In addition to being thrilling and paranoiac, The Forgery of Venus is smart, providing nearly an art history elective’s worth of insight into Velazquez and his contemporaries. While knowledge of art history is not at all necessary to enjoy the story, it would certainly add to the experience; I ended up marking a number of pages so that I could later go online and see the art the characters had been discussing. The reader is also treated to a seminar on how to forge an Old Master, reminiscent of What’s Bred in the Bone by the under-appreciated Robertson Davies. Gruber is not as witty as Davies but still entertains while educating – an accomplishment not easily attained.
I enjoyed The Forgery of Venus immensely. It starts a little slowly, in a possibly unnecessary story-within-a-story framework, before launching headlong into the first person narration by Chaz Wilmot that makes up the bulk of the novel – great, strange stuff. I’d never read anything by Michael Gruber before but after this introduction I will make it a point to track down his earlier novels.
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