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Title: Entertaining, but not a Vermeer
Review: Though built upon a promising premise, this collection of short tales woven around a single "lost" Vermeer painting gets off to an objectionable start that I found difficult to get over. The suggestion hinted at by the ending of the first story, that somehow the painting itself should be destroyed because it had once been stolen by a Nazi, is unconscionable. A work of art acquires no inherent guilt through the actions of those who handle it; the suggestion is all the more inappropriate given the Nazis' own penchant for destroying art.Otherwise, most of the stories in the book were originally written and published separately, and this perhaps accounts for their somewhat uneven execution. I found the two middle stories, "Morningshine" and "From the Personal Papers of Adriaan Kuypers" to be the most compelling tales in the book, each more for the personal stories they tell than any protagonism of the painting itself.
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