Andrew WinerCritiques

I loved it! Picked this up as my "blind date" book on Valentine's day 2013. The book alternates between pre-WWII to post-WWII and present day.

THE MARRIAGE ARTIST is very intellectual and literary, written in a wry, modern voice and dealing with some pretty heavy themes. It's sophisticated, complex, and makes use of an educated reader's full vocabulary. It's a novel for the type of person who reads magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's.

The novel cuts between two seemingly unrelated stories, which unite by the end of the novel. The first plot is about a successful art critic, Daniel, who discovers that his wife was having an affair with an artist whose work gained fame because of Daniel's glowing reviews. Daniel finds out about the affair when his wife, Aleksandra, and the artist, Benjamin Wind, commit suicide together. In the wake of this tragedy, Daniel must sift through the wreckage of his marriage and take a clear look at his failures as a husband for the first time.

The second plot follows a wealthy Viennese family in the years before and during World War II. They are assimilated Jews, converts to Christianity who contemplate their Jewish ancestry with shame. The focus here is Josef, who as a boy discovers that his great talent in life is a gift for creating the ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, and imbuing the imagery in each new contract with the unique truth of a couple's love. It is a gift that becomes macabre once Josef is transported to Birkenau by the Nazis, where he continues to make ketubat for the other men in the concentration camp, men whose wives are surely dead, producing images that inextricably mix love and death, hope and despair.

It turns out that Josef is Benjamin Wind's grandfather; Joseph's wife did survive the Holocaust, and she made her way to America with their son. Wind and Josef's life are set in parallel: both are artists, and both produced glorious, tragic artwork in the months preceding their deaths by suicide. Daniel, in his quest to understand the suicide of Aleksandra and Wind, unravels the process by which Wind, the grandson of a concentration camp survivor, came to believe that he was an American Indian, not Jewish at all, and confronts issues of religion, identity, and love.

THE MARRIAGE ARTIST is very highbrow, but between all the references to obscure artistic movements and chatter about New York high society, it has a real beating heart. It's not facile or empty, and it ultimately offers an elegant, insightful look into the murkiest depths of the human heart. It's the kind of book that will get excellent reviews rather than excellent sales.

Dentist Ron Thompsen really liked this book, gave it big personal endorsement. Author lives in Laguna Beach, CA.

From the very first sentence, the reader knows that The Marriage Artist is not going to be an easy or light-hearted read. Opening with the suicides, the reader is immediately plunged into the loss and doubt left behind for the survivors after such a death. Against this backdrop is a world unfamiliar to most readers, the art world in general and Jewish art in particular. To add even further complexity is the interwoven story of Josef Pick, which takes place in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Taken separately, each individual story thread is beautiful in its own right but missing a key element which allows the reader to become truly vested in the story. Taken as a whole, The Marriage Artist is a stunningly ambitious novel that covers the entire range of human emotion and experiences.

Mr. Winer challenges the reader to the core by his almost animistic portrayal of human relationships. His use of crude, inflammatory language only serves to elicit the exact same sentiments as his characters, while simultaneously hinting at the bruised egos and true sentiments hiding underneath the crassness. It is a brilliant use of the language, as the reader is thrown back and forth across the spectrum of emotions with each sentence.

Neither Daniel nor Josef are easy to understand or to love. Both are cruel in their ability to withhold affection from those most in need of it. If a reader is willing and able to see through their crusty exterior, underneath their overt prickliness is a heart that bleeds with uncommon ease. The experience, if seen through to the end, is a rewarding one.

The Marriage Artist is a beautiful juxtaposition of the very best and very worst of humanity. Daniel's search to uncover the reasons for his wife's infidelity and suicide lead to the discovery of what it means to truly love someone and to absolutely lose everything. Mr. Winer uses his considerable writing talent to create in the reader simultaneous feelings of revulsion and utter heartbreak. Challenging and emotionally difficult to read, The Marriage Artist ultimately leaves the reader haunted by its brutality and poignancy.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to Picador Books and to Jen and Nicole from the Book Club for my review copy!

Daniel Lichtmann is a New York art critic married to a beautiful Russian immigrant and photographer named Aleksandra. When Aleksandra plunges to her death from a rooftop, she does not go alone. The body of Benjamin Wind, an artist who has taken the world by storm and received accolades from Daniel, is found next to her. Their deaths are sudden and unexplainable. Although it seems apparent that the two committed suicide in some lover’s pact, Daniel cannot accept his wife’s death at face value.

