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Dec 29, 2015wyenotgo rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
The book is not really classifiable; I've never encountered anything like it before, morphing as it does from poetry to prose to stream-of-consciousness musings, dreamscapes and back. At first glance it appears almost unreadable, reminiscent of James Joyce. But after a few pages one gets the rhythm of it and Smith's use of the voice of the painter Francesco (or rather his/her ghost) observing people as they study his and others' works on display is intriguing. How this connects to the second half of the book remains unclear until much later. She certainly waxes lyrical, even fantastical at times, so this is definitely not a book that will appeal to readers who don't appreciate prose. My major complaint is Smith's decision to abandon intelligible sentence structure in favor of random mutterings of the teenage protagonist in most of the contemporary portion of the book. While this may serve to place the reader "inside" George's thoughts, it does so at the expense of making it laborious to read. I'm not being stuffy here; there's a reason for grammar and punctuation: It facilitates the clear communication of ideas from writer to reader. Disjointed, random, unstructured comments that are meant to convey character and perhaps "make it real" quickly become tiresome when they cause a reader to lose the thread of the narrative (which is what happened to me unless I slowed down and concentrated on every phrase, as if I were reading a text book). Ironically that never happened in the part of the book set in the renaissance time frame! The contemporary half of the book just never achieves the rhythm and flow of the renaissance portion. If this book is "about" anything, it's about character development -- i.e. the two main protagonists. For me, that's an admirable objective on the part of the author and I was cheering for Smith to make those two unique characters live and breathe for me. I believe she succeeds to some degree with Francesco but doesn't quite make it with George, despite having invested so much effort in "voicing" her as noted above. Too bad, because I think George had more potential as an interesting and likeable character but somehow, it just doesn't quite come off. Many other readers will probably disagree with me about this. I've no idea how to place this book on a rating scale but I have to say I find it astonishing how highly rated it tends to have been by other readers. Maybe I just don't "get it" ....