I’ve written about two of Antoine Laurain‘s other novels here at bookconscious: The Red Notebook and The President’s Hat. Like those books, The Portrait is about an object that changes someone’s life. In this case, as you can guess from the title, the object is an eighteenth century portrait that Pierre-Francois Chaumont, a Parisian patent attorney with a lifelong love of collecting, finds at an auction and buys because the man in the painting looks just like him. He has no idea who it might be, but there is a coat of arms in the painting so he researches it.
I don’t want to spoil the story by saying exactly what he finds out, but it leads him to discover, if you will, a whole new self. I had a little trouble with the plot — Chaumont basically walks entirely away from his old life, taking time to bully and blackmail someone into helping him do so. Then he takes a great deal of trouble to recover his collectibles and antiques only to lose them again in what seems a very preventable accident. Also no one in his old life seems terribly troubled by his absence, based on the tiny glimpses we get of the aftermath.
The idea that an image could be a portal of sorts is appealing, and I enjoyed as always the details about France and French life. A minor character, Pierre’s Uncle Edgar, was more interesting than Pierre himself to me, but the other minor characters were nearly one dimensional. Pierre seems rather self absorbed and sees women as merely beautiful body parts.
So if you want to try Laurain, I wouldn’t start with this book, but it was, overlooking the disagreeable main character, a diverting short read. It might be interesting to talk about with a book group because the plot poses an ethical, if completely improbable, question: is it right to take on someone else’s identity if no one seems to really get hurt?
[…] and I realized many other authors have used this situation, including recently, Antoine Laurain in The Portrait. Unlike in that novel, where the protagonist finds his exact image in a painting, in The […]
[…] another wonderful book, less light-hearted and more introspective than some of Laurain’s other books but equally entertaining. And it has led me to pick up another book I recently bought at the […]