Blog Tour | The Forgery
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Forgery by Ave Barrera, translated by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers. Thank you to Charco Press and Midas PR for having me on the tour!
Title: The Forgery
Author: Ave Barrera
Translated: Ellen Jones & Robin Myers
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 26th July 2022
Genre: Fiction, Translated fiction
Rating: 4/5 stars
A failing artist turned forger, an architectural masterpiece hidden behind high walls, an impish vagabond, and some very resourceful, very intimidating twins-Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragan, traversing late 20th Century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th Century picaresque.
Thank you to Charco Press and Midas PR for sending me a finished copy of this novel to read and review.
This is a short novel, its 175 pages, but it does manage to pack a lot in. This isn’t my normal genre of book to read, I don’t tend to dip into general fiction so much, but the blurb of this one really caught my eye!
This novel follows Jose, the failing painter who is struggling to pay his bills. When he is approached by a mysterious man who has a painting he needs forged, he becomes embroiled in a confusing world of money and mystery. I liked the mystery surrounding the painting and the world Jose is thrown into.
The novel has a nice focus on painting and the artist. There is a nice passage where Jose goes shopping for the ingredients he needed to do the forgery, which I enjoyed. The author obviously has knowledge of painting, and how to create a successful forgery, and I enjoyed the description on aging the painting etc.
I have to say that the translators did a brilliant job in this novel. I am always in awe of translators, being able to translate the language but also keep the lyrical nature of the writing from the original novel. This novel does this brilliantly, it still reads with a lovely fluidity.
Overall I really enjoyed reading The Forgery. It has an interesting collection of characters, and it was fun to discover the mystery of the forged painting with Jose.
Thank you again to Charco Press and Midas PR for having me on The Forgery blog tour.
Buy The Forgery from Bookshop.org or Waterstones
