The Swan Thieves is Elizabeth Kostova’s much-anticipated second novel. Back in 2005 Kostova made headlines when her first novel, The Historian, became the first debut novel in history to enter the New York Times Bestseller List at number one. The Historian tells the tale of a young girl who finds a medieval manuscript in her father’s library and learns the disturbing story of his quest to find his mentor who had disappeared twenty years earlier after admitting to certain knowledge that Vlad the Impaler (the Historical inspiration for the Dracula myth) is still alive. The Historian was the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in US History.
Kostova took five years to write her follow-up novel — half the time it took her to write The Historian (which she worked on while working and earning a BFA at the University of Michigan). Kostova’s fascination with history continues in her second novel, which explores the world of French Impressionism. Kostova juxtaposes past and near-present (late 20th-century US) in The Swan Thieves while exploring the world of art and the nature of genius and mental illness. The Swan Thieves is told partly through the voice of Psychiatrist Andrew Marlow (also a gifted amateur painter), who is asked by a colleague to take on the care of renowned painter Robert Oliver who has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital after attacking a painting at the National Gallery of Art. Marlow quickly becomes fascinated not only with his patient but with Oliver’s obsession – a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.
Beyond these broad thematic brush-strokes, Kostova explores themes near and dear to the hearts of women and mothers – balancing the pursuit of creative expression, independence and the demands of motherhood and marriage. While each of the women in The Swan Thieves experiences her own unique challenges in this regard and none of them succeeds entirely, it is inspirational to read their stories and share in their struggles.
I am thrilled to be able to offer one lucky reader both of Elizabeth Kostova’s remarkable novels, The Historian and The Swan Thieves. To be eligible to win, you must be an urbanmoms.ca member (it’s free, so why not join now?). Your ballot is your comment below. Tell me who your favourite impressionist painter is and why and you could be our lucky winner!
I had the great opportunity to speak with Ms. Kostova about her novel recently, and I’m thrilled to be able to share that conversation with our readers here:
A theme I’ve noticed in both your novels is the power of the written word to control – in The Historian it’s the dragon book, and in The Swan Thieves it’s Béatrice de Clerval’s letters. The characters in The Swan Thieves largely spurn the use of email, text messaging, etc. in favour of written letters. Tell me a bit about your feelings about the power of the written word, and the impact of modern technologies on it?
We are using it very casually and at a very fast clip. But I think that for example teenagers write a lot more to one another than they have in a long time because they’re using text messaging and email. And of course it’s a very different kind of writing: it’s almost like chatting, but it’s interesting to me that we are and we aren’t using the written word now and it’s something we’ve never experienced before and it’ll be interesting to see how it changes language. But I think that the letter, you know the real, honest-to-goodness written letter is a dying art. I mean, obviously it’s a dying art. And there’s something so intimate about letters, and the fact that they used to be a major form of communication between people, and of course in the period in which Béatrice is writing they were almost exclusively written by hand. And I loved the act of imagining those letters: what they would have looked like, what the handwriting would’ve looked like, the ink on the paper, the experience. And there’s a thing in which Béatrice is actually rereading a letter from someone, and she’s unfolding and refolding the pages as she stands in the snow. And that’s become such an exotic and a novel image for us now: the feeling of opening and rereading a letter on paper. I wanted to try hard to give a sense of the intimacy of that kind of communication. A letter allows you to savor things.
Both books explore the nature of obsession, but the obsession in The Swan Thieves takes the form of madness, instead of the supernatural. In the earlier parts of the novel I almost felt the plot would unfold in favour of the supernatural, with Béatrice somehow controlling Robert through her letters. But it doesn’t turn out that way. Was this a conscious decision, or did it evolve naturally?