Josef Pick is only ten years old and living in pre-WWII Austria, the son of Jewish parents who deny their faith, when he discovers a hidden talent: the ability to draw ketubot (Jewish marriage contracts which are an integral part of the Jewish faith). Josef’s contracts are so astonishingly beautiful and intricate that they belie his lack of artistic training. His gift draws him to his maternal grandfather, a Rabbi living in the Jewish section of Vienna. Josef will come to manhood as Hitler’s troops invade the city – forced to reconcile his confused view of marriage, his faith and belief in God, and what it means to love another.

These two characters – Daniel and Josef – are separated by half a century, but are astonishingly connected. As Daniel searches for truth in the death of his wife, he will discover the answers hidden in history, religious belief, and the elusive threads of family.

Andrew Winer has written a multi-layered, brilliant novel about identity, marriage, love, and our connections to each other through our shared histories. The book is narrated through the parallel stories of Daniel and Josef, moving back and forth from the present to the past. Winer’s characters are richly developed – real, flawed, complex, and wholly believable. The result is a stunning and haunting novel which pulls the reader through its pages and doesn’t let her go until the emotional ending.

Winer weaves the historical elements seamlessly through the novel, setting the reader down in Vienna during the terror of Nazi invasion. But, Winer does more than just give us history…he uses history to show us the importance of identity ( a strong theme in the novel). When Hitler’s troops rounded up Jewish people, forced them into cattle cars and murdered them in mass numbers, he essentially stole the identities of individuals. By shaving their captives’ heads, the Nazis neutralized their gender. They tore families apart, disconnecting individuals from their shared pasts. They used mass graves to dispose of remains. They stole people’s futures. They even negated their names by labeling them with the letter “J”.

The officer examines her child’s documents first, meticulously transcribing HERMAN JOHANNES PICK in his notebook, along with the rest of the two-year-old’s particulars. As she watches the officer finish with a practiced flourish by setting down in bold ink the letter “J” beside her son’s information (just like he did for the other Jews registered by his hand on the same page), she is stirred by everything that is annihilating about identification…the reek of human inventory, the chilling exactitude of a street address, the futurelessness of any single person’s name. – from The Marriage Artist, page 226 -

But it is perhaps the examination of life’s meaning intertwined with the connections we have with others which elevates this novel to something extraordinary. The Marriage Artist makes salient and honest observations of marriage, love, death, and the binds that connect families from generation to generation.

Perhaps the boy was seeking instructions of a much weightier kind, answers to questions for which there are no easy answers: What does one do with a life? Which path should one take? How might one live each moment? What will happen to us? – from The Marriage Artist, page 53 -

And so it is, that Josef experiences his first conscious recognition of the deep, the thorny, the bizarre pull between family members that most people call love but, more often than they would care to admit, resembles tolerance. – from The Marriage Artist, page 101 -

Aleksandra may have married him, but she had died with Benjamin Wind. Could he accept that death was the stronger bond, or worse, that his marriage had not been what he had believed it to be – not necessarily a lie, but something narrower than love? – from The Marriage Artist, page 14 -

As Daniel struggles to reconcile the affair between his wife and Benjamin – that then led to their demise – he begins to question why people are drawn together. What are we looking for when we choose another person with whom to share our life? Are we perhaps, only looking for ourselves reflected through another person’s eyes?

[...] if there was any truth to the notion that when we love we are not really looking to see something new, but rather our own ideas embodied in the other person – qualities that awaken echoes already resounding in us. – from The Marriage Artist, page 256 -

Winer was formerly an artist who wrote art criticism, and he is clearly in his element when he explores how art forms our impressions not only of the external world, but as also a reflection of who we are. Some of the most moving passages in the novel show art as self-expression and a means to touch others.

The Marriage Artist is so beautifully rendered that I found myself moved almost to tears at its conclusion. What Andrew Winer does with his words is paint a portrait of his characters’ lives against the backdrop of history. And yet, although history is certainly important in the novel, it does not define it. Winer’s gift is his ability to demonstrate the timeless nature of our ruminations about life, death and faith.

