#4: The Swan Thieves, Elizabeth Kostova

Oh, The Swan Thieves, how I wanted to love you after the strange joy that was The Historian. But I just couldn't. More than anything, I thought the book was boring. It's not badly written but it just didn't have the oomph to carry this reader along. I had to force myself to read more than five pages at a time - especially when the library wanted its book back. Stop here if you don't want to know what happens!

The Swan Thieves combines two stories in two different eras, much like the wonderfully fantastic Possession. In the present day, artist Robert Oliver attempts to stab the (fictional) painting Leda at the National Gallery and after he's subdued, he's committed to an institution - where his psychiatrist, Andrew Marlow, spends the book trying to puzzle out his motives. About a hundred years before that, fledgling artist Beatrice de Clerval begins a love affair with her husband's older uncle. As the story moves on, we find out that Robert is obsessed with the mysterious Beatrice, dead long before his birth, and Marlow himself becomes obsessed with figuring out why.

I think the main problem with The Swan Thieves was that none of the modern-day characters were terribly likeable. Robert is portrayed as both a narcissist and a genius, and I think that we're supposed to root for his recovery so he can go on being a genius, but he was so self-absorbed - and treated all his loved ones like crap - that I really didn't care what happened to him. I found everyone else to be kind of pathetic - Robert's loves, Kate and Mary, were so damaged by him and Marlow was so overeager that it seemed perhaps he needed a little professional help himself. I found Beatrice's conundrum and narration to be a lot more interesting but unfortunately, she just wasn't in the book as much.

I also didn't care much for the ending, mostly because Robert's story wasn't actually resolved. I feel like Kostova focused so much on Beatrice's ending - which was well-written and poignant - that she forgot that Robert's illness had to actually be resolved, instead of just dismissed. Marlow's solving of the mystery shouldn't make the mute Robert better, but that's essentially what happens - Marlow figures out why he was trying to stab a painting and poof, Robert's better. But the problem is, Marlow never actually addresses what sort of disturbance has made Robert resort to such an action - we may all think the fictional Gilbert Thomas is a cheat but I daresay most of us wouldn't try to stab a portrait of him, if given the chance. And this is the mania in Robert that's never solved...and yet somehow, he's fixed. Ah, the wonders of fiction.

Well, I'm on to the next book, the lighthearted Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict.

#3: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

I really don't understand how Wolf Hall won this year's Booker Prize because the novel is awful. Although I finished the book weeks ago, I put off blogging about it - I just wanted to forget about it, Wolf Hall was that bad. (It amazes me that most professional reviewers and about half the Amazon reviewers thought it was brilliant...why?)

My biggest issue with the book was the vague use of pronouns. There are nearly 100 characters listed at the front and most of them are men. When they show up on the page, they're often identified simply as "he." In conversations, "he" is talking and it's up to the reader to puzzle out the speaker's identity (which is frankly too much work). In addition, Mantel often doesn't start new paragraphs when the action/speech switches to another character, so it became very difficult to figure out who was doing what. Good writing embraces and loves language and I don't understand how a book that misuses its main tool won a major prize. *Head. Thunk.*

So, as mentioned above, there are 96 characters listed at the front of the book - and most of them have, like, three names (family name, landowning title, professional title, etc) - so the book abounds with people. And, frankly, it seemed like there was very little to distinguish them. Aside from Cromwell and his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the characters just flitted in and out of the pages in a one-dimensional funk. The only people I found to be at all interesting besides the aforementioned were Jane Seymour, of all people, and Mary Boleyn - and sadly, they didn't appear much in the novel.

Lastly, I didn't quite understand the arc of the story, which interestingly is the same criticism I had about another (quasi-) Tudor novel, The White Queen. I know Cromwell's story and yet I still had no idea where Wolf Hall was going. And in the end, I would argue, it didn't really go anywhere. The novel ends with the death of Thomas More, which I didn't at all understand. He and Cromwell weren't really enemies, just men with different viewpoints, so it's not like there was a big power struggle or showdown, at least in the novel. My only guess is that Mantel ends the story at this random point to preserve something for the rumored sequel? I guess I just think that a story about a man's rise naturally moves to said man's fall - and yet, Wolf Hall ends years before that. Heck, it even ends before Anne Boleyn's downfall. It just ends, so randomly.

So yeah, Wolf Hall - to get through it, I basically just gave up on it. I stopped caring whether or not I understood who was speaking or what they were talking about and just kept turning the pages. Which is kind of pathetic, really.