The Rembrandt Affair by Daniel Silva, Grade: B
In The Rembrandt Affair, retired spy Gabriel Allon is asked by his art dealer friend to locate a missing Rembrandt painting. Following his belief that “sometimes the best way to find a painting is to discover where it’s been,” Allon sets out to discover the painting’s history. His search will take him to different locations around the world, and it will require the help of friends and colleagues, old and new. As they dig into a dark past involving Nazis, they uncover connections to people in the present who will stop at nothing to keep those connections from being exposed.
The Rembrandt Affair is #10 in the Gabriel Allon series (a series that contains at least 20 books), and it currently has a 4.6-star rating at Amazon and a 4.29-star rating at Goodreads. So, clearly some people really like this book and its series. As for me, I thought it was readable, but it didn’t do much for me. There was nothing so off-putting as to make me abandon the book, but the writing style was cool and distant (more like a report than a story), and the spy stuff felt cliche. Thrillers don’t thrill me, I guess. I enjoyed breaking out of my reading bubble for a while, though.
Someone recently told me that if they can find one thing to like in a book then they consider that book to have been worth their time. I agree. This book gave me a better understanding of how much wealth the Nazis gained by stealing from Jews during the Holocaust. Not that I wanted to know that per se, because it’s awful, but it’s the kind of thing one ought to know, because history must not be allowed to repeat itself. I also liked the advice that Allon had for a spy in training. He told her, “The mind is like a basin, . . . Pull the plug, and the memory drains away.” I don’t know that it’s true, but I certainly would like the power to control my mind that way, to make it full or empty of memories depending on which state I preferred at any given moment. Who knows? Maybe it just requires practice, or becoming a spy 😉