I was blown away by this novel. Very few authors are able to explore such complex themes with such brilliance. I was carried away by the prose, enraptured by the characters, and felt compelled to keep turning the pages. The Marriage Artist is a must read for those readers who love literary fiction. It will certainly be one of the best books I have read this year.

Highly recommended.

This is a really strange story about some very unlikeable people revolving around the unrequited love of one man for another and the tragic consequences on their descendents. I can't say I like it but it held my interest long enough to see where it was going

Art critic Daniel Lichtmann finds his world suddenly falling apart when his wife Aleksandra jumps to her death. Her body is found side by side with that of artist Benjamin Wind and it becomes apparent that Benjamin and Aleksandra were lovers. David is forced to seek answers to unravel the mystery of his wife's affair with Benjamin and their subsequent suicides.

His search forces Daniel to open old wounds and examine his shortcomings, with the aide of Max Wiener, the old man who has chosen to share the secret of Benjamin's past, in an effort to finish a story that began before WWII. This burning quest for truth plucks Daniel from NY and lands him in Vienna.

The Marriage Artist, by Andrew Winer is an artful novel with amazingly fleshed out characters that the reader quickly becomes intimately familiar with.

The Marriage Artist, Andrew Winer’s latest novel, weaves together two love stories, one contemporary and one historical. As Daniel Lichtmann, a modern-day art critic, seeks the truth behind his wife’s recent suicide, he discovers a back story that originates in Vienna before World War II and continues through the Holocaust. Winer’s portrayal of love and marriage in difficult circumstances is nuanced and intelligent. The Marriage Artist avoids syrupy, sentimental romances in favor of complicated, and often doomed, relationships that reflect the idiosyncrasies of their participants: “[W] hen we love we are not really looking to see something new, but rather our own ideas embodied in the other person—qualities that awaken echoes already resounding in us.” This finding of ourselves within those we love is an important concept explored by The Marriage Artist.

Along with love, art is a recurring motif across the decades of this novel, beginning with the beautiful illuminated marriage contracts made by Josef Pick, a Jewish artist in Vienna, and continuing up to the dramatic final sculptures of contemporary artist Benjamin Wind. Eventually, this novel’s present and past love stories converge in a devastating conclusion. Overall, The Marriage Artist is a sensitive rumination on the complex nature of love and marriage.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved how the history of all the characters was slowly revealed throughout the story. I was engrossed in the story and had a hard time putting the book down. My only complaint about the story is the way sex was made into a character. It was too graphic and disturbing for my taste. Other than that, I would recommend this to anyone adult enough to read it.

I wanted very much to like The Marriage Artist, but the novel gets bogged down in its own seriousness, leading to some very weird and uncomfortable moments. For example, one of the key plot points feels like something out of a Borscht Belt routine (two words: Jewish Indian), which made it hard for me to take the rest of the novel seriously. This is too bad, because I think Winer had the germ of an interesting novel, but it gets lost in the uneven pacing.

The writing is also very uneven; particularly in the sections where Winer describes the act of painting ketubot, the language is very fine and evocative, but many of the passages dealing with relationships and grief are clunky and fall back on overly familiar tropes.

The character of Hannah, though, is really a great creation. Winer does a much better job fleshing out her internal life than that of the main character, Daniel Lichtmann, whose character seems only to react to the events around him and does not particularly have any memorable characteristics. Hannah, on the other hand, constantly surprises and shows depths of emotion that none of the other characters remotely approach. I would have enjoyed the novel much more if it had focused on her strand of the story before, during, and after WWII, perhaps leaving out the much weaker contemporary plot.

Overall, I would not recommend The Marriage Artist. It's too dense to be a quick read, but not fulfilling enough to justify the amount of effort it takes to get through it.

Daniel Lichtmann is obsessed with discovering the details and reasons why his wife Aleksandra leapt to her death with the brilliant artist Benjamin Wind. Daniel uncovers and pursues a connection to an equally brilliant Jewish artist in the Vienna of the 1930’s.
The author, Andrew Winer, weaves two complex story lines – encompassing present and past, art and history, love and marriage – in a novel of thought provoking breadth and depth. Almost against my will, I found this book to be haunting, strangely compelling and memorable.

