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Summary
Summary
Set in a Paris darkened by World War II, Sara Houghteling's sweeping and sensuous debut novel tells the story of a son's quest to recover his family's lost masterpieces, looted by the Nazis during the occupation. Born to an art dealer and his pianist wife, Max Berenzon is forbidden from entering the family business for reasons he cannot understand. He reluctantly attends medical school, reserving his true passion for his father's beautiful and brilliant gallery assistant, Rose Clément. When Paris falls to the Nazis, the Berenzons survive in hiding. They return in 1944 to find that their priceless collection has vanished: gone are the Matisses, the Picassos, and a singular Manet of mysterious importance. Madly driven to recover his father's paintings, Max navigates a torn city of corrupt art dealers, black marketers, Résistants, and collaborators. His quest will reveal the tragic disappearance of his closest friend, the heroism of his lost love, and the truth behind a devastating family secret. Written with tense drama and a historian's eye for detail, Houghteling's novel draws on the real-life stories of France's preeminent art-dealing familes and the forgotten biography of the only French woman to work as a double agent inside the Nazis' looted art stronghold. Pictures at an Exhibition conjures the vanished collections, the lives of the artists and their dealers, the exquisite romance, and the shattering loss of a singular era. It is a work of astonishing ambition and beauty from an immensely gifted new novelist.
Author Notes
Sara Houghteling is a graduate of Harvard College and received her master's in fine arts from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to Paris, first place in the Avery and Jules Hopwood Awards, and a John Steinbeck Fellowship. She lives in California, where she teaches high school English.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A young French-Jewish man obsesses about taking over his father's fine art dealership before WWII, and tries to locate its lost canvases in the war's aftermath in Houghteling's ambitious and satisfying debut novel. Halfhearted medical student Max Berenzon tries to impress upon his father, Daniel, that he should inherit the business, and spends the rest of his energy wooing Rose, the gallery assistant. But the war soon makes talk of the future a moot point, and the Berenzons survive the war in a cellar in the south of France. When father and son return to Paris, their gallery is empty, looted by the Nazis. In dirty postwar Paris, Max chases both the missing art and Rose, and though both his targets remain elusive and the gaping hole left by the roundup of French Jews is impossible to close, Max does shed light on his own family's secret tragedy. Houghteling dazzlingly recreates the horrors of war, and it's the small, smart details-a painting that was a sentimental family treasure turning up years later in an ordinary gallery; an offhanded anti-Semitic remark in a cafe-that make one uncommon family's suffering all the more powerful. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Weaving a fictitious Jewish family into historical figures of the Paris art world of the 1930s and 1940s, Houghteling humanizes the story of the Nazis' systematic looting of France's art treasures. Daniel Berenzon, who counts Matisse and Picasso among the artists he represents, routinely grills his son, Max, on the exhibits mounted in his prestigious Paris gallery, then steers the boy toward medical school since he considers Max lacking in business sense and too attached to paintings to let them go for profit. The Berenzons flee to the South of France during the occupation of Paris, returning to find the gallery a burned-out shell and hidden masterpieces gone, and it is Max with the help of his father's apprentice, Rose Clement, whom he loves who tries desperately to recover the stolen art as he uncovers a family secret. Rose, who works heroically to track the paintings in secret from her Nazi employers, is patterned after real-life curator Rose Valland, whose documentation helped repatriate thousands of paintings. Houghteling's vivid descriptions of paintings and their power add to the allure of this impressive debut novel.