I never expected to find myself writing novels about the supernatural at all. That’s not what comes naturally to me. And it was only because of the nature of the legend I wanted to explore that I found myself doing that in The Historian. But for me the irrationality in the Swan Thieves is psychological or mental in a way, and we all have elements of that in our lives, but it’s of course extreme in Robert Oliver’s life. I’ve had a couple of readers tell me that in the scenes when Robert seems to not be in the room, when he seems to be looking at someone through a doorway, that that’s similar to haunting – in this book as well. That’s something that affects the other characters as well. Mary has it when Marlow jokingly asks her to marry him, Marlow is immediately aware that there’s someone standing in the doorway and that someone is Robert Oliver, his rival. So I guess I wasn’t thinking of a very clear delineation between the supernatural and what we experience and invent in our minds consciously when we’re writing a novel and unconsciously for someone like Robert Oliver who experiences it as obsession.
The setting of The Swan Thieves is very different from that of The Historian – how was it different to set a novel in your own place and time?
I found it very challenging. I’m glad you asked that because it was the first time I had written about places in the US, places I grew up in, places I knew really well. And in the Historian I was writing about places I knew well, or had traveled in or had lived in recently, but those places were almost all European. And these US settings were actually really challenging for me, because I think when we’re in a place for a long time and it’s second nature and sort of feels like a home place, we don’t observe it as closely, and there’s this kind of numbing process that makes things familiar and yet not sharp anymore. And so we may know things very well but we’re not observant about them. So I found that I actually had to go back to some really familiar places and look at them as a visitor or traveler or a searcher. And sometimes it was something very ordinary like the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, which I had been at many times, but when I realized that scene in which Marlow is threading his way among all the people – that I really needed to revisit that place to get it right. And I couldn’t remember: were there really hot dog stands at the bottom? So I ended up having to
do some of the same kind of research for that. I think the other thing that’s really confusing about writing about places you know well is that you don’t have the same imaginative vision, yet you’re having to sort of place yourself far away so you can place other characters in those spots. And at the same time I found it kind of a relief in that a lot of the settings in Greenhill, where Kate allows Marlow to visit is a house I know very well, and the little college where Robert taught is a college I attended for a year, although I changed names and identifying characteristics, so in a way it was kind of a relief, but on the whole I found it harder, not easier.
do some of the same kind of research for that. I think the other thing that’s really confusing about writing about places you know well is that you don’t have the same imaginative vision, yet you’re having to sort of place yourself far away so you can place other characters in those spots. And at the same time I found it kind of a relief in that a lot of the settings in Greenhill, where Kate allows Marlow to visit is a house I know very well, and the little college where Robert taught is a college I attended for a year, although I changed names and identifying characteristics, so in a way it was kind of a relief, but on the whole I found it harder, not easier.
How was the experience of writing the second novel different?
I think the main way in which it was different was that I had more time to write. I had always written around the edges of a lot of intense work and jobs and sometimes had only 10 or 20 minutes a day to work on The Historian and it did take a long time. So I found it wonderful to be able to focus on it although I still had lots of other responsibilities; I could still put in writing time in a more intensive way. And then the other thing that was really new for me and also very helpful in some ways was writing on a deadline – I had never done that before. You know with a first novel that no-one has ever seen you have this sort of total freedom and privacy and also open-ended time and its really up to you whether or not you ever finish the damn thing. And deadlines create their own good kind of energy. I really actually enjoyed that very much. It did make me feel a kind of urgency about it that was kind of new, and that I did need to get through certain portions of the research for it for example. I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to make a book that would perform in a certain way. My publisher is wonderfully open-minded and they bought an idea for a second book and said “have at it” and they never pressured me to write a certain kind of book or to write a sequel. But you know I really appreciated their letting me do what I do and trying something different, and I knew already that I wanted to write a very different kind of book or at least a different subject matter because it’s important for me to learn something new in every project myself. And there’s also something about the actual process of composition that I find so absorbing, and I think most writers say this, unless the writer is really writing formulaic fiction, but I think any writer who’s writing from the gut and trying to do something serious would probably say the same thing: that you feel this kind of absorption when the work is going well that makes everything else go away. So very often when I was composing in the voices of these new characters I didn’t remember when I was born or what my name was, let alone the fact that I’d even published a first book. So I think the writing process itself kind of protected me from that.
