Monday, August 20, 2007
Dan Brown = Le Suck
Langdon had always considered the Tuileries to be sacred ground. These were the gardens in which Claude Monet had experimented with form and colour, and literally inspired the birth of the Impressionist movement.*headdesk*Dear Dan Brown:Although the term "Impressionist" was derived from a work by Claude Monet (Impression, Sunrise, exhibited in 1874 along with a number of other works by artists such as Sisley, Renoir, Pisarro, Morisot and Degas), the inspiration for the "birth" of the Impressionist movement would more accurately be attributed to Eduard Manet, if anyone. His work reflects a changing manner of painting, with visible brushstrokes and sketch-like, atmospheric style. The rejection of his Luncheon on the Grass by the Paris Salon in 1863 in part led to the creation of the Salon des Refuses (Salon of the Rejected), through which Monet, etc., were able to exhibit their works in the next decade.Also, Manet did a ton of sketches of the Tuileries Gardens, and one of his major early works is Music in the Tuileries.Please take an art history course.Thanks ever so,Pained ReaderPS: Claude Monet experimented with light, open spaces, and brushstrokes WAY more than form.PPS: Monet also studied Turner in England, whose work is also clearly a foundation for the Impressionist movement.PPPS: You suck.Now I remember why I didn't finish The Da Vinci Code in the first place. Urge to spork... rising...ETA: ...an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his repuation for unblinking severity in all matters.Okay, be honest now: who else has an image of a guy with really pointy hair sticking straight out of his forehead and lasers shooting from his eyes? And WTF does that last clause really mean, anyway?lizbee, I do prefer Phryne.
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14 comments:
Definitely getting the pointy hair! And now I have the laser image, anyway. Obviously, the last clause means that anyone who sees the laserbeams shooting out of his eyes can immediately predict that they don't want him to look their way, because he won't blink and it will hurt severely.
What is really sad is that he is married to an art historian {G}. Think of it as an adventure novel, not a serious work of fiction. It reads better that way!I read it, but never understood the fuss.
*giggles**loves you*
No, seriously? If he's married to an art historian, I'm thinking this book is grounds for divorce.Unless she's just sticking with him because his crapfic has raked in oodles of money, and she's secretly plotting his death once his will is in order and that prenuptual agreement is dissolved...
Why research your book's topic/background/plot if it's just gonna ruin it, hunh?
i still want to finish that book before the movie comes out.i've started it twice...
Leaving aside your apt sporking on art-historical grounds (and don't pity his wife, she was the one who did his research so he would be free to Create) and the fact that the character thinking this is probably in a car chase, "literally inspired the birth of"? Inspired. Gave birth to. And literally would mean there was a uterus involved.And that's just one fairly okay sentence. The second bit you posted I'm not going to touch with a ten-foot spork. Except to say that he better watch where he points that thing.
Well, he didn't literally give birth to, he literally inspired, which means he... breathed at it? Breathed it in? And something else gave birth to it as a result? Art movements obviously have a different biology than the rest of us...Between Teri and Geoff Pullum, I feel oddly inspired (though not literally) to read this book, if only for the spork exercise.
Pointed hair! Unibrow! Yeah, Dan Brown's an idiot. You'd think he could at least wiki his stuff.
Actually, she does his research...
You ought to illustrate this book.
*Raises golden spork of opportunity*And to think that even *I* know this because I just took my vis22 (art history) during which the teacher made it completely evident that Impressionism was not a paragon completed by Monet...*le sigh*
At the end of the day, it is fiction, and "popular" fiction at that. Yeah, the novel does promote a veneer of truth, and it often seems like it's waving around a flag of authority on all kinds of matters. But you gotta take it all in with a grain (or whole damn shaker) of salt. I let it entertain me and provoke some thinking about possible (even probable?) aspects of Jesus' life not taken up in the Gospels, but like any good fictional conspiracy tale, some (many? most?) facts have been made to more conveniently fit the overall narrative than they would otherwise. It's interesting that "National Treasure" hasn't generated half the controversy that "DaVinci Code" has (nor, for that matter, has "The Rule of Four," another art conspiracy actioner). I took it as an entertaining framework for thinking about a plausible, (perhaps) alternative history. That doesn't excuse the poorly written or ungrammatial portions, but it gets Brown off the hook of being some encyclopedic font of art historical and theological knowledge and puts him in his proper place as a storyteller.
Just a shaker? I was thinking one of those 5lb bags of rock salt.Because I'm an artist, and have studied art history, it just bothers me that he makes a point of using these metaphors with paintings and artists, but doesn't get it right. These aren't obscure facts -- any freshman art history survey class could note the problems within the text.Yes, at the end of the day, it's just an entertaining story. And sure, it keeps up a fast pace and is full of mystery and hijinks and adventure. But at the end of the day, it's also chock-full of awful prose, inept metaphor, cheesy dialogue, information-dumps, and redundancy. Having a good story to tell is only half the equation.
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