Confession: I checked this book out from the library because it met the color in the title criteria. I also checked it out because it wasn't very long. I never imagined that I would fall in love with this book.
At first, I thought it was a book of short stories. Until I realized it was, but it wasn't. The book tells the story in reverse chronological order of a painting and how each of it's owners acquires it. We go all the way back to the moment the artist created the painting, and then to the moment his subject (his own daughter) finds it up for auction the first time years later.
The authenticity of the painting was lost somewhere along the way, leading the final owner to never have 100% certainty that this painting is authentic. "It was a painting, for now it would go forth through the years without its certification, an illegitimate child, and all illegitimacy, whether of paintings or of children or of love, ought to be a source of truer tears than any I could muster at parting."
Each owner has a different idea of who the girl may be. None of them quite figure out just who she is, which makes the words at the end of the book fitting.
"She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her."
B Star Rating:
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