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. ( )