As you might remember, I adore Christopher Moore. I think he’s a brilliant author, up there with Neil Gaiman. His works are always a blaze of cultivated wit, with a somewhat ethological twist towards the study of human nature, imbued with research that will take you down into the bellies of history, literature, costume and, with this last work, art.
Set mostly in Paris around 1890, during the impressionist era, Sacre Bleu plays around the color blue and its importance for many artists of the period, imagining arcane forces at work behind it: the story starts with Vincent Van Gogh‘s last day and dances through the works of Eduard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Claude Manet, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, James McNeill Whistler, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with one Lucien Lessard, baker and aspiring painter, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec himself as main characters, involved in a mystic investigation on the death of their friend and the apparent misfortune and sickness, both physical and mental, that seems to come with the usage of a certain color blue in painting.
Blue is glory and power, a wave, a particle, a vibration, a resonance, a spirit, a passion, a memory, a vanity, a metaphor, a dream.
Blue is a smile.
Blue, she is like a woman.
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The story will soon become an entanglement of murder, mystery, memory and time, mysterious women and odd inventions, with deep dives into a history that gets more and more distant. Why is the gown of the Virgin Mary blue? And why didn’t Michelangelo finish some of his works, leaving specifically behind parts in that color? Was it just because of the price of the color or was it something else? And how far do we have to go into history, to discovery the dark secret of the sacred blue?
The title of course plays on the French exclamation Sacrebleu!, which is pretty much the equivalent of Holy Crap!
If you love art, mystery and witty ladies, you’ll love this book. I promise.
It’s currently my second favorite from the author, following the unparalleled A Dirty Job but beating the still extraordinary Fool.
On a more personal note: I would like to thank everyone who’s been reaching out to me, these days, but I’m not ready to talk about what’s going on with my life just yet. Please have patience. ♡
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