Your novels are both very richly researched; and you immerse us so deeply in the worlds of your characters. In this novel you’ve chosen the worlds of clinical psychiatry and painting…why these fields?
I had wanted for a long time to write a novel about a painter and about painting and to try to describe painting and also to try to describe the point of view of the painter and I wanted to try to do it through other people’s voices. So out of that emerged the idea that I needed this main character to have some very strong reason why he wouldn’t speak to other people – and that was how those two subjects came together for me.
You refer often in the book to the modern world’s ennui with the works of the Impressionists, yet the clear message of the novel is that these works – although overexposed – are still as important and revolutionary. Does this reflect your own opinion? Why did you choose impressionism instead of another period?
I love a lot of different periods of painting history, so when I was thinking about what this artist’s obsession would be – with what part of history he would be obsessed with – and it wasn’t quite that sort of objective decision, but this was just the way it unfolded. I thought about the impressionists because I’d been interested in them for a long time. And because I did suffer from a little bit of that burnout and that feeling that oh I’d seen it all, and I’d seen too many exhibitions (and certainly too many umbrellas and tote bags) and I had the experience Andrew Marlow has, of going back to a museum or two and looking hard at the work in the flesh and being so blown away by it: for one thing it doesn’t reproduce very well – I mean for one thing not only does it not reproduce very well on a tote bag, but it also doesn’t reproduce very well in a fine art book because you really have to be able to see the surface textures, and all the evidence of the artist’s hand, and all that brushwork, it’s so remarkable when you see it up close and I was very moved in the way marlow was when I went back and started looking at original impressionist paintings and started reading about them a little at a time and realizing how extremely different they were from what came before and what they were rebelling against. And yes I did have the same kind of experience – actually while I was beginning the book. So when marlow speaks in that passionate way on both sides of that – that is something I very much shared with him.
While doing some research in preparation for this interview I discovered that Robert Oliver wasn’t the first person to attack a painting of Leda and the Swan with a knife – Louis, Duke of Orléans attacked a Correggio canvas portraying the myth sometime in the 1700s, apparently in a fit of moral conscience. Is this a coincidence or did it influence your work in any way (after all, as Mary says, it’s very easy to find out a great deal of information with the internet, and I’m sure you wouldn’t have missed that piece.)
I actually discovered that too, after I started writing. It was a coincidence but not a total coincidence in the sense that it makes sense that a subject like Leda and the Swan would provoke people to that kind of reaction. That real attack was very interesting in that it was sort of repentance. I was very entertained when I stumbled on that – and of course it’s very different than Robert Oliver’s motivation.
Although the story seems to be mainly about one painter (Robert Oliver), the three major female characters in the novel are all painters themselves. However, as women they are not able (or choose not?) to be consumed by passion for their work, tending instead to the necessities of daily life (both Kate and Mary comment on this in their first-person accounts of life with Robert Oliver). Both Kate and Béatrice give up painting after becoming mothers. Are you conveying a message about motherhood and/or the challenges of women artists?
I’m glad that comes through because I did think about that a lot and in a similar way, you know, Mary doesn’t have children until she’s going to at the end of the book. But even without children she says the same thing, Robert Oliver never offered to pay any of the rent when he lived here and somebody had to be paying that, and somebody had to fix dinner and after a while it was me. And when that becomes annoying enough to her she has the personal strength to throw him out. And I think that it’s partly a comment on the clash between women’s lives and their art and I guess there is a sort of message buried in it, because Robert, for whom there is no boundary, really, he also ends up doing a lot of damage, that these women don’t have to live with in themselves. And I don’t mean that as a sort of moralizing about art, but it’s a different set of choices or non-choices (depends how you look at it). But the character of Mary was very important to me because I think she kind of stands on the shoulders of the others. Mary, as the youngest of all those women has gained strength from the earlier generations enough to say, “I will support myself even though I come from a moneyed background, I wont ask for help, I will live alone”. For me she’s the woman who will break those other moulds. She will have a child and a job and she will go on painting.
