A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
"A frothy picaresque that ... vibrates to the "sweet celestial
confusion" of Soutine's painting: delirious and earthy, reverent and
irreligious." -- The New York Times Book Review
A wild, effervescent, absinthe-soaked novel that tells of the life of
the extraordinary artist Chaim Soutine
Steve Stern's astonishing new novel The Village Idiot begins on a
glorious spring day in Paris 1917. Amid the carnage of World War I, some
of the foremost artists of the age have chosen to stage a boat race. At
the head of the regatta is Amedeo Modigliani, seated regally in a
bathtub pulled by a flock of canvasback ducks. But unbeknownst to the
competition, he has a secret advantage: his young friend, the immigrant
painter Chaim Soutine, is hauling the tub from underwater. Soutine, an
unwashed, misfit artist (who incidentally can't swim) has been persuaded
by the Italian to don a ponderous diving suit and trudge along the floor
of the river Seine. Disoriented and confused by the artificial air in
his helmet Chaim stumbles through the events of his past and future
life.
It's quite an extraordinary life. From his impoverished beginnings in an
East European shtetl to his equally destitute days in Paris during the
Années Folles, the Crazy Years, from the Cinderella patronage of the
American collector Albert Barnes, who raises him from poverty to
international attention, to his perilous flight from the Nazi occupation
of France, Chaim Soutine remains driven by his unrelenting passion to
paint.
To be sure, there are notable distractions, such as his unlikely
friendship with Modigliani, who drags him from brothels to midnight
felonies to a duel at dawn; there are the romances with remarkable women
who compete with and sometimes salvage his obsession. But there is also,
always on the horizon, the coming storm that threatens to sweep away
Chaim and a generation of gifted Jewish refugees from a tradition that
would outlaw their longing to make art.
Wildly inventive, as funny as it is heart-breaking, The Village Idiot
is a luminous fever-dream of a novel, steeped in the heady atmosphere of
a Paris that was the cultural capital of the universe, a place where
anything seemed possible.
