A fictionalized account of the life of expressionist painter Chaim Soutine follows his life and career in Paris, his friendship with Amedeo Modigliani, his sudden success and rise to fame, and his flight from the Nazi occupation of France.
Stern has blended biography and fabulism into a frothy picaresque that curdles into a haunted, dyspeptic study of Jewish identity ... When it works, there’s nothing quite like it. An exacting describer of feculence, Stern is at ease in his subject’s sordid milieu. Few writers could find the romance in public urinals 'furry with hoarfrost' or the 'sour-pickle musk' of a brothel laundress. Fewer still can capture the 'debauch of creation,' as Stern calls Soutine’s frenzied bouts of painting dead flesh ... At its best, the novel vibrates to the 'sweet celestial confusion' of Soutine’s painting: delirious and earthy, reverent and irreligious, so hot with life that it can’t help incubating disease ... For all the felicities of Stern’s prose, though, his Soutine remains frustratingly opaque — too distant, even, to register as a stranger to himself. This would be forgivable if the novel weren’t doggedly concerned with the origins of Soutine’s genius, 'the old unanswerable question' of what makes a painter take up his brush in the first place. Soutine calls it 'the itch,' the same way he might affectionately refer to a bout of dermatitis. That’s true to form, maybe, but it brings the reader no closer to his motives, his head, his heart ... He has written a story of Parisian artists that’s gloriously free of sentimentality. A shame that it’s often free of real emotion, too.
The story is set in Paris, and it disappoints ... The encyclopedic weight of the novel’s ambitions flattens the effort. At times, Stern unnecessarily veers away from a fictional recounting of Soutine’s often wretched life; instead, he insists on showing off his considerable research by relating biographical fact. He not only wants to document Soutine’s place among the other artists in Paris, but to also position him, as a Jew and painter, in the era between World War I and World War II. The proceedings become heavy handed because the magic of storytelling is too often banished. What’s called for is a balance between realism and the imagination. Because Stern sticks to the former, Village Idiot becomes more informative than it is engaging ... Stern breaks no new ground here. In truth, he fails to convince the reader why Chaim Soutine deserves our attention, whether he is in a house of ill repute or elsewhere. I’m also at a loss to understand — or appreciate — Stern’s strong suggestion that the artist should be seen as an exemplary Jew. Perhaps, in his next novel, Stern should stick to familiar American turf, such as The Pinch.
In an act of resounding creative alchemy, audaciously imaginative Stern combines his fascination with Jewish folktales and mysticism with the life and work of painter Chaim Soutine, forging saturated, gleaming, and tumultuous prose that captures the vision and vehemence of Soutine’s thickly textured, writhing, nearly hallucinatory paintings ... Stern tracks the morphing of Paris’ art world over the decades, culminating in the German occupation. Stern’s kinetically inventive and insightful homage is incandescent, riveting, and revelatory in its wrestling with the mysteries of creativity and the scourge of antisemitism.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