For me, this book started slow. Once Hannah came on the scene, however, I was hooked, as I began to see the connection between her story and Daniel's. History, love, and art form the basic themes the author explores through his characters. And what characters! One of the strengths of this book for me is that so much about these characters remains a mystery. Josef's character and motivations are inscrutable. Daniel never really does find the 'truth' about the death of his wife and Benjamin. But Daniel and Hannah both experience separate and very different revelations about the nature of life, love and memory. This is a book I will definitely read again.

The Marriage Artist is a very difficult book to review. In fact, I have been trying to write this for 2 days. Previous reviews do a good job of describing the storyline, but what grabbed me most was the emotion created by this story. Although I am not sure if I took what was intended by the author, but this is a story that will likely stay with me for a very long time.

The first pages of this book grabbed me. Then the next hundred moved along so slowly, I thought I would never finish. Even so, I could not stop reading. It was like a painful spot, that you cannot stop poking, just to make sure it still hurts. By the halfway mark, I was unable to put it down. Although I felt that some areas were described in too full of detail, others were unfulfilled. Since this was an early release, my hope is that a final editing will tweak some of the unnecessary details.

The Marriage Artist spans 70 years of struggle, heartbreak, and search for answers to the characters' personal inner conflicts. Each character is more damaged than the last. While none of them are particularly likable, they are each gripping and touching. Each character spends their life trying to search out the answers to their own suffering, yet only manage continue the pattern damage to those they love the most. Each life touching, and leaving its mark on the next. Generation after generation, though living in different countries and experiencing different societal issues we see repeated challenges and repeated failure to heal from them.

It is very hard to sum up the emotion that this book creates. All I can say is it brought me to tears several times. This book is often slow, and quite challenging, but it is worth the read.

The Marriage Artist opens with two lifeless bodies on the New York summer pavement, a woman and a man. They appear to have fallen. Was it a suicide pact? Was one person pushed? Was there a struggle and both fell? Or was it something else entirely? The woman was Aleksandra Lichtmann, the wife of art critic Daniel Lichtmann. The other body was that of artist Benjamin Wind, who Daniel helped propel into fame.

Then story then takes us back to 1928 Vienna and the world of ten-year-old Josef Pick. While Pick is visiting with his maternal Grandfather Pommeranz (a failed Rabbi and struggling ketubah artist) the grandfather discovers there is an amazing artistic talent dormant within the young Josef when the young man begins to create a sacred ketubah, the illuminated marriage contract of the Jews.

Author Andrew Winer has juxtaposed the seemingly unrelated worlds of Daniel Lichtmann and Josef Pick in a carefully woven tapestry of family struggles, heartache and denials stretching over decades and continents. As Daniel starts on his journey to uncover the truth of his wife's death he's forced confront his own beliefs and what's important to him in his world. He also must learn to understand the motivations of people and their far reaching consequences.

Like the story's young Josef Pick, Winer is also an artist. However, it is his use of words and the images they create that make The Marriage Artist the compelling work that it is. I must add that I got a bit lost for a short period as I felt the story bogged down towards the middle act, but the ending more than made up for the short term issue.

I do recommend this book, it's a heartfelt study of family, faith, trust, truth and what we do to survive.

Unfortunately, the busy-ness of my life lately made this book a little difficult to get through -- but I don't think it had anything to do with the book.

This is a family story, dating back to the horrific days of being a Jew in Austria in the early 1940's to a present day couple who leaps to their death. The husband of the dead woman begins a search to figure out why she would die so next to the artist that he helped raise to stardom. He ends up tracing the artist's family history, falling in love again, and learning some devastating family secrets.

Beautiful book, beautiful writing. You should read this!

The narrative of Andrew Winer’s The Marriage Artist is akin to two train tracks heading toward each other and meeting at a final destination. Imagine watching these trains from the sky, see them converge, but sit back and enjoy the view. Look at the landscape, watch the passing trees, and eavesdrop on fellow travelers’ conversations and stories which only make sense once both trains have pulled into the station.

Track one is the story of art critic Daniel Lichtmann, whose wife Aleksandra plunged to her death alongside Benjamin Wind, one of Daniel’s favorite artists. Whether his wife and the artist were lovers is unknown. What she was doing on the roof of his building, and whether the two jumped to their deaths by choice or force, also remains a mystery. Daniel searches for answers and receives unexpected information in the form of an elderly wheelchair-bound man who attends both funerals.