Robert’s name “Oliver” and the character “Olivier” in the letters – was that intentional?
Yes. I wanted to have lots of references to colour in the book. Robert has eyes the same colour as his name, for example, and Olivier has the same name. I had written all these French characters and I didn’t know what their names meant. When I looked up the name Béatrice, I discovered that it means “blessed one” or “bringing blessings”, and the two French men were named for trees: Olivier (olive tree) and Yves (yew tree).
Don’t forget to enter the contest to win a copy of Elizabeth Kostova’s novels The Historian and The Swan Thieves by telling me who your favourite Impressionist painter is (and why) below!
Contest closes April 14th, 2010. Remember only UrbanMoms members are eligible to win so don’t forget
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My fav artist is Monet. His work is so peaceful. You can just dream away the afternoon staring into one of his works
I like so many…each for their own expression, labor and uniqueness. If i had to pick one…I guess I’d have to say Van Gogh, for the reasons mentioned above.
This sounds like a great book,, I would love to read it!!
As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. – Pablo Picasso
Although she’s actually classified as Post-Impressionist, I LOVE Canadian Emily Carr’s native paintings. For true Impressionism, I have to put my vote for the master – Claude Monet.
Monet….because of his style of painting
Monet’s 1900 “Le Bassin aux nymphéas, harmonie rose” has beautiful coloration and offers a different perspective on the traditional Japanese style bridge.
van Gogh is my favorite because of his use of bright colours, especially his painting Sunflowers.
For me it’s a toss up between Monet & VanGogh. If I’m in a quiet reflective mood I love Monet’s softer colors & the peacefulness of his floral paintings. On my gregarious happy days it’s definitely VanGogh as his colors are brighter as in Starry Nights or Sunflowers.
Being a gardener, I really enjoy Monet paintings, they are both beautiful and so relaxing.
Monet is my favourite impressionist painter. I love the colours in his garden themed paintings.
Monet is my favourite impressionist painter. I have copies of several of his paintings and never tire of them.
I’m not to familiar with impression artists…but i do love to read and learn. These books sound amazing and i would love to learn all about art.
I know nothing about painters! So maybe I need this book to introduce me to Art! 🙂
I like some of Camille Pissarro’s paintings, specifically the agricultural based ones (like the women in the hay field).
Well, I don’t think I am much different from most on this site. I do like Monet. His paintings a beautiful, make me feel relaxed and almost dreamy. I like the colours that he used as well. They also tend to be scenery pictures that I personally like too.
Van Gogh’s “Starry,Starry,Night” … I saw it in Paris and it was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes and the song to my ears
I really prefer Paul Cezanne. The Card Players was always on of my favorite paintings. I am fascinated by the expressions of the players.
I’d have to say Helen Galloway McNicoll (OK, I did a search of impressionist artists since I don’t know a lot about artists:) and liked that she was Canadian, but mostly b/c her pictures dealt with nature and children it seems.
van gogh – such gorgeous colours!
I liked Van Gogh’s style of paintings. The colors are all so nice.
Claude Monet is my favorite impressionist painter. The brushstrokes in Water Lilies are the most perfect I have ever seen. It is absolutely breath-taking.
I’m going with Monet. He was one of the first that we learned about in school, so his paintings have always stayed with me. Beautiful, thoughtful works, calming yet vibrant at the same time.
I love Monet because I love his work.
I like Renoir. I find his paintings more intimate.
van gogh!
I used to like Impressionists, most of all, Van Gogh. But their styles and images now I believe are iconic more than art.
Van Gogh’s sunflowers on a wallet. Renoir hung up in a remedial art class. They become more like pop art than impressionist work.
My favorite impressionist is Van Gogh. I like the color palette he used and the variety of subject matter.
She is canadian which is awesome! And her work is great!
Monet is my favourite
C. Monet,very tranquil to look at & soft colors,,thx for contest..
I love Monet and his beautiful water lilies image — thanks for the great giveaway. I love the paintings and colours this artist uses.
