Pictures at an Exhibition
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping and sensuous novel of a son’s quest to recover his family’s lost masterpieces, looted by the Nazis during the occupation.
Max Berenzon’s father is the most successful art dealer in Paris, owner of the Berenzon Gallery, home to both Picasso and Matisse. To Max’s great surprise, his father forbids him from entering the family business, choosing instead to hire a beautiful and brilliant gallery assistant named Rose Clément. When Paris falls to the Nazis, the Berenzons survive in hiding, but when they return in 1944 their gallery is empty, their priceless collection vanished. In a city darkened by corruption and black martketers, Max chases his twin obsessions: the lost paintings and Rose Clément.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