Track two starts in 1928 Vienna when young Josef Pick discovers his artistic talent and trains with his grandfather to paint Jewish marriage contracts called ketubah. This track follows young Josef through his teenage and early adult years, during the tumultuous start of World War II and the purging of Jewish citizens from Vienna, until it meets with Daniel Lichtmann’s story in the present day.

At times both sweeping and engaging, here is an author who knows his tools and how to use them. Winer’s prose ranges from lilting and poetic to stream-of-consciousness. Emotional and poignant, The Marriage Artist is a vast and tremendous dramatic novel of history and heartache. Of the bonds that bring people together and the devices that tear us apart.

Not knowing where the plot is taking us, the reader has no choice but to read onward, trusting in the author to reveal his secrets. And reveal he does. Winer selectively shares bits of historical ingredients to define the puzzle of present day, piecing each corner edge to its partner. Only when the whole puzzle is complete can we truly see and appreciate the splendor of the picture. Beautifully wrought and imagined, The Marriage Artist is remarkably unlike anything I’ve read in quite some time.

**This review written for Library Thing Early Reviewers**

The Marriage Artist was a fantastic book, told from alternating viewpoints that later merged into a coherent and in-depth look at love, marriage, religion, life, and death. I absolutely loved this book, and the richness and diversity of its characters. I also really loved the way the story was told, staring in bits and pieces and eventually weaving together to form a story with a powerful punch and many jaw-dropping moments. I'm sure the characters in this book and the perspectives on love and faith related in the narrative will stay with me for a long time. The writing was gorgeous and the story was riveting. I can't recommend it enough.

Perfect for: Holocaust literature enthusiasts, readers who like multi-generational sagas, readers who like to grapple with "the big questions"

Not so perfect for people looking for a light vacation read, or people who need a fast moving plot½

I thought that I was going to love this book from the synopsis, but while I did like it, I found it to be very slow reading. The alternating stories did not have the same feel to me, which is what probably slowed the reading down. While I found the story very interesting, in the end I have a feeling of disinterest towards the story as a whole.

When a celebrated artist and a woman are found plunged to their deaths, Daniel, the art critic, looks back at his life and wonders when his wife started having an affair with the artist and if he had introduced them. Her death leads him towards an analysis of their marriage, his past and his discovery of a photograph of his wife and the artist, Benjamin Wind, leads him on a quest to find out more personal details about Benjamin and in doing so, perhaps the answer to the mystery behind his wife's death. Was she pushed or was this suicide?

Daniel's investigation leads him to uncover changed identities and a history filled with lost love, hatred, lost lives during the Nazi invasion of Austria, and artistry passed through the generations.

Before WWII, a boy's talent for illuminating ketubots, or artistic marriage contracts was shockingly discovered by his grandfather who later sought to exploit his talent, his mother, who secretly took pride in her son's work, and his father, who scorned and despised it because he recognized his son's future greatness.

We follow this boy's development from an innocent child to a cynical adult, one who vows never to marry together with his best friend, and yet during a moment of crisis, undertakes to marry a woman just because she held a visa to Palestine and the escape from the Nazis in Austria. The war that erupts around them is nothing compared to the personal war the couple wage with each other until they are separated by Hitler's machine.

Daniel discovers that Benjamin is not who he thought he was. Was the discovery of the truth behind his heritage the turning point in his art and ultimately lead to his death? And will Daniel also discover the secret and meaning behind the incredible sculptures in Benjamin's final show, the one he took his wife to? As Daniel starts to unravel Benjamin's history, he also learns the truth about himself and what it really means to love and to live.½

I so wanted to love this book, but just couldn't make myself. The story opened beautifully with rich, figurative language and I melted right into it. But all too soon it felt as if the language and story held a forced quality rather than a natural rhythm. I lost all interest in the "mystery" behind the deaths long before it was revealed by the author. The author is so determined to show the quest for love among ugliness, that all that remains after reading is the ugliness.
The story is woven with Anti-Semitism and the Nazi Regime, as well as difficulty in personal relationships. The author chooses harsh ugly language to express some of these sentiments. And although I understand why the author selected these words, I believe that it deeply distracted from the mood of the story rather than enhancing it. This banal use of words severely limited who I would recommend this work to.