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EARLY on in Sara Houghteling's captivating first novel, the protagonist, Max Berenzon, receives a music lesson from his concert pianist mother. Playing some chords from "Pictures at an Exhibition," she explains how each movement represents an artwork from an actual show. "Mussorgsky wrote this for the painter Victor Hartmann, who died young," she says. "This is the closest you can ever get to that exhibition. They say all of Hartmann's paintings have been lost, so there is only the music." Houghteling's own "Pictures at an Exhibition" was also written for lost paintings: it tells the story of the art looted from Parisian galleries and museums under Nazi occupation, much of it subsequently destroyed or smuggled out of France. When the novel opens, in the late 1930s, the Berenzon Gallery is thriving - both Picasso and Matisse are under contract - and Max, an indulged only child, assumes he will inherit the business. But before his 17th birthday, his father delivers a stinging blow: Max, he announces, lacks "the hunger, the desire to hunt and chase," to be a successful gallerist, and should become a doctor instead. Over the next few years, Max seems determined to prove his father right. Given a blank check to buy a painting at auction, he spends an exorbitant amount on what appears to be a fake Manet. He gads about town, seldom attends his medical classes and moons after his father's assistant, Rose Clément, "a woman as Ingres would have painted her: luminous skin, impossibly long limbs and hair so fine it never stayed in its combs but found its maddening way to the sticky corners of her mouth." Max is lost, better defined by what he isn't - not an artist, not a businessman - than what he is. Then Houghteling jumps to 1944, sketching the war years in broad strokes like an Impressionist landscape. The Berenzons, who have been hiding at a farm in rural France, return to find their gallery a vandalized shell. Like everyone else, they can hardly believe the stories of what happened to the people sent east, until pictures of mass graves start turning up. When Max's heartsick parents retreat to the countryside, he determines to find the missing paintings, hoping to redeem himself in his father's eyes. Aiding him is the lovely Rose, whose passion for art preservation is matched only by Max's passion for her. (Houghteling based her character on the real-life Rose Valland, who worked at the Louvre and secretly kept track of looted art in meticulous records that allowed for some of its repossession.) Max pines after Rose from start to finish, in a lengthy unrequited love story. Her cause is noble, but her character is static; her nunlike devotion to art makes his fixation frustrating. The more interesting, dynamic relationship here is between Max and his father. Houghteling shows how we hurt the people we love the most, often when we seek to protect them from the truth. At one point, Max's father explains that he likes the Impressionists because they "let your eye finish the picture." The same could be said of Houghteling's elegant prose. Max's voice is at once crisp and poetic, detailed and spare. While the second half of the book turns into a cat-and-mouse chase, the story is layered with vignettes that give it deeper resonance. Max may not succeed in recovering much of his father's stolen art, but the quest gives his life purpose and the novel substance. In a book about coming to terms with loss, things continue to exist even in their absence. The paintings may be gone, but there is always the music. Houghteling shows how we hurt the people we love the most, often when we seek to protect them from the truth. Malena Watrous's first novel, "If You Follow Me," will be published next winter.
Kirkus Review
Longing and loss permeate Houghteling's debut, which focuses on the world of Parisian art dealers before and after the Nazi occupation. Between the wars, Daniel Berenzon was one of the most successful gallery owners in Paris, numbering Picasso and Matisse among his clients. His son Max, the engagingly modest narrator, is the victim of his father's success. In 1939, the 19-year-old hopes to join his father in the business, but Daniel says no. The pampered youth, though knowledgeable, is not hungry enough, and he hires the beautiful young Rose Clment, a Louvre curator, as his latest apprentice. Max yearns for his father's approval and Rose's love throughout the novel, but he makes little headway. Rose is affectionate, but work always comes first, and during the occupation, while the Berenzons, assimilated Jews, are being sheltered by a Protestant farmer in central France, she remains in Paris and strives heroically to offset the Germans' looting by becoming "a registry of lost art." Houghteling has immersed herself in the history of the period, and her love of these paintings shines through. But though Rose's story is the most dramatic, it is Max who's front and center, and this makes for some awkwardness. Back in liberated Paris in 1944, Max sets his heart on tracking down his father's paintings, all lost; his hopes are constantly dashed, but his search is exciting and the author is finely attuned to the dealers' folkways, their sophistication sometimes masking collaboration with the enemy and outright thievery. It is not only the paintings that have gone missing; so too have thousands of deported Jews. Max is sheltered by a friendly Hasid, an Auschwitz survivor, and they both try to track down loved ones, but again there is some awkwardness as the author integrates the two searches. The ending, with a years-after epilogue, is a mess. An uneven first novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In late 1930s Paris, Max Berenzon studies medicine but longs to be his