Vanitas - Hardcover

Olshan, Joseph

3.7

57 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684833964 ISBN 13: 9780684833965

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

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The author of Clara's Heart, which became a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg, tells the story of a bisexual journalist struggling to come to terms with his life as he writes the biography of an art dealer dying of AIDS. 15,000 first printing.

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Review:

In Joseph Olshan's Vanitas (the title refers to a conceit in Dutch art in which the painter would include a memento mori--Latin for "be mindful of dying"--in the midst of vibrant life scenes), the specter of AIDS is an unspoken, and often unacknowledged, motivator for protagonist Sam Solomon. While interviewing world-famed, but now very ill, art collector Elliot Garland in order to ghostwrite his autobiography, Solomon sees a stunning, highly sexual drawing of a near-naked young man on a bed cradling a skull. The picture startles Sam and sets him off on a journey--not only to discover the artist and subject, but into his own life to resolve his conflicting emotional needs: to find what he considers the security of heterosexual family life and yet pursue emotional and sexual relationships with men.

As in his popular, award-winning novels Clara's Heart and Nightswimmer, Olshan understands here how sadness, fear, and even death are the most common shapers of important emotional and erotic experiences. Vanitas is filled with hope and love, but avers that these life-affirming emotions are only achieved after facing the deepest horrors, fears, and terrors of living in the world. --Michael Bronski

From the Publisher:

The moment Sam Solomon casts his eyes on a stunning erotic drawing that hangs in the apartment of a dying art dealer, he finds himself caught in a tide of confusion and longing. Sam suspects that the drawing, called �Vanitas,� has a dramatic story behind it, one that might answer questions that the art dealer has refused to address: the story of a once tragic love affair, the fate of the artist who created the drawing, and the events surrounding a falsely authenticated 19th-century French painting that nearly destroyed the art dealer�s career. Joseph Olshan is the author of Nightswimmer, The Sound of Heaven, The Waterline, A Warmer Season, and Clara�s Heart, which was made into a major film. He lives in New York and Vermont.

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