Une réflexion historique, un échafaudage littéraire qui tiennent tout entiers sur l'évocation d'un tableau imaginaire. Style superbe, souvent proche de la prose poétique. Belles descriptions de Combleux et de son canal. Puissante évocation de la Révolution. ( )

I enjoyed the beautiful prose in this novel and admire the translator for bringing such complex language into English from the French. There is a lot of poetry in this novel. For me, this was the best part. The lack of coherence of the story was frustrating, and there is nothing compelling the reader to keep reading other than pure enjoyment of the prose. ( )

This book is filled with lush imagery and complex prose. It demands a careful and deliberate reading that will not appeal to everyone. The book is best enjoyed by letting yourself get carried away by the atmosphere and tone without worrying too much about the story. ( )

I guess I should know better than to judge a book by its cover or even by its description. I thought this book would be something like The Girl with the Pearl Earring, an explanation of what went on behind the scenes of a painting. Boy, was I wrong.

For one thing, the painting The Eleven (or Les Onze) doesn't exist. I was about a third of the way into the book and I was struggling with it so I thought if I could see a reproduction of the painting it would help. But when I googled The Eleven all I got was reviews for this book. Even combining Corentin with The Eleven didn't help. Then I tried searching for Corentin Francois Elie and found some French language sites that referred to him but my French is good enough to learn that there was no such painter. So no painting, no painter, did the committee supposedly represented even exist? I knew enough about the French Revolution to recognize the name of Robespierre but none of the rest. Wikipedia has nice little article about The Committee of Public Safety and sure enough Robespierre and some of the others were named but the Committee when Robespierre was part consisted of 12 members. Many of the names were different from the ones Michon gives so I couldn't even determine who was missing. Arghhh! This was just too convoluted for my taste.

On top of that the writing often consists of long, multipart sentences which I had to read over and over again in order to get the meaning. It must have been a nightmare to translate. On the occasions when the writing was more straightforward I enjoyed the descriptions but mostly it just made my head ache. ( )

This is a book one feels more than reads as Michon sweeps one's rational self away and seduces the reader into a poetic frame of mind under the influence of his stream of conscious-like prose that is lyric and fluid. The serene beauty of his writing is in stark and deceptive contrast to the foreboding central "character" of the novel -- a fictitious work of art titled, "The Eleven" that looms over the novel like la Terreur it represents.

In all, while dark in atmosphere, the writing is as rich as haute cuisine in flavor and will be enjoyed by Francophile readers. ( )