|
|
|
SELL US
YOUR BOOKS
Powered by Bookbyte
|
|
|
The Flanders Panel
Arturo Perez-Reverte
|
|
|
"When I reviewed the back of Flanders Panel, it seemed to be an intriguing mystery, so I borrowed it from a friend.
Flanders Panel is about -- the main character's Julia. She restores art; that's what she does for a living. She brings all the natural colors out and everything like that, and she gets ahold of this piece that's 500 years old. It was drawn by the artist in 1425, or painted, rather. As she's researching the piece and investigating it further, she X-rays it as part of her research, and she discoveries an inscription down in the corner, "Who killed the knight?" The subject of the painting is a chess game: -- A knight on either side, supposedly a knight or a gentleman or someone from the 1400's playing a game of chess, and then a woman in the background watching and reading or something of the sort, but the inscription of "Who killed the knight?" all of a sudden doesn't pertain to the game that's being played on the board, doesn't pertain to the players. So the story is actually about her first trying to figure out more about this, to figure the value of the piece. It's just for somebody who's gonna auction it off and make everybody a lot of money. So it's first her trying to figure out the mystery to add to the value, but when she starts researching deeper and takes the information to an art historian friend of hers, all of a sudden he winds up dead and this whole mystery envelops, and it becomes a lot more dramatic than just, "Who killed the knight because I want to know?"
I enjoy reading mysteries. This book was actually translated from Spanish. It's a Spanish author, so it's interesting -- you know, he's written it with the personal experience of where they are in Spain. The concept of chess, it was interesting to find out a little bit about it, but my atten -- my personal attention span didn't hold long enough for them to -- they actually had chessboards in there and they kind of went into the play a little bit more than would hold my attention. I felt like I needed to get a chessboard out and kind of figure it out; I couldn't just read about it.
I think anyone who read something like Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons would enjoy parts of this because it's the history and it's the art. It's not quite that extreme, so after having read those, if they read them quite recently, they might feel like there's jus a bit of a letdown, but I think if you had a break in between and you just want a little bit of that nostalgic back, it would be enjoyable.
I would give this book three out of five stars."
|
|
RSS feed 
