Pictures of My Desire
A search for a stolen painting leads to an unexpected romantic connection in the absorbing novel Pictures of My Desire.
Caroline Goldberg Igra’s thrilling novel Pictures of My Desire explores the rarefied art world through a couple’s turbulent romance.
Nate hopes to heal his family by reclaiming a Camille Pissarro painting that was taken during the Holocaust. Armed with evidence of its theft, he uses his job at an auction house to cover his personal investigation into works that disappeared in wartime Paris.
Emily, a historian at an art consulting firm, acquires the Pissarro for a sultan’s collection. But she’s attracted to Nate and is suspicious about his curiosity about her client, whose anonymity she is obliged to protect.
Suspense builds around Nate’s secretive mission; this plot intensifies when he pursues Emily while withholding information. Introspective, back-and-forth passages convey what they think about each other and about themselves. Their characterizations are developed through these candid assessments. Both are more insecure than they seem: Nate believes that he is calculating, but he’s in fact apprehensive because of his grandfather’s and father’s tragic backgrounds. Emily, meanwhile, appears competent but assumes that she is too unsophisticated for her glitzy job.
The book’s knowledgeable, passionate descriptions of art stand out. The prose incorporates auction- and art-related terminology to showcase people’s expertise, as through Nate’s search for chains of provenance. Vibrant facts about specific periods and artists enrich this work. Elsewhere, Emily’s musings on her personal favorites, including Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, draw forth the painting’s colors and patterns while hinting at her own thwarted desires.
When it comes to Emily’s erotic fantasies, though, the book’s phrasing is less precise. She considers Nate’s good looks in rhapsodic language that reasserts the same points. The whirlwind pace of their relationship, fueled by psychological tension, involves misunderstandings that somewhat curtail the more practical parts of the story, as when an ex-lover appears midway through the novel, causing the focus to drift. However, the couple’s cosmopolitan dates help flesh out the settings as they go to bars and other New York City locales.
How Nate’s pain over his family’s past is resolved involves a touching amalgam of vulnerable truth-telling and healing through a Jewish artist’s exhibition. Because of its potent depictions of inherited trauma, lies of omission, and themes of self-discovery, this proves to be a thought-provoking novel about people looking for ways to atone for the past.
Pictures of My Desire is a brooding novel about tangled romances and fine art.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
