Headlong

Rating:
Summary: An intellectual farce
Review: Martin Clay is an academic who comes across a lost Bruegel painting at the home of his country neighbor. As the neighbor is unaware of what it is, Martin concocts a scheme to get possession of it for himself. This part of the plot is purely farcical, and frequently quite funny (Frayn is an extremely witty writer). However, cut into the plot are Martin's ruminations about the painting and its period of Dutch history, as he keeps vacillating about the authenticity of his find. These parts of the book are sometimes hard to follow and become monotonous after a while. Also, the plot has too many stops and starts, and you start to lose patience with it. More successful are the scenes involving Martin's marriage, and the psychological warfare with his wife, who is dead set against the scheme. I enjoyed enough of this book to recommend it, but hope that Frayn gets a different editor for his next one.

Rating:
Summary: Funny enough
Review: British postwar literature has produced a fair amount of erudite writers who rely heavily on the ironic situations that occur when people behave unbecoming to their class and rank. These writers try desperately to balance comedy and existential despair in one narrative and David Lodge's campus novels are exemplary in this respect. You laugh while reading, yet some of the finer points linger on. Michael Frayn's much lauded Headlong falls into the same category, even if it's not as engaging as Lodge's best work. Headlong tells the not-so-gripping tale of lapsed philosopher Martin Clay who gets involved in an art scam involving an undiscovered Breugel, thereby displaying a behaviour that is not commonly expected from men of his standing. One must add that this is not really a convincing premise for a compelling novel of today. Especially since it is hardly shocking news to anyone who has spent any time within the confinements of an university that academics are conceited, wilfully deceitful, hungry for money and power and driven by the same shady motivations as the rest of the world. Frayn seems to imply that there actually is something of interest beyond these less noble instincts, a hunger for meaning and coherence that naturally cannot be saturated. So be it, but it is for the genuinly farcical moments that one should read Headlong, not for its depth. So be warned, great literature it is not, but great fun nevertheless.

Rating:
Summary: Please Pass the Bruegel.....to someone else
Review: This was my first time to read Mr. Frayn's work. There is no doubt the novel will appeal to art enthusiasts. However, I found it cluttered with too many details of the different paintings. The history sections took up too much of the novel and were, frankly, boring and not at all illuminating. The story was great, though, when we could see beyond the frames of the paintings. And hey, I object to the portrayal of the fat, quiet wife. Still, I'll look for other work by Mr. Frayn.

Rating:
Summary: If you liked "Confederacy of Dunces"...
Review: This story is hysterically funny. If I could force you to buy and read it, I would. If you liked "..Dunces", you'll probably enjoy this. The other reviews go into what the story's about, so the only thing I'll add is that this was a fun read. It'd make a great movie too.

Rating:
Summary: Good, not great
Review: I found this to be a very enjoyable book for the most part. I thought it was a very pleasing combination of art history and modern comedy. Except for a few overly detailed digressions into art history (and I do like art history) the book moved along well. On the downside, although the narrator was likable, most of the characters seemed rather two-dimentional. Furthermore, though I did get a few laughs, the book was not nearly as funny as I was hoping for. On the whole, though, well worth reading--especially for an art lover.

Rating:
Summary: A plot flaw ....
Review: Part of this review includes some plot discloure so if you haven't read the book, don't read on. First, I gave the book 4 stars because I thought it was very well written and frequently funny.

Here's what I didn't like so much about it. First, I hard a hard time dealing with the fact that fully 50% of the entire book consisted of a DETAILED exposition of 16th century Netherlandish political, social and artistic history. However, I'm perfectly willing to concede that my reluctance to plow through this part of the book (although I did) may be merely a function of my own intellectual laziness.

More importantly however, I thought that the book had a significant plot flaw: The whole notion that Martin Clay would have some preferred right to sell (or purchase for himself) the 3 Dutch paintings if he could sell the Giordano was only in his mind. Martin and Tony had only one very brief discussion about this issue, and Tony didn't really agree to anything about it. Whatever other personal failings Tony may have had (and there appear to be many), the notion that he somehow breached his agreement with Martin by consigning the 3 Dutch paintings to a third party is clearly not one of them. To me, this was an obvious risk that Martin was taking the whole time, and if the author intended this to be some sort of "plot twist", it certainly didn't strike me that way. Even if Tony knew that it was really the Dutch paintings Martin was after (and even this is not entirely clear), Tony absolutely never agreed to give Martin any sort of "right of first refusal."

In addition, I would suggest that Tony was NOT trying to pull a fast one on Martin, at least as to the Bruegel painting. While it was not clear whether or not Tony had any appreciaton of the value of the other two Dutch paintings, it appears clear that thought nothing of the Bruegel. Otherwise why would he have it stuffed in the fireplace?

In short, I felt that the premise that Martin was operating under the whole book through--i.e. sale of the Giordano=possession and ownership of the Bruegel, was simply a false premise on Martin's part, and because this potential flaw turned out to be a real flaw, I view this as the author's fault. If I recognized this potential problem right away, I assume others did as well. Finally, I must say that I found the ending somewhat dissatisfying, at least as to the Bruegel, though not as to the other two Dutch paintings.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific combination of history and fictional plot
Review: Frayn's book is far more than just a typical British-countryside farce novel. By combining historical facts of artist Pieter Bruegel's life, as well as 16th century Netherlandish history, into a novel of 20th century deceit, Frayn has created a classic for all times. An enjoyable -- and heady -- read for anyone lucky enough to pick this one up.

Rating:
Summary: A Lot Of Fun
Review: If one can see past the esoteric, self-indulgent topic, Michael Frayn's book is a great deal of fun. Frayn brings his playwright's skill for quick wit to the book, along with an erudition about art history that is refreshing. I certainly grew more excited abou tthe fate of the painting as the book progressed, and in the end learned a great deal about Nederlandish art and politics in the 16th Century. Obscure? Maybe. Pedantic? Perhaps. Entertaining, insighful and, most importantly, educating? Certainly.

Don't bother with the readers who are put off by a smart book without obvious references. It would be your loss to take their word for it.

Rating:
Summary: Liked the art history, hated the characters
Review: I'm not a trained art historian, but the only part of this book that I enjoyed was the investigation of the painting. I completely missed the supposed humor of the novel - I think because I didn't find a single likeable quality in any of the characters. This book got a great review in the local paper & was a disappointment. It's on it's way to the used book store.

Rating:
Summary: Two Good Books In One
Review: Affectionate loathing, the beastliness of circumstances, comic anguish, satiric farce, the sympathetic narrator anticly undone by his base impulses-- nobody does it better than the British. I brought this book hoping for Evelyn Waugh by way of Amis pere et fils, Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge. And I got quite a bit of it, maybe not up to the very best of the genre, but very good. The comic plot feels like the packaging the author had to supply in order to market the other third of the book, perhaps the part he really wanted to write-- a sober (but not stilted) essay on the painter Breugel. The essay is quite good too: I never appreciated before how brutal the Spanish were, leading up to the revolt of the Netherlands, for example. It just isn't very well integrated; sometimes it interrupts the action in fairly raw and arbitrary chunks. (I disagree that the essay is an essential part of the plot; you could skip it and still makes sense of the story.) Nor will everyone have the patience or readerly virtue to try to build up mental images from the descriptions of the many Breugel paintings pondered and discussed. Imagine how much better the reading experience would have been, how even more enjoyable, if reproductions of these paintings, however primitive, had been included. The idea is too obvious not to have some sound publishing reason in its way, like prohibitive cost (but who can make sense of publishing costs?).