Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Brief Space Between Color and Shade

Author: Cristovo Tezza, Alan R. Clarke (translator)

Narrator: Nick Podehl, Laural Merlington

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-19-14

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Suspense

Publisher's Summary:

Winner of the 1998 Machado de Assis Award for Best Novel from the Brazil National Library.

In a period of just three days, everything changes for young painter Eduardo "Tato" Simmone, who has never sold a painting. During the funeral of Tatos renowned and beloved mentor, Aníbal Marsotti, Tato meets two people who will determine his fate: a beautiful young woman who may be a vampire and a major dealer of art forgeries. Tato gets caught up investigating the theft of famed Italian figurative painter Amadeo Modiglianis tombstone, and all signs point to Curitiba, Brazil - Tatos hometown. A letter from an expert art historian in Italy brings Tato further clues, but shadows lurk in all directions and there is no one to trust. Tato discovers the similarities between viewing a painting and solving a crime: closer examination shows us there is more to people than meets the eye.

Members Reviews:

It would have made a much better short story

I don't know if it was the translation, but the book seemed to try to hard to be arty, and fell flat. It would have made a much better short story.

An unfinished surrealist word-painting (3.5 stars)

Tato Simmone is a painter in Curitiba who exists on the monthly allowance he receives from his mother, an art and antiques dealer in New York. He has little interest in his mother, or in his father (who resents not receiving a similar allowance), or in the half-sister he hopes never to meet again. A year earlier, he had an ambiguous encounter with an older woman who now writes to him from Italy -- pages from her lengthy melancholic "testament" appear during the novel at regular intervals -- but the only significant friend in his life, a painter who was also his mentor, has just died.

At his mentor's funeral, Tato meets Richard Constantin, an art dealer with a shady reputation. He also meets a woman Constantin describes as a vampire. She can no longer suck the life out of Tato's mentor and seems intent on latching onto Tato as a substitute. Tato gives some of his time to the woman but never bothers to learn her name, referring to her only as "the vampire."

The novel's scattered moments of intrigue begin after the funeral, when Tato discovers that someone has broken into his home. On a later occasion, an unseen burglar in his studio punches him in the eye, yet nothing is taken. Threats he does not understand are left on his answering machine. As Tato ponders that mystery, another pops up. His mother, his father, the Italian, and Constantin all have a puzzling interest in a bust by Modigliani -- or is it a fake? And if it is a fake, why are the interested parties so interested in it? I would have been happier with this novel if it had produced more satisfactory answers to those questions. Instead, the abrupt ending leaves many questions hanging in the air. The novel is like an unfinished painting (the kind that Tato most often produces).

Tato is clearly not a happy guy. Transfixed in the composition of a painting, Tato experiences "a powerful illusion of forgetting, which, if I give in to it, I would call happiness." Tato's pompous and judgmental personality is so grating that it is difficult to work up any sympathy for him. Like his Italian friend, Tato seems intent on being miserable and prefers to wallow in self-pity rather than pursuing happiness.