chatter and wandering hither and thither is leading.

Picaresque? Peripatetic? Pathetic? One struggles to describe this strange novel, and to arrive at some "justification" (a big word in this story) for its publication.

Rupert Brigg is not a bad man; he's just amoral. He doesn't believe in right and wrong, good and evil. Even when he learns of a murder, he responds with a curious shrugging-off, apathetic, "whatever" fatalism.

The ancient Greek philosophers sought the meaning of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Sabina Murray's Forgery is a similar examination of the meaning (if there is such) and the relationship (if such exists) of these qualities.

Forgery is an artsy, subtle, and sophisticated work. Its postmodern skepticism casts suspicion on naive interpretations of reality and warns us that people are often not who we think they are and things are often not what they seem.

I picked up this book looking for books that take place in Greece because we are going to be traveling there. It is a book that isn't really worth reading not for that purpose or just for entertainment. I think the book is attempting to make the analogy between forged art work and forged personhood (maybe). But I'm not sure.

It follows Rupert, a historic furniture expert, to Greece where he is supposed to be finding materials for his uncle's antiquities practice (through illegal or legal means). The story is complicated by the fact that Rupert is a drunk, a womanizer, and his son was recently drowned while in care of his now divorced wife. If we could have sympathy for Rupert it would help, I think, but I could never develop any (or for any of the other characters which range from a gay drunk friend, to a drunk adulterer and possible murdered, her husband, a Greek young man having flings with tourists as he prepares to marry, to a reporter/CIA agent, etc.)

I had a hunch that this novel might really be about art forgery (it isn't), or perhaps Greek statuary (it is, but only in passing,) or perhaps be an engrossing mystery of some kind (certainly not). Instead, the reader is offered a central character, Rupert Brigg (what an astonishing choice of name!), who lacks emotional and physical courage, seems to drink himself into oblivion most days, but nonetheless has bagfuls of money and women anxious to sleep with him at every turn. He does not have to fight them off with a stick, but indeed pushes one of them off a road so she falls and is injured. If Brigg had any inner life we might almost believe all this, but his only deep motivation seems to be the death of his son ... a sad event, but irrelevant to the story.

At the end, Brigg marries a woman he met on his Greek Island sojourn (page 209), she dies (page 210), he is grief-stricken and gets drunk (page 210), he goes to her funeral (page 211) and gives up his claim to most of her estate (page 212). Just like that. While the whole Briggs-Olivia romance was poorly developed, its ending is really atrocious.

The author seemed to have trouble deciding if she wanted to write a sensitive novel about grief and survival (I suspect her talent would let her do this), or a spy thriller, or an art smuggling adventure story. In the end, she wrote none of these. She created an interesting Greek Island travelogue and populated it with characters who (with the exception of the lively Nikos) are simply movie stereotypes.

Once again Sabina Murray has written another brilliant and intoxicating book about a cast of colorful and duplicitous characters. Set on a Greek island in the early 1960s, amidst political turmoil and intrigue, Forgery tells the story of Rupert Briggs, an antiques dealer who is haunted by family tragedy. Rupert is a "man of taste," as he calls himself, a collector of beauty, no matter what the cost--financial, emotional or moral. At the encouragement of his Uncle William, he travels to the remote island of Aspros in Greece to seek out ancient artifacts. He finds himself in a house full of artists, aristocrats and intellectuals, each one burdened with his or her own secret of debauchery or betrayal.
I fell in love with Rupert, and with his ebulliently eccentric friends, despite their flaws or rather, because of them. As she did in her last novel, Carnivore's Inquiry, Murray weaves her characters together in startling and compelling ways, luring us in to care passionately about them with her wry, darkly humorous and unsentimental prose. Like the ancient gods whose voices echo ever so lightly in the background of Forgery, Rupert longs for that which is idealized, beautiful and immortal. His search brings his story, and that of the others in his circle of friends, to an evocative and surprising conclusion.
Forgery is not only about a man's quest for redemption and divinity through art but it is also a book about ideas--culture, politics, the history of civilization, the folly of vanity and love. Yet I never once found this book to be droll or inaccessible. Murray's dialogue is always economical and entertaining. She paints a scene with exactitude and authenticity, and moves us through Rupert's story with a graceful deft hand. Frankly, I couldn't put it down. I missed lunch, dinner, a party, and numerous phone calls. Forgery is the ultimate book to read this summer. Board a ferry and head to the enchanted island of Aspros in the Aegean. It's 1963, you have all summer long and nothing to do but meet the most interesting people you've ever encountered. Trust me. Go buy this book right now!

Quite simply, _Forgery_ is the best novel I've read in years. The ensemble cast of characters become a group of friends that readers will not want to part with.

As the book begins, Rupert Brigg is sent by his wealthy uncle to hunt for antiquities in Greece. Slowly we realize, though, that the real purpose of this trip is to help Rupert begin to deal with the tragedy that has shattered his family. In Athens and on the Cycladic island of "Aspros" Rupert befriends Nikos, a lively and cosmopolitan young Greek, and the two of them find both the artwork and the eccentric comrades they are looking for.

In his intelligence, dry wit, and generosity, Rupert reminds me a bit of Nick Carroway, the narrator of _The Great Gatsby_. The difference, though, is that many of the other characters in _Forgery_--Olivia, Clive, Nikos, even the obnoxious American artist, Jack--are people you want to spend time with. (And who wants to spend more time with Tom or Daisy Buchanan?) I couldn't put this book down, and then when I did I felt lonely--I missed those characters and their parties on the Greek island, and I especially missed Rupert and his insight into the human heart. So I read the book again.