Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I'll give the author two stars purely for risk-taking. The concept at least is original and it has to have taken a certain audacity to write this book.
What I don't understand is why he wrote it, or why we are supposed to enjoy reading it. The girl Ursula is a stupid, self-centered, insensitive, thoroughly repulsive excuse for a human being. Not that she isn't convincingly depicted--Tuten did all too good a job on her--but I can't think why we are supposed to care about her and want to read about her. And certainly not why we are supposed to admire and approve of her, as Tuten obviously does.
That Van Gogh might have fallen in love with someone like her is all too plausible--he did, after all, have a record of wasting himself on women who were far beneath him. But Vincent's love for Ursula is not shown as yet another self-destructive folly, but rather as something fine and beautiful.
Vincent himself is handled a good deal better. The flashback to his days as a preacher among the coal miners is perhaps the best thing in the book. The attempt to get inside his deteriorating mind is very fanciful and speculative, but then so is any attempt to see what goes on in the head of a schizo-affective.
As for the modern-day narrator, he is simply pathetic. Who can care about him? Who even wants to know about someone like that?
Furthermore, Tuten might have made a little more effort to get his facts straight. For one very big thing, the "Night Cafe" that Van Gogh painted and wrote about was located in Arles, not in Auverre-sur-Oise.
I have to admire the artistic courage that went into the writing of this book, but the results are just too badly flawed. But I admit I would like to try reading something else by Tuten. He is undeniably a gifted writer.
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