Customer Reviews

The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa

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

 

 

The story is of course, about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1912. What the book is really about is the people who perpetrated the crime. This is a fairly good book, a fast read with no spiritual crises, deep insight, or anything else of that sort to drag it down. I enjoyed the pre theft stories of the master thief and conman, the Marquis de Valfierno, and how he elegantly swindled his "clients."

I would have given this one five stars as light fiction: fast-moving, easy-reading tale based upon the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. But it is so close to fact that I wonder whether it is fiction at all.

The facts:

The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in August of 1911, and disappeared for two years; it was recovered when a Louvre worker of Italian origin, Perugia, tried to give it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in exchange for a reward. The painting was returned to France by the Italian government and Perugia was imprisoned. In the 1930's a New York Times writer named Decker wrote of an interview he had had with an aging fine-arts con-man named Valfiero, who told him he had engineered the theft in order to justify the sale of several excellently-faked Mona Lisas to wealthy private collectors.

This is exactly the story Noah tells in "The Man who Stole the Mona Lisa".

Presumably, the fraud victims themselves would be too humiliated to complain when the original turned up again; but in almost a century since then they must have passed on, and their heirs would have had much less trepidation in exposing the fraud, so some plausible Mona Lisa fakes ought to have appeared. Since none have, perhaps Noah was right to present his story as fiction. But I can only give it four stars: I am as affronted to see fact presented as fiction as I am to see fiction presented as fact. I think the two should be kept very completely separate. Noah has not done that.

Nearly a hundred years after it occurred, is when I first heard the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre. No details. You'd expect something that big to show up in the news, and it might have been a prominent story except that it was overshadowed by the news of the Titanic at the time. The plot of the disappearance of the Mona Lisa painting didn't surface until the 1930s.

I enjoyed reading "The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa" by Robert Noah. Con man Marquis Eduardo de Valfierno assembles his cast of cohorts to commit the notorious art heist. The thrill of the chase keeps the story entertaining from start to finish. The details are intriguing throughout. A gripping plot, well-told.

It turned out to be a great overal bargain. I found that even though it is fictional, it was quite interesting and quite plausible. The book was the right combination of realistic imagination, creativity, and fact. Unfortunatly, though, I felt that the writer lost his flow near the end of the book. Therefore, I felt that the ending was just tacked on when the author felt that he was done writing the core of the book.

What could have been, indeed WAS, an amazing true crime story is ground out at a laboriously slow pace and Noah seems more interested in the sound of his prose than anything to do with this amazing and faascinating true story.

I kept waiting for the good part to begin. The set up for the crime is long and tedious and there is very little excitement in the actual theft or in its aftermath. I couldn't wait until it was over. Save your time and read something else.

I was completely amazed with the writing in this book. Noah is an exceptional writer. I can hardly wait for the next one.