Zidrou

From his Barcelona studio in 1939, an aging Catalan painter shares with his model the mystery of his best friend Vidal Balaguer, "the forgotten genius" of Catalan Modernism, who vanished on the eve of 1900. His story his linked to the disappearance a few months earlier of his muse and lover, Mar, the subject of his most famous painting, "Young Lady in a Mantón." But there are other disappearances, too, of people, a corpse, some oranges, and a stubbornly silent canary named Stradivarius. A police detective is convinced that Balaguer murdered his model but by the end of the story we may come to believe that, as the painter himself reflects, "the murder weapon is not always what you might think!"

The Muse The Muse

Jeff James

The best part about this book is the art, which resembles paintings in a classic style. The story is about a commercially unsuccessful painter who spends all his time moping about his lover, who disappeared without warning. The slow reveal of what happened to her is only helped along by the unreality of the book’s painterly style.

Unfortunately, things go sour thanks to a moment where the painter lashes out at his moneylender and calls him a “dirty Jew.” I suppose the author intends to show how far he’s fallen, but it’s hard to separate the antisemitism from the rest of the book, especially because the moneylender is never portrayed as anything other than a villain.

The Muse The Muse

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