Book Review: The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

I have a lot to criticize about this book, so I should probably start by saying that I did enjoy reading this book, and my general impressions weigh more heavily to the positive rather than the negative, despite the criticisms I enumerate below. But it wasn’t an engrossing novel for me, and it did have a lot of flaws. 

I picked this book up because it seemed to have a similar premise to The Weight of Ink, which I know I talk about too much. It was indeed similar in that there was a mysterious history connected to an artifact (this time a painting) that the protagonist is trying to uncover. But instead of using the sciences of archeology and archival studies, the protagonist, Andrew Marlowe, uses his career as a psychologist to interview a bunch of people in kind of an invasive way to uncover the truth. 

The novel is all about obsession—mainly the debilitating obsession of painter Robert Oliver with a lady from the 1800s and uncovering her story—and I was worried that the obsession was contagious. While Marlowe was interviewing other people to uncover Robert’s obsession, he walked a fine line where he himself arguably became obsessed. And though he was supposed to be portrayed as a star of his profession, he made a lot of ethically questionable choices. He got too involved in not only his patient, Robert Oliver’s life, but Robert’s ex-wife and ex-girlfriend. He was attracted to both, and he got romantically involved with his ex-girlfriend, Mary. 

That romance seemed forced. Marlowe made it very clear in the beginning that he was longing for a love interest, and he became attracted to every woman he encountered, until finally Mary seemed to reciprocate. At the beginning, I was a bit surprised this was written by a woman, because there was a lot of fixation on boobs, how they moved when women do simple gestures, and simple oversexualization of all women the protagonist came across. Romance in Marlowe’s life didn’t seem to have a place in the novel, especially with someone so central to Oliver’s story as Mary was, but Kostova pushed it in.

I would say this is more of a plot-driven novel rather than a character-driven novel. In a way, this is a novel about the psychology of obsession, but I think the psychological exploration and the characters themselves took a backseat to the mystery Marlowe was trying to uncover. I was curious about the lives of the characters, but I wasn’t necessarily invested. None of the characters had a distinct voice, although the alternating POVs gave Kostova the chance to explore that in depth.

There was a narrative repetition that didn’t seem realistic, and I’m not sure if it was intentional. Robert Oliver always wears the same yellow shirt (which is either an intentional way to show his bland lack of awareness about his own appearance or a mistake because Kostova can’t imagine the character in anything but a yellow shirt). All of the women are into older guys (Kate with Robert, Mary with Robert, Mary with Andrew, Beatrice with her uncle-in-law). I felt like Kostova was betraying her own fantasies through her characters based on the prevalence. 

All that being said, I did enjoy the slow unraveling of events, and all the characters had a distinct and well-developed personality, if they did take a backseat to the plot. I liked how the protagonists were painters and how art itself seemed to be a character in the novel. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel with such a high focus on art. And I am looking forward to reading Kostova’s other work, The Historian.