My favorite is monet, i never stopped being amazed when I see his work.
I like Monet’s waterlilies – so soothing and restful
Van Gogh for sure! Such beautiful paintings! As for the books I would die to own these, my sister has read the historian 6 times and loves it so I would love to give it a shot and let her read the other one too!
I would have to say Alfred Sisley because I love landscapes and buildings – his art makes you feel like you are somewhere else.
I love Van Gogh’s Starry Night….makes me happy.
Helen Galloway McNicoll
She is Canadian and has great work http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/women/002026-516-e.html check for yourself.
She became Deaf due to scarlet fever . I did a study on her years ago in high school and feel in love with her work.
monet is my favourite because he is the ultimate purist
spynaert@hotmail.com
My favorite is Renoir. I love his portraits.
My favourite impressionist is Degas. Wish I could paint like that
I also think highly of Claude Monet and love his paintings.
I always loved sunflowers by van gogh, there was a board game that had cards and remember one was of the painting sunflowers and I have loved it since then
My favourite impressionist painter is Pissarro. I really like his landscapes.
monet’s beautiful landscapes are amongst my favorites
I love all the impressionists. Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Renoir. Even more so, I love books!
Edgar Degas is my favorite painter for the beauty and delicate femininity of his dancers.
I love Monet. His paintings are so beautiful.
It is hard to choose just one ,but I like the work of Hans Gamble as a Canadian who is influenced by many of the above mentioned artists , this artist is very modern.
It would have to be Dali…I worked at a picture store and fell in love with him!! 😀
Mine has to be Dali…I worked at a picture store, and fell in love with Dali!!! 😀
Gustave Caillebotte is my favorite impressionist painter. He was French.He takes on a new form of look of early paintings who adopted different techniques in his time putting his work very different. I love the painting he did with the rain drops in the water by a river bank. It is called River Bank in the Rain. Its gorgeous.
Monet is my favourite because he’s my mom’s favourite and her introducing me to his works is a fav childhood memory.
THis probably sounds cliche’ but to me Claude Monet was amazing. I have many prints of his and just looking at them make me feel very serene.
Sounds like a great read!
I would enjoy to read this books.
Genius and mental illness has often been recognized as being mutually inclusive, or part of the same side of the coin. Including it in a novel of the word of French impressionism would be a very interesting read.
Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” – I love him and have his artwork on my pc as wallpaper
If I had to choose one, I’d pick Monet. I’m not an expert on art but I especially like “water lily pond”. Altough I like post-impressionism better…And I’d love to read both of Elizabeth’s books!
Monet is my favouite and lately I am really into art as my son is an up and coming new artist so everything art appeals to me right now
i love to read and this sounds like an interesting book that could stimulate ones imagination.
I especially like Pierre-Auguste Renoir. I like his use of color. One of my favorite painting is By the Sea.
I am going with Monet and for the amazing landscapes
Pierre-Auguste Renoir is my favourite impressionist painter, I thought Van Gogh was a post-impressionist painter.
Claude Monet’s Water Lilies is my favorite.
I love Monet myself. His paintings give me a sense of tranquility.
apears to be an exciting book would love to read it!
I don’t anything about art but I do love to read and these books sound interesting. I do enjoy Claude Monet because he did some beautiful landscape paintings.
Claude Monet is my favourite impressionist painter, particularly his work, The Cliff at Étretat after the Storm. This is the most beautiful, peaceful painting with vivid use of colour that I have ever seen.
Looks like a great book
My favourite Iimpressionist painter is Oscar-Claude Monet because I enjoy looking at his water lily paintings which were done near the end of his life from his garden.
As an artist, this is very interesting.
Viewing art is not a passion of mine, but I would be soo excited to win a book as I am just finishing up with school and would be happy to read a book just for the sheer pleasure of reading, and not school books. hope this will still qualify me!
Definately Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” painting…his impressionist paintings are amazing…
Hi I really like sunflowers because they are often painted so bright and full of life, thus I like several of the works by the Impressionist Painter, Vincent van Gogh. Thanks