father's apprentice at the city's most successful art gallery in Paris. In lieu of succeeding his father at the gallery, Max falls in love with his father's protegee, Rose. However, when World War II reaches Paris, the Berenzons must flee, hiding in the French countryside for the next four years and leaving the gallery's paintings behind in a vault. When the war is over, Max and his father return to Paris, only to find that all of the paintings have been looted. By staying on at the Louvre during the German occupation, Rose has been able to track the movement of many of the stolen paintings, and it becomes Max's mission to recover the lost artworks. Although the war has led to the loss of the paintings, it uncovers the great secret of Max's childhood. Houghteling received a Fulbright to study paintings that went missing during the war, and the detail shines through in this first novel, which effectively depicts the new reality for Jews in postwar Europe. Recommended for most libraries.-Amy Ford, St. Mary's Cty. Lib., Lexington Park, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One In the twilight of my life, I began to question if my childhood was a time of almost absurd languor, or if the violence that would strike us later had lurked there all along. I revisited certain of these memories, determined to find the hidden vein of savagery within them: the sticky hand, the scattered nuts, the gap- toothed girl grasping a firecracker, a cap floating on the Seine, flayed legs swinging between a pair of crutches, the tailor and his mouthful of pins. Some of these were immediately ominous, while others only later revealed themselves as such. However, whether or not another boy living my life would agree, I cannot say. Of the humble beginnings from which my father built his fame, I knew only a few details. My grandfather, Abraham Berenzon, born in 1865, had inherited an artists' supply store. He sold tinctures, oil, canvases, palettes and palette knives, miniver brushes made from squirrel fur, purple- labeled bottles of turpentine, and easels, which my father described as stacked like a pile of bones. The shop was wedged between a cobbler's and a dressmaker's. Artists paid in paintings when they could not pay their bills. And as Renoir, Pissarro, and Courbet were far better with paint than with money, the family built up a collection. When the value of a painting exceeded the price of its paint, Abraham sold it and invested the money with the Count Moïses de Camondo, a Jew from Istanbul with an Italian title and a counting-house that he named the Bank of Constantinople. Both men loved art, and they were fast friends. By 1900, Abraham could purchase an apartment on rue Lafitte, near Notre- Dame-de-Lorette, in a neighborhood known as the Florence of Paris. Soon afterward, Moïses de Camondo recommended that my grandfather invest in the railroads. Coffers opened by the beauty of paint were lined with the spoils of steel, steam, and iron, and my grandfather did not have to sell any more of his paintings. As a teenager, I often passed by rue Lafitte and imagined the family home as it had once been, as my father had described it: each picture on the grand salon's walls opening like a window--onto a wintry landscape, a tilted table with rolling apples, a ballet studio blooming with turquoise tulle. The salon's chandelier shone onto the street through windows which, as was the case across the Continent, were made from high- quality crystal. On sunny afternoons, Grandfather's gallery was so ablaze with prismatic light that schoolchildren returning home for lunch thought they saw angels fluttering down rue Lafitte. They reported their sightings to the choirmaster at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. When he could no longer bear to tell any more youngsters that they had not seen angels but just rainbows, and from a Jew's house no less, the choirmaster hinted to some older boys that perhaps they should break the windows, which they did. At least that was how my father explained the attack on his childhood home in July of 1906. Then again, Dreyfus had just been exonerated, and there were many such outbursts across Paris. Abraham had followed the trial closely, nearly sleepless until the Jewish captain's verdict was announced. Two days later, hoping to spare a dog that ran into the road, he drove his open- roofed Delage into an arbor of pollarded trees on avenue de Breteuil. My sixteen- year- old father, Daniel, was pinned between the tree trunk and the crushed hood as Abraham expired beside him. From then on, my father walked with a limp, which eight years later exempted him from service in the Great War. So whether he was lucky or unlucky, I could not exactly say. In 1917, my father purchased the building at 21, rue de La Boétie, after my mother Eva agreed to marry him. For this young Polish beauty, whom he hardly knew, and who spoke comically stilted French, he bought a house in a neighborhood known for its t Excerpted from Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
