Another thing that I should have taken as an omen, thinking back on it, is the book I discovered recently. I didn't know it existed, having lost touch with its author (who I used to converse with for a time), but when I found a mention of it, it was in a review that touted it as one of the best he's done in quite some time.
THAT caught my attention, so I ordered it forthwith, and have been delighting in it. It is, after all, written by one of my favorite authors and madmen, Christopher Moore. Unlike some of his other novels, this one isn't an *overt* comedy; it's a serious novel, an attempt to turn history into an alternative universe. The basic plot (spoiling nothing, because you know this in the first few pages) centers around the death of Vincent Van Gogh. According to tradition, he shot himself in a field in the south of France. But WHY, looking through letters that he had written leading up to his supposed suicide and noticing how hopeful they were, would Vincent shoot himself and then walk a mile to a neighboring doctor and ask for help? That's what Chris asked himself, following up with an even more creative question: "Could it have been something other than a suicide...possibly even a murder?" Sacré bleu, an idea for a novel was born. And that's it's title, "Sacré Bleu." It's a meditation on the color blue that also happens to be a murder mystery, and also happens to be *gorgeously* written, and funny as hell. Chris is *incapable* of not being funny, and that aspect of him shines through in this novel. If you've ever felt an affinity for the golden age of painters in Paris, and wanted to know what it was like to hang with Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Monet, Pissaro, and other notables of that era (and the patrons who supported them, not to mention the prostitutes who posed for them), this is Your Kinda Book. It's to an earlier era of Paris what Woody Allen's brilliant "Midnight In Paris" was to a later era of literary luminaries. WONDERFUL book, so far. I find myself reading it and flashing back to having sat and talked art and politics and philosophy in many of the cafes and bistros named, and reliving the magic of those moments. Even if you haven't been there, done that in real life, you certainly can in the pages of "Sacre Bleu." Chris has that rare ability to transport you into the world he's writing about, and allow you to *feel* it as viscerally as if you were really there. It's a